CIA Chief Breaks Silence on Time Travel Abilities

26:59There's certainly nothing fun about trying to recover nukes in a country that's just lost control of its entire empire, like Russia had in 1991, 2, and 3. So I'd say that answers two things. It answers kind of what the big... there are a lot of things to worry about in the world. You know, there's biotechnology, there's AI, there's nuclear, but nuclear weapons are still, for me, the king of the hill because it can happen that fast and we won't even be aware if we're not really serious about stopping it from happening. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're in a scary world right now where you have all these kind of, you know, this asymmetric warfare and all these capabilities, and then all this ability for if you're China or Russia or some sort of larger adversary to gain plausible deniability and act through sort of rogue actors.

27:52But I want to back up and just talk about, you've had these kind of mystical downloads. And I want to talk about the first one. You were kind of a nihilistic youth at West Point. What happened? Well, you know, there was a point in my life when I was I combined my interest in knowing truth to an extreme where I was receptive to whatever input I would get to the point I pushed myself to an extreme. I had had experiences where I had dreams that came true. And I realized that I started thinking about consciousness and subconsciousness. And these were things that were affecting me in terms of being receptive to the idea that there's way more out there than we see in logic and reason, or even if you add intuition to that, right?

28:45And so at West Point, I did these dream experiences. I talk a little bit out of the book. They were kind of childish in a way and not very scientific. But then when I graduated, I went to Fort Knox as an armor officer. I was going to go to the Czech border as an armed guy. And they started to become much more vivid. And the first briefing I got, actually, in the Army, a secret briefing, was on the Russian nuclear threat in Europe at that time, because I was going to go out and be what they call the covering force. We were literally the closest American forces on the border to confront the Soviet hordes.

29:24Now, this was in 1976. So we're talking eight years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia. So everything is very real and palpable. And the Germans were depending on us to defend them and the whole world, in a sense. And part of that briefing was the idea that we had tactical nuclear weapons. We would fire on them if they invaded. And I was a shock to me. That was my first introduction to nuclear weapons in a context of war, which nowadays when we listen to where this has gone full circle, we listen to Vladimir Putin talking about using nukes in Ukraine. We have to think about this idea of nuclear weapons.

30:02The tables have been reversed. Back then, we needed them because we were afraid of being invaded. And he's using them now what he regards to be if Russia's existence is threatened by NATO in the West, he would use them too, which is really what he said. So the point being at the time I'm in this kind of mode and my friends and I are all going through this together, the four of us, kind of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And so I had this incredibly vivid dream in the midst of all this at Fort Knox where I dreamt that I was in a battle, like a battle of Armageddon. it's the first time the mystical things turned i would call turned religious or you know religious history or when i became a big advocate or hobbyist in eschatology which means the theology of the end of days which i kind of now i hobby in it because it's such a it started then the roots of it i didn't understand that at the time and it was just such a vivid dream and in the dream these numbers appeared.

31:05So there were no voices. I couldn't hear anything. And the whole, everything was black. So I'm in a dream state or escape in which I can't see. I could sort of smell like, you know, the acrid smoke and things like that, that was around me. And I was aware of these forces gathering for great confrontation. And in that sort of context of, I would say, an apocalypse. It didn't necessarily have to be at the time. But I saw these numbers roll out in cubes. And it all was around 747. So the number 747 becomes a lifelong number for me, like a mystical number. What does it mean to you? Well, I don't know, actually, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book.

31:59I don't know. but my i think it has to be a divine number it has to be something related to what i later became which was a watchman for uh terrorism and you know these kinds of things in my professional life in my religious life i was getting more and more interested in understanding what these numbers would mean so i've done everything from reed nikola tesla's obsessed because the numbers were 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 27, and 40. So they're cubes. So first you get 7, 4, 7. First I get 7, 4, 7. Then these cubes kind of are circling in the smoke. They were cubes. And the cubes were these numbers, 3, 6.

32:44Well, the 3 and the 6 were one cube, but they kept spinning. So it could be 3 or 6 or 9 or both, right? Because they turn, right? I would never realize that if I hadn't seen it. It sounds silly because, of course, they could. But it was not a—and then the rest of the—well, all, of course, except for 40, a variation or a multiple of three. Three cubed, 27, you know, three, nine, 12, 12 tribes, 40 days and 49. I started to ascribe what had to be religious meanings to the numbers. But I didn't understand why I was receiving them. Like, what was the point? You know, I began to think as I lay it out, I tried to do it in a very systematic way in the course of my book when I would see the numbers and why subsequently.

33:32You asked me the first time. And I have to say a word to my wife before I'll say how the numbers get completed. because that wouldn't be until I was in Germany after the course. When I met my wife, she was a German. Just a girlfriend, we're carousing. She was as nihilistic as I was for lots of reasons. And we were just party animals. We had no interest in long-term hookup or what became three kids and nine grandkids in our life, 54 years up to now. And she's in many ways the opposite of me, just practical, gets stuff done to this day. I mean, we're like real opposites. I'm philosophical, kind of all over the place.

34:11She's like feet on the ground, gets you through the, you know, with our kids. Everything was always that way. And it served me great because I had a tether. She'd always reel me back in. But that night, she was really disjointed. And she woke up because she's always joked. And I never told her this dream. I didn't want my girlfriend to think I was completely nuts. Right? Yeah. Logical thought when you're 19, 20. Of course. but she wakes up, she goes, I just had a really strange dream. I said, what? She said, well, we were at the Schwandorf, which is the town next to the town I was garrisoned, which was Umberg, Germany, and Schwandorf was less than a half hour away, and there was a large church on a hill there, Catholic church, and she said, I was in by the church.

35:00Now, we had gone, our favorite discotheque was in that town, and we met all our friends there three, four nights a week, It was like a robo-carousing party time, as I'm saying. And she said, it was night. I was alone. You weren't with me. I'm never there without you. She was never in that town without me. And she said, but I was going down an alleyway along the church. I knew what we knew that the geography of it, you know, was coming down a big hill. And I went to the end of this alleyway. And as I came, approached the end, dim light, just some lights on the church on the side, I saw your desk.

35:34And I approached the desk and there was a chair behind it. and the desk was facing me, and there were numbers cubes on your desk with numbers on them. Whoa. And I said, I started to almost hyperventilate, but I didn't want to say anything. I said, do you remember what the numbers were by any chance? She said, well, how could I forget? Of course. It was like I woke up with all the numbers. That's why I just woke up, because I remember it was 3, 6, 9, 12. No way. Yeah, yeah. It was the same numbers. Same numbers. One additional number, 49. Wow. So now, just to say one last thing on my wife as a witness, like for me, for no one else, for me, I needed this.

36:15It's almost like a sanity check. I said, well, I told her then, of course, about my dreams. I never told her that before that. To this day, 54 years later, oh, well, 55, 56, whatever it is, 1978 is when that started. um she um she said well i don't want to read your book i don't want to talk about this anymore she had that kind of a reaction to it but it doesn't in any way diminish she knows the truth of it she knows the truth of all of it because she was a witness to all of it all the everything in my book that those were the early the earliest mystical experiences were around numbers and war and the final sort of bearing testimony to the truth because you have to again i stress to everybody, don't start thinking you're having these things.

37:05You need very deep authentication, very deep testing of your own mind. Are things like this true or not true? I just want to assure anybody listening to any of this that I put myself through all that in great detail, at great depth. Test, test, test, test. In the end, you start to know, is this of God? Is this of God? That's the essence of it. If it's of you, if it's of your imagination, if it's of someone else putting in your mind. It could be anybody. Did she have any prior knowledge of the numbers that you received in your download before she had her dream? No, no, no, none. Wow. And, and the other part, which, you know, you, you know, and I had to actually test my mind because remember all this is happening in the non-interrediated.

37:47I couldn't look anything up, but right, right after my, you know, in the same time I'm having these dreams, two other things that now inform me, that's all they were informing. A perfect stranger walked up to me in a fish restaurant. It was a Long John Silver's. I don't think they're around anymore. There's a fish restaurant, like a fast food restaurant called Long John Silver's. But you go there for fish, which I rarely did. I go McDonald's. But one of our friends says, so the four of us were gathered, the four musketeers, or my friends at the West Point graduates who all went to Germany together and all experienced all these things, I'm saying, and partied together.

38:22We're sitting in the restaurant and this guy walks right up to me, who I describe in the book, and says, read Ezekiel Daniel revelations and walked away. We all looked at each other like, okay, I mean, you don't, there's nothing you do with that. It's just like, that's very strange. But it's coming at the same time, all this other stuff, which he knew nothing about, obviously. When we first started selling merchandise at AmericanAlchemyMerch.com, we had no idea how complicated and annoying selling merch could be. We talked to a dozen different platforms and companies comparing shipping tools, payment options, website builders, and it all felt like way more of a headache and complicated than it should be.

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41:26So I'm imagining, and I was so bored in the class. I was like, that's when I realized, I'm not very good at tank stuff. I mean, I ended up being, I learned forced learning. I was good at my profession as a tank commander of troops in the Army while I was in it. But I didn't really like it. And this was the worst of all, which was learning about maintenance-related things on tanks. So I'm writing. I'm doodling. So I decided to come up with a name for myself as an author. I'll be Frederick Wolfe. So I wrote Frederick Wolfe. Now, that was in honor of two things I admired at the time. You know, you're, you're getting young.

42:05This is like typical of the way I was thinking at the time. Nietzsche, who was my favorite, Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche, but, you know, Friedrich, kind of adaptation of Nietzsche, who I'm obsessed. I was obsessed with, even at West Point. I go through some stories of Nietzsche. And maybe because he fit this idea of, you know, to know yourself, you have to free yourself. You have to free, and even of God, you have to free yourself of all constraints on who you are and confront yourself as to who you are which was also a theme at that time of a lot of the novels fiction i like to read particularly herman hess at the hess at the time and steppenwolf so the wolf came from that frederick well the man searching for his true nature his true character i'm willing to lay it all out there as a you know again brask a brash guy and uh so then i said what'll be my first short story i'll write it here in this class well i decided i called it on suicide's suicide note why did you choose well i i thought it'd be i chose it because it seemed like a really dark deep theme to write about it so i imagine the note was the note i would leave if i actually committed suicide so it was it was like a like if i left a note now because i now i don't you know i don't want to encourage this thinking anybody out there and and i was it came to my senses so to speak but i was getting into the novelistic in fact the irony was I've never in my life felt the slightest bit suicidal ever, ever.

43:28And I attribute a lot of that to my faith and belief because I'm also an inveterate optimist, even in the future of the world, even with all the dark things I've talked about, war and apocalypse and Armageddon, and I'm actually very optimistic about it because it's all tied to this God I know is a loving God. This God is the creator God, means everything around you in nature, you can see God and how wonderful it is. It's this personal God you can talk and interact with who loves you, who wants you to love him. So how can you not be an optimist if that's your perspective? So I had that perspective, even that, because I hadn't forgotten the childhood things in my life that made me feel that way.

44:10But I'm going to go down this dark road because it's interesting. And one of my inspirations was Camus, the philosopher, who was obsessed by the question and mused that maybe the only really relevant question to think about was, is life worth living? Because you have complete control of your life from that very basic way of looking at it. And so I wrote this thing, and that's when I had these dreams, you know, and at that same time, this is all happening concurrent with what I've talked about. So I realized I was getting in way too dark.

44:49We're Again, never got negative or self-destructive. That's the funny part. And I'm convinced I could have kept plowing down that deeper, deep, that tunnel deeper and deeper without ever hurting myself or anybody or anything. But that's not necessarily for other people, something I would advise, right? But it all culminated in the next day. I said, oh, I've got to clear my head. Let's go play golf. So we were all terrible golfers, but we liked to go hacking at golf at Fort Knox. They have a military golf course right on the base. So we went golfing. And you can look this up if you need to, because I couldn't for years had to actually look up on the internet what I experienced.

45:30As we're golfing, it was going to be a stormy day. You know, of course, that fits. It has to be a stormy day with thunder and stuff. But we went anyway, you know, being irreverent. And at one point, we reached a—I'm trying to get— shoot to the hole straight over this cemetery. and of course the ball hooks just an iron hooks into the cemetery and I'm feeling very not respectful just in a bad mood let's just put it that way so I remember climbing over the wall I go over wondering where the grave is with the ball and I was sitting right centered on this very small gray oval grave in the ground and I walk up to the ball it's right centered on the ball I said, I wonder who's trapped my ball.

46:14That literally was what I was thinking. Again, really tempting fate. I was really tempting fate. And it says Frederick Wolf. German soldier died November 5, 1944. I had no idea who this guy was, but I know that my birthday is on November 5, 1954. Whoa. And I just dropped my club and completely freaked out by the experience at the time. Because I realized there's no way that could be, you know, coincidence. That's the night where I had the 747 dream. That's fascinating. Did you try to find anything out about the historical Frederick War? Yes, and I did. And he was a German soldier who, after World War II, was sent to Fort Knox as a prisoner of war.

47:07And he was involved in like a little mini German uprising over conditions there. And he was shot by the guards, you know, and killed. And then he was, of course, buried there. I don't know why he wasn't, his body wasn't sent back to Germany. I never found that level of detail. But it became also kind of this like very interesting connectivity because I was going to Germany. What do you, do you think there's something apocalyptic going on? I do, yeah. This guy goes up to you, he says, read Daniel, Ezekiel, Revelations. All of those books are kind of notably apocalyptic. You're dreaming of this sort of Armageddon-like thing happening.

47:46Well, yes. And the ways I would tie that together would be, so the first apocalyptic, well, future dream. Now, we're talking Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation. I mentioned the person who walked up to me. At that time, that's another thing I did. I filed that away and I didn't think about it much more. But it was always there. You know, I kept it there. It's going to serve a purpose later. I didn't think that at the time, actually, but it did. And one of the purposes was after 9-11, I realized, oh, I get it. I'm Ezekiel's watchman. It's my duty to warn the people, which is really the quintessential CIA officer's role.

48:28I mean, it is in a very modest way. I don't want to make this sound too huge, humongous. It's just, that's what we should do. If we don't do that, there's not much purpose for what we do. And I realized it was much more specific in my case because my first dream, which I chronicle in the book, was Sadat's assassination on September 6, 1981, where I was there. I was on the scene when he was gunned down in a parade field. The interesting thing about it, I wasn't thinking about Assad. I didn't even know the event was taking place the day he was assassinated. and of course given the time change between where i was at fort bliss texas at the time as an army officer this is right before i joined the agency um and uh where he was killed in cairo it was the exact timing i woke up in the middle of the night having had the dream and i remembered in every detail watching in slow motion while gunmen pulled machine guns out of their cloaks and you know shot him dead and a number of others and i pictured this so i couldn't verify any of that until the next day.

49:32Again, no internet, no. And it was reading it in the papers. Did all the details line up of what happened? Every detail, including the timing. It was just impeccable. And I did do one additional thing. Was there an example of like a small detail that you dreamt of that was corroborated the next day reading the news? Well, the main, the most important detail, which I was tying into 9-11, was among the, it's never been entirely established, but it certainly was in my mind. that Eamon Zawahiri, who was, of course, the deputy head of al-Qaeda, later the chief of al-Qaeda, was bin Laden's lieutenant, right?

50:08He was one of the conspirators that pulled it out. And I mean, weirdly remember him and another guy named Saif al-Adil, who was the number three guy in al-Qaeda. Now, he's the head of al-Qaeda. So two of the people I pictured in my dream became the heads of al-Qaeda after bin Laden was killed. And you know they were implicated in Sadat's assassination. Well, it's not 100%, but I did in my dream. But if you Google it, you'll see they probably were. So it's like you remote viewed the event or something. Or time traveled. Well, it felt like that. And it felt like it because it happened at the same time.

50:47And the more important thing is— Or bilocated or something. Yeah. Well, I had no reason to be thinking of this. This is the other, I think, compelling thing. Many experiences, particularly as you get into the Virgin Mary and things that later happened to me later, there was no logical explanation why I went in that direction except for the warning theme. The idea that was building up to a series of serve as a watchman, serve as a messenger. I want to go through the numbers themselves because I think they're fascinating. and um you know i think of 747 you know we were talking earlier actually before we started rolling uh you have the seven story mountain is by thomas merton right and he is one of many mystics where the number seven is this extremely important number i just had this guy on peter lavenda and he wrote a book called stairway to heaven which is a book about celestial ascent traditions across history.

51:49The Merkabah, the, you know, the Ziggurat, the Hekalot, the Aret, you know, all of these things contain seven levels, even esoteric orders like Rosicrucianism. You have to go through seven levels and leave a garment at each level or whatever. It's always discarding or passing a test at each level. And so, you know, I think of seven as sort of, you know, something celestial. And then four is the ascent or conversion into matter or something. And then And seven is like the, you know, the reascent into the celestial. And so maybe there's something around fallen angels or fallen celestial beings, you know, the fall of man or something.

52:25That seems really important with that first number. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that's entirely, you know, not only plausible, but I think the track you're on is probably true. I mean, it's hard to, you just have to continue to explore it and see what insights it renders. That's the bigger challenge is never to think of it as reached a conclusion, a continual journey and almost a non-ending journey to infinity on these subjects. But to understand, to see the associations may be more important than being able to analyze the association completely, thoroughly. because the moment you thoroughly analyze it and you're sort of done with it, it means you close your mind to other possible interpretations.

53:16And since we're in such a broad vista of reality, it's really what it is. Exploring a reality is very broad. There's not a lot of evidence we have through our normal application of language, logic, and reason, which is why, again, numbers help because they take communication on a far more objective level. if you're, but most people, including me, we're not that facile at using numbers in the ways that the real geniuses can with numbers and the people have defined for us what the numbers mean just for physics. I marvel at what some of the great mathematicians have produced and the insight they've gotten from just looking into things that seem to have no purpose, much less something with a purpose.

53:58So I think you're onto something there. Well, let's keep going. So then you have three, six or nine is three. Maybe, I mean, have you thought of the Holy Trinity? Of course. Father, Son, the Holy Ghost. Six or nine, six, you know, the amount of days, you know, before the earth was created, maybe in Genesis or something. Does nine mean anything to you? Well, it's three threes, you know, it just continues a pattern of where there's a emphasis of three. You know, 12 being lots of things, like 12 tribes. These 12 tribes, yeah.

54:3940 days and 40 nights, of course, the temptation of Christ among 40 years for the exodus from the Jewish people under Moses. I mean, there's just lots of religious significance. But I hesitate to, like, you've done well. You know far more than I do about the way it ties into other fields and other potential explanations that broaden, really, from religion. One thing I've done with ongoing satisfaction, I have no conclusion, is reach out to physicists. I've had a number of physicists contact me who've read my book, and those are very interesting. or I've given my book to some other physicist. And through my time at the Department of Energy, I spent three years as the head of intelligence and counterintelligence at the Department of Energy between 2005 and 2008.

55:25And then beyond that, especially, when I continued the nuclear stuff, but expanded it a great deal. DOE is an incredible organization. We have what they call the America's National Laboratories, all based in the Department of Energy. So it's been an amazing ride for me to get connected to all these incredibly important smart people who could probably be doing anything. Don't have to work at lower pay in most cases for, for the U S government doing things, but do it because they want to serve the country too. So there's all those kinds of people out there that I get to know, but the physicists that I, I've given them a challenge, which is kind of what you're doing with the numbers.

56:06I said, look, I, you know, read my book or you read my book. I now want to know more than ever. what's the physics behind mysticism there have to be physics behind it it's not something that belongs to a different reality it's part of our reality it happens in this world therefore there has to be an e equals mc it has to be a quantum or relativity space time all have to be taken in account as to what happened and what it how to explain it you ever gotten a satisfactory answer Uh, nothing that I would describe as answering the question, but I have gotten the kind of encouragement I need that it's not a silly question.

56:53That's kind of what I'm looking for. I mean, the most interesting scientists, whether it be Einstein or, you know, Heisenberg has an apocryphal quote that's often attributed to him where it's like the first sip of the science, you know, the bottle or whatever leaves you an atheist. But when you get to the bottom, you know, there lies God. And, you know, so, okay, so that's good. So they don't think it's all, you know, that's like a bad, that's a bad framing at least for inquiry. And you know what Einstein said. What did he say? I want to know God's thoughts. The rest are details. Wow. That's a great quote from Einstein.

57:29That's a really great quote for somebody whose, you know, theory has basically become the modern scientific paradigm. Right, right. Well, I think almost all the great physicists, or I would say were great ones, that I certainly have become hobbyists of. I'll never quite grasp the full math and science aspects of it, of course. But like Paul Dirac, you know, people like that. people, I encourage people to, to, which I used to do when I, you can imagine a, a lay person like me, not a scientist or taking on weapons of mass destruction and trying to stop terrorists from getting bombs and biological weapons.

58:03And one of the biggest, uh, skeptics, you know, skepticism I encountered was the Russians were really good. I went to Moscow to lecture them and brought a bunch of people so they could stop this stuff in Russia and other places. And it's one of the old russians i knew from way back when we were catching and recruiting and catching spies hey you know ralph we know you know you you don't know anything about this stuff so why why you know i said that's why i brought all these other people listen to them don't listen to me i'm not i'm not if you notice i'm not telling you the science they are yeah i'm pulling it together because you have to you have to establish science is irrelevant without the concept understanding the consequence of science and i used to say that the doe scientists quite often if you can't explain this in layman's term and make it relevant to real people like everybody listening to this if we make it irrelevant to them in their lives then we've lost our sense of mission so the idea with with um with with the the idea of the physicists i asked them i tasked them i would call it jokingly come back to me with some plausible explanation the biggest roadblock i've encountered from talking to real men of science on this or women of science is they say well the problem we have is you almost have to create alternative um not universes per se but a space in dimensions in the universe in which things occur that we can't experimentally measure right and that becomes our problem because good physicists will say anything i can't experimentally confirm or measure is is not and and i would say This is me talking, so I may, anybody listening could easily contradict me on this if they know more.

59:48But I've reconciled quantum and relativity, you know, as a problem of scale, nothing else. It's just, to me, it's the idea that you're measuring things at two different extremes, but the underlying reality, there's no conflict. It's the same reality, measured in different scales. So we have to start thinking of when we have these mystical experiences, thinking of them as things that happen at scale, but maybe there is no time and maybe there's not even motion. Maybe the idea of an angel of going between two different places, why we put wings on angels, right? It's a tradition. Is this a medium of coming from a world at rest into a world in motion and needing to somehow cross over that divide and that barrier?

1:00:31That's just the way I think of it. So I haven't solved any of these things, but you asked the question of how do you think of them? And all I can say is you open your mind to all kinds of potential explanations. And the truth is, you know, everybody, you know, I come from UFO world. You talked about your history at the DOE and we will get into some questions there. But, you know, I think a lot of people in, you know, in that world think of the truth as something to be disclosed. Like you can say it prosaically. And I don't think that's the case at all. Right. Like, you know, I always find it interesting.

1:01:07You know, St. Thomas Aquinas was like working on his Sumo Theologica, this like rational explanation of God. And I think he had this conversion, you know, kind of moment while he was in mass. And it was like this mystical experience. And then he like stopped speaking after that. But there's a scientist, I think his name is Mishka Gregory Perlman, and he's in Siberia right now. And he's known in theoretical physics world as one of the top best guys. And I've even talked to some people who are like, if anybody's sitting on a theory of everything that marries general relativity and quantum mechanics, it's probably this guy.

1:01:48And I think he claims that he has a unified theory, and he just won't talk. And so there is this something very interesting about, you know, it's so, you know, maybe the truth is just so hard to, like, grapple with. And there's a translation function between, like, what a person knows and then what they can even describe to, you know, the world. Like, that's a really hard thing to do. You know, there isn't some Archimedean point where, like, everybody instantaneously gets it all at once. And it's just the semantic, it's a semantic truth. But, um, yeah, anyways. Well, the only thing I'd add to that, because I think that's so important too, is, is as you approach unification of like understanding the nature of all reality in some equation form or something that could be expressed through physics or mathematics, you are in fact getting closer to what I would describe as what I think of God as, which isn't the head of the Catholic church or the Protestant church or whatever.

1:02:50It's, it's the entity of the creator God and the personal God. On the creator God level, I mean, if you know on the religious side of that, the idea of God, Yahweh, you couldn't even say it. So you develop a term that you couldn't even pronounce. So it gets a little bit backward like a Perlman who's, if he is at some level where he can no longer talk about it, I think that tends to happen when you reach a point of insight that just you're overwhelmed by the profundity, if that makes sense, of what you're looking into. I want to switch gears because we've talked forever on all this stuff. But you have had direct experiences with the Virgin Mary.

1:03:30And that is a really rare thing for somebody with your background and in your position to say, can you go into those experiences and describe them as sort of viscerally as you can? Yes. For me, it's the most important part of the book.

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1:05:36After you sign up, they'll ask you how you heard about them. please make sure to mention this podcast to support the show. So what the story was, in 1991, when I was in Greece, I went on a pilgrimage to Monathos, Greece, which is an Orthodox mountain that's something akin to the Vatican in Greek Orthodoxy, Orthodox world. It's 20 monasteries on this amazing peninsula that juts out by Thessaloniki up in northern Greece, right? And I got a three-day diplomatic visa to go with the Diplomats Club. But I did it with a calculation in mind, a work-related pretext, which was I had been given a tip by a Greek very close to the president, Prime Minister of Greece, about a monk at Monathos who was actually a Russian intelligence officer who was getting cover and changing his identity to go on a mission to the U.S.

1:06:41on behalf of Russian intelligence and would be undercover at a Russian Orthodox church in the U.S. to do God knows what. But he would have just wonderful cover to be in the U.S. So it was an amazing tip. I didn't solicit it or it came to me. They came to me with the tip and handed me the file so I could read it. And then I resolved to go up there and investigate through direct, you know, direct contact. So you're looking for this spy who's going undercover as a monk in Mount Athos. And then you go to Mount Athos. And then what happens? I'm going through an all night, experiencing an all night service at the small Catholicon of Monastery Dionysio, which is one of the monasteries on a huge cliff.

1:07:26And I was just, they were very relaxed on, you know, how I wasn't Orthodox to begin with, which the monks all knew. I was just a visitor. I just described myself as a Christian. And so I go out and I'm sitting at this, I fell asleep, sort of napping on this stone chair facing the church, little church on the hill. It's a stone courtyard, all stone courtyard, very severe, very severe looking. thousand year stones, thousand year walls, a thousand year throne that was the only chair, I'd call it, carved in the stone wall. And I'm sitting at it. It reminded me of the scene out of like Conan the Barbarian or something.

1:08:11It really was that kind of a feeling. And with the waves rushing, crashing against the sea, crashing against the walls, way below, hundreds of feet below me. you know and beautiful just absolutely gorgeous you know amazed mesmerizing balmy day so i'm just relaxed sitting there fall asleep that's when i immediately went into this dream state

1:08:34so

1:08:45I realize this is one of those, like that's what had started to happen to me. I knew when one of those meant it was not a usual dream. So your description of, was it time travel? I mean, I would say that's a possibility. I mean, I don't know. I can't, but I felt like it was something happening. And first you go to 1800s Paris. Yes. I go to 1800 Paris and I, I just walking down these 18th century Paris streets and I'm walking to a brothel. Yeah. I just want to see what's going on. That's kind of a typical me thing. And that's when I encounter what turned out to be the Virgin Mary. Didn't call herself that, but I just felt, I just felt that without it, without an introduction.

1:09:25And this one open door was, door was open and it was like all the others. It had like a waist back with soiled condoms and things, you know, and it looked awful. It was blood on the sheets. And I was thinking, oh, this is awful. And I looked at the woman and she just looked at me with these imploring eyes, just like the suffering of the world was on her weight on her shoulder. What better place to be to feel that with the exploitation and things of this place? And it just, the gravity of that hit me because I'd also seen a scene where like a rotund priest is, of course, this is coming unbeknownst to me, you know, kind of at the height of the sex scandals in the Catholic Church and things too.

1:10:02So I don't, I'm not tying these things together, but it just, it was very depraved. And I felt, I felt the depravity. I felt nauseous in my own dream. And then, yeah, I walk outside the brothel and this guy, meet this guy outside. And he says, basically, you're odious maximus and go, go atone for your sins kind of conversation I have with this guy, Harry Hiller, which was one of the characters from from herman hess's steppenwolf and harry hillard basically encourages me to go to mount athos to sponge myself or find clarity or salvation or whatever the whatever i could find so okay so you're in 1800s paris you meet harry hillard yeah you see this scene and you're confident that this is the virgin mary in this brothel because of it was a conclusion I reached not at the time, but only after it became a pattern, if that makes sense.

1:11:02So at the time, I wasn't entirely sure who this old woman was other than she didn't fit. And I could feel the suffering, which became a common, every encounter with the Virgin Mary, was an element of the weight of her suffering for the world, for the fate of the world, in particular for the fate of people who are suffering, for the pain and the agony of others. This is the common feeling I had each of the experiences, but I didn't know that at the moment. I just knew that, wow, this is certainly disruptive. Yeah. You know? So when I continued the dream. Did you feel love coming from her or, or she.

1:11:37I didn't particularly feel love. I felt more pathos. Like, like, like, like her ultimate empathy for everything. Right. And all suffering and all beings or something. Nothing so much directed towards me. What I think I put in my mind more than something she, a vibe she gave was the idea that, man, I shouldn't be here. Did she say anything to you? No. Do you, have you thought of the symbolism of her being in a brothel where all this kind of, you know, corrupt, you know, horrible deeds are being done or whatever? Like, do you think of that as somehow significant? Well, yes. I mean, certainly not at that time again, but certainly looking back, I realize how it fits so well into the subsequent encounters and the pattern being, okay, you want an image?

1:12:31You want images of what I mean by suffering? This is the image, right? What can be worse? There's very few things that are worse than that. Certainly the Holocaust, there are things that are worse than what she showed me. the reaction everyone should have to this or her reaction to this reality of the world that I was seeing with her at that moment and sort of stumbled upon. So then when I went back in time, it became kind of a, then it became kind of a disappearance of time to put me in the right state of mind to do the exploration I needed to do at Mount Altos. So the rest of the dream sequence that I outlined in, it's called The Bizarre World of Odious Maximus in my book, because it's how bizarre I felt when I knew it was still me, but I'm going now into this, I have to adopt this cover of a character, so to speak, which is a CIA thing anyway.

1:13:26But it was so unusual and unique to me that it was really scary. I wasn't sure I could not be that character. I wasn't sure that I'd ever be Rolf again. So then I'm going back in time as I'm traveling, as you would in those days, to Athens and then from Athens to, and with every step I'm taking, the time is going back in time. And by the time I get to Mount Athos at the capital city, which I had sort of landed in when I came off the boat in real life now and to where I'd had the dream a couple days ago getting there, I saw that town again, but back in the 1500s, you know. And I go there and I present my credentials, so to speak, at the capital to, say, if you will, the governance people there, including this guy, Monk Gabriel, who was the head.

1:14:14So Harry Hiller is this character that's in 19th century Paris-ish. I leave him. You leave him. But he says, you are odious maximus. You must go to Mount Athos. You go to Mount Athos, and then all of a sudden you're like a few hundred years earlier in history. So like 1400s, 1500s. Correct. Trapped up there, essentially. Trapped up there. Was there a gradient of time moving backwards from the 1800s to the 14 or 1500s? Or like all of a sudden you're in Mount... No, it was a gradient. It was as if time was evaporating. It was a way, like with each step. That was what was so, I would say, very unnerving, was going back in time but feeling it happening as it's happening.

1:15:03and it's getting and i was trying to adjust but it was getting too difficult to go so i tried to limit any contact with anybody like on a ship or on a coach or as i'm going back because i didn't want anybody say anything that would think i was some insane person and throw me in some you also don't want to alter the future forever with i didn't think that variable or something i did not think that but that's a good thought i did not think i remember not thinking anything profound It was like pure survival. I remember being in pure survival mode, including, I would say, my mind. I hoped I wasn't losing my mind to the point where, you know, whatever the, say, inspiration was to adopt this way of thinking of myself as being a very onerous, bad person, that I would overdo that again.

1:15:48And I mean, that wasn't really the point. I kept reassuring myself, but I would have to play this out. So I get up there and I describe this, and long and short of it, the monks take me in, even though they argued against it. But this Gabriel, he saw something in me. And he said, we're here to, like Peter said, open our house to those who need it. This man needs it. So I get assigned to the monastery at Dona Dionisio, which is where I happened to be when I was having the dream. Does all of this feel as real as this interview feels? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it feels like... any sort of real experience that you've had it's indistinguishable pretty much it's there are things that occasionally in all the dreams like the the sadat dream and i'd had uh other you know dreams also which i lay out pretty much all of them that i can remember in in the book i had a basketball game dream even like when i was a teenager and when i did i knew immediately qualitative reality in those dreams was close to reality but i could usually still understand it was a dream if that makes sense so in this dream i still knew i was in a dream i could still distinguish the rolf i was from the character going back in time but otherwise outside outside of that it seemed totally real to the point where i don't think there were historical like you've seen movies where there are things in in movies that shouldn't be there at a historical time you I didn't see telephones in the 16th century or things you shouldn't see, you know?

1:17:16Were you wearing your clothing from? And it changed. It was changing. It was going back. So your clothing was becoming more and more appropriate for the time. Well, I also found myself, and I don't remember specifics on this, trying to find more appropriate stuff. So I wouldn't look like a space traveler back in the 17th century. You know, I was trying to, like a person would do to try to fit in. I was trying to alter my look and things like that. I was getting a beard because I didn't shave. You know, I remember those kinds of details. So when I'm at the monastery, then it got deeper and deeper into what monks do, which I learned a lot about through the dream, but also through what turned out to be two trips there, spending a grand total of a month in Monathos.

1:17:59At the end of the story, that's what it consisted of because I got, of course, very into this understanding, not just a dream, but then the encounter that followed, which was the idea that you live a life in a monastery. A lot of people just sort of quickly jump to the conclusion that's world evasion. You just want to avoid the world. You want to go off on yourself. It's very selfish. So I understand people when they say that about monastic lifestyles. I don't feel that. in large measure because I had this dream where I experienced it on such an intense level because for some people it's the only way they can pursue God it's the only way they can be close to God it's the only way they can get themselves closer to God they don't give up on the world in most cases they're not doing it to avoid the world most they're doing it to get close to God sometimes there's a consequence of those other things when you do that so I felt that and so when I experienced the the life up there was not experiences I had felt spiritually before which And again, this was a new reality I was learning from.

1:18:59It wasn't just adapting what I already knew and living it vicariously as a monk. It was something very different. Through the character I became in the monastery, I was growing. I was developing. I became a recluse up there. You know, I learned to fly. You know, and I remember, and I've talked to other people who have had the flying experience. That's a different conversation we can have one day. because I've had reactions from people who read that part of my book and said, oh, I've done that. I've been able to fly, you know. For me, flying was a manifestation. The more I think about it, I see it as a reward almost in a way.

1:19:38A reward you're not asking for, but it's a tribute to opening your mind. And when you're flying, you're spiritually open. you're just in a different state of consciousness than you are when you're just praying if that makes sense and what we talked about even right before the interview is what i didn't expect to find was as i went through the whole experience here is the flying monk and the i burned my hut up there like all the things a recluse does were you doing you were burning your hut yes yes and And so this is happening across months or weeks? In the dream, it's months. In reality, it's the course of the dream, which that's easy for me to do years in a dream.

1:20:25But in my dream stay, it was weeks. Days went to weeks, went to months. And so you are aware that your reality has drastically shifted from 20th century Rolf, CIA, case officer. Right. Right. To it was trying to catch the spy on Mount Athos to it's like you entered a portal and you are here for days upon days and you are going to sleep and waking up within this. Yes, within the dream. That is fascinating. Well, the biggest thing about it was I knew at the time I had the dream as I was dreaming that I was dreaming and I might not be able to get back. That was the scariest thing was I felt trapped and I wasn't sure I was going to wake up.

1:21:11And at one point, I told one of the emissaries, so this Father Gabriel, who I got to kind of know, sent this other young monk called Evagrius, and he would come and meet me. And I remember my encounters with him, and he was encouraging me, and we were talking all the time. And I remember some of those, I just put snippets of them in the dream, and I frankly forgot some of them, but I just knew that was really alive. It was my only contact with a human being when I was in a recluse stage, which was when I was doing the flying about. And he told me, yeah, the other monks had seen me and wondered if it was real.

1:21:44So I remember that stuff. It was just so palpable. But then I, of course, had three dreams within a dream. And now we're reaching the culmination of what I would call the fruition of the dream. The point of the dream was what follows. The farther I'm getting away from myself, the farther I'm detaching my faith in God from a selfish interest in me, that's when I start flying. That's when I start, my spiritual growth is happening when I'm being less selfish, when I'm joining sort of I call the general universal salvation idea of mankind, if I'd call it that. And the more intense my spiritual experiences were getting within my dream, to the point then I had three dreams within a dream.

1:22:28And very quickly, because one, and they're very intense. One night I go to sleep in my dream, and I have a dream where I'm in the middle of a big room, and we all have to go pick numbers from what looks like a barbershop number thing. You pull the number, and I got my number, a two-digit number. Oh, I don't remember the number. It's too bad. It would have been great to add to the number collection. I was so frustrated I forgot the number. But it was a two-digit number. And everybody got a two-digit number. I thought, well, that's very strange. There are way more than 20 or 99 of us here. What's the number?

1:23:02didn't, nobody explained anything. Nobody talked. It was just murmuring, walking around. Then I, then I woke up. The barber shot clanged with the number. I pulled the number up. I woke up from the dream. It was in a dream. It startled me. So then in my dream, the next day I go to bed, I go to sleep in my hut and I have another dream. It's a second dream. Now in that dream, now I'm standing in the room again. It's a big round room with seven doors. And I'm looking at my number and I just had this wild thought, which I had never thought religiously, like until the dream. I thought, man, what a bummer.

1:23:41I mean, we're all going to go through these doors, I guess. And these numbers must be, and we were wearing clothes. They issued clothes and I had fine clothes. I remember with brown suede shoes and some people were with rags. And I saw an old woman in the corner who again I thought is this the Virgin Mary the same woman I met in the in in Paris I didn't know so I don't want to overstate it but I thought is that her and uh I said well I'll see what happened I kept my eye on her but I didn't want to go up to anybody or to say anything it was like everything in this I was just like trying to survive that's really I was trying to survive even in my dream within a dream and then the doors open seven doors open and we had to walk through the doors.

1:24:24And I remember thinking the heretical thought, like in a way of doubting God again, what if my number's like right under the ones that are going to heaven, I'm going to hell? I mean, imagine missing by one number, but it's kind of stupid thought you, like if the situation were real, that's a real thing. If there's such a thing as heaven and hell, right? Which I've never believed after this and other things that there's such a literal thing as that. I think heaven and but partially because of this. So then the boom, wake up again, startled by this, the doors groaning and having to walk through them.

1:25:00And then the third dream is walking through the door. And I remember it very carefully, particularly when I reread it, you know, last night, actually, where I'm standing at the beach and it brought it all back to me really clearly. It was a dark, dark night, not a star in the sky. I remember that, but the sun, it was bright light. I thought, well, the sun's not up, but it was a bright light on the other side. side of the, and I remember thinking of the contradiction that the sun's not out. What's that? It wasn't the moon. There's something very bright on the other side of the shore. And it was like a river kind of thing, a river, like a wide river.

1:25:38And it was turning dark. And I could tell, we were all being encouraged. We knew, no one was saying anything, announcing anything. You had to walk across the river to the other side, which I took, at that time, this must be salvation, the test of salvation for all of us. And I'm walking on the top of the water like Christ in Galilee, and I'm thinking, oh, this can't hold me with my brown suede shoes. But it started to work. And I said, well, if I put all my effort into my faith, maybe I'll make it to the other side. And then people are, I heard plunk. It was a terrible sound, like somebody going into the water and being swept away in the depths.

1:26:22You couldn't see below, except like an inch below your shoes. And I was worried, stupidly, thinking my shoes are getting wet. I remember thinking that. I was like, oh, these shoes are going to get ruined. They're going to be stained. I really did. Wow. And then, you know, sure enough, I get halfway across and I think, I can do this. I can make this. And then the old woman's right next to me and she stumbles and loses her step. And I instinctively just tried to grab her arm to hold her up. And we both went swept away and I woke up. The Virgin Mary. Well, I don't. What you interpret. What I interpret, probably.

1:26:55Because it tied into the, but then the final scene is that I wake up. Like this is the, I'm done with the dream. That was getting swept away was the final part of the dream. So I wake up at the throne sitting there and, and I realized I saw a light in the church. This was like this from distance, maybe we're going to say six, seven yards or whatever it is. 15 feet to your windows over there, right? That's where the wall of the church was with the windows, stained glass kind of windows I had. And I saw this red light moving along the thing. And I got up out of the chair and moved toward the window.

1:27:36And it had gone all the way up to the front of the church, the altar, and was sitting there burning red. and now i think but the lights were related the light and the the red light of course of the yeah other than the red light of mary so i attached to all the marys together the in the dream this must be this but i but to be clear i had never seen the virgin mary so i saw the dream image of her and then i saw the light which i took to be that i took that light immediately when I saw it. I talked to a monk the next day. I said, I saw this mysterious light in the church after it was closed, and it moved from here to here.

1:28:17I thought he would just say, oh, were you dreaming something? I said, well, I was awake, I said. But he said, no, he said this. His name was Monk Timotheus, and I ended up going back to my house to seek him out. And he ended up taking me back to his cell that they call it, where they live, their little bunk in a stone place, really, really austere, you know, rugged kind of living conditions. And he had like 10 books on his shelf. He gave me three of them about Athos because he said, I just want you to read more about this because it seemed like you saw that for a reason. He goes, there are monks who have said they've seen the, this is the light of the Virgin Mary going down the thing.

1:28:56And it seems like you might've seen that. I don't understand it. He was very confused by it because he said, you're not even, he even tested me and said, you're not even Orthodox, right? He said, no, know we went through that he said well i don't know but i'm not going to doubt it and that's when he gave me and i kept those books for i still have those books when you wake up and you're at the church and you see the red light yeah and maybe that's somewhat symbolic of the virgin mary yeah is that in 19 is that 1990s or is that okay that's that's 1991 okay so you basically you go back to 1800s Paris, then you go to Mount Athos.

1:29:32Mount Athos is days turned into months. You are Odius Maximus, this monk who goes through all these kind of ascetic protocols and you're fasting and you say you're burning your huts and stuff. Then I finally requested permission to go away from the monastery and just be a recluse in the wild, in the wilderness. You know, like there's a tradition there. Some monks go out and they just separate themselves from everybody, even their fellow monks. And the only time they see anybody is they come in to get provisions or medical emergency or something. I mean, they don't completely abandon all ties to civilization, if you call that civilization.

1:30:12They just limit it as much as possible to get even closer and closer. And, in fact, I ended up meeting a recluse who I feel was kind of a full circle experience that I actually met a real recluse. the second time I went to Mount Athos and who gave me a book and tremendous conversation we had about the apocalypse. I mean, normally people get together, I'm sitting on a curb, you know, with this guy and talking about things and he's asking me who I was and where I worked and I have a family back in this day. And he said, I haven't seen anybody in a few weeks. This is kind of nice. He's carrying bags of, he's carrying some lettuce in one bag, a plastic bag in the other bag.

1:30:48He's carrying a baguette. You know, he's going back to the woods. But anyway, he stopped and chatted me up. And the next thing you know, we're talking for a couple hours on, turned out into the apocalypse and everything else. And it was amazing. It was like we both had studied the same books about this. But that's the side. That's just the idea of what it meant when I went into this room. It was almost like I needed this full circle, which is so much of the story for me, where things are explained later. So when I, at the time I saw the light of the Virgin Mary. I mean, I honestly didn't think that much of it.

1:31:21It was a light. Maybe it was a light. Even the image of the old woman, maybe it was her, maybe it was not her. So I had all those things. You know, the dream itself is the way you describe, and that has its own, it's its own story in a way. But it wasn't until two more things that happened with the Virgin Mary that it all came together. It's fascinating. And you also then come to realize that there had been Virgin Mary apparitions all over Mount Athos? Not at this point. Okay, that was, but later you were. No, no, I mean, I had talked to people there later, everything was later, including the story of Virgin Mary being on the mountain that I'd learned and wasn't until 2006 or 2007 that I heard some of the backstory of the history and lore that included the site.

1:32:12So I'll save that because at this point I don't know any of this, including I wasn't ready at that point, prepared in the sense of thinking it would happen to me. So there was no predisposition, for example, to actually meet the Virgin Mary or understand what has happened historically with the Virgin Mary. Some people ask me that. Well, when you started to have your Virgin Mary experiences, were they in any way because you read about, you know, Lourdes or Fatima and all this? I said, well, I honestly knew nothing about any of that at this point. And this was 1991. What did you find out later in 2006 and 2007 about the Virgin Mary showing up at Mount Athos?

1:32:52Because I think it's very fascinating that there's some historical corroboration on other people are experiencing what you're experiencing spiritually in this specific location. Well, I find out that there's at least a legend lore that they have at Monathos that the Virgin Mary, after Christ was crucified and rose from the dead, was traveling along with other Christians at the time, or apostles, around in ships. and of course they were all based in Corinth and places like that. So she was on a ship on its way to sea of all things, John at Potmos, and also to go to Cyprus because Lazarus supposedly fled Israel when the Romans started looking for him because they wanted to execute him as being this person who rose from the dead.

1:33:45It was a very disruptive idea that Jesus was going around raising people from the dead, right? It was the reason why both the Jews and the Romans saw the early Christians, they called the way at that point, they weren't called Christians, as being saboteurs, disruptive to order and society. So they were hunting him down, actually. So he fled, apparently. And I didn't believe that story either until, I believe, I didn't like, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. And there's actually, if anybody listeners goes to Nicosia, Cyprus, I urge you to take a look at Lazarus' tomb, which is supposedly in Cyprus, where he went and became the first bishop, starting the church in there.

1:34:29So Mary was supposedly traveling on a ship, and there was a big storm, which that part of the Aegean is famous for that, going all the way back to the Spartans and the Athens, having a huge summer storm that ruined fleets and everything, shipwrecked fleets. and she got blown on the island of Monathos. And there's a monastery placed on the site where she supposedly landed, went ashore, called Ivaran. It's on the west coast of this peninsula at that monastery in the south part of the monastery. And I've been to that monastery, but it wasn't until this 2005, 2006 period when a monk told me the whole story about this little icon in a hut right on the shore that this hut, this is supposedly the spot where she landed at that time.

1:35:15Wow. Wow, this has got way more. And of course, I've sent my book and gotten letters back from the Vatican and also from the Orthodox Church hierarchy in Istanbul, Turkey. And the letter I got from the Orthodox Church was really priceless. It said basically, we wish you had become one of us and still joined the Catholics, but we still consider you a friend of ours. And your book is in our library and His Eminence has read it and all that, because I really appreciated that, because I've said to many people, the accident of me being Catholic or Orthodox is not what any of this is about, right? And I think they appreciated that.

1:35:56Mary belongs to the world, not to Catholics or Orthodox. Orthodox and monotheos, they consider her the whole object of the veneration that the mountain is dedicated to, which is why women to this day can't go, and I think this is misguided, just to put that out there, But women to this day cannot go on Monathos, step foot on Monathos, because it's dedicated completely to Mary at the exclusion of all women. As I said, I think this is veneration that goes too far. But the point of it is to emphasize how fundamental Mary's history and role is. Have other visitors or pilgrims experienced Mary that explicitly?

1:36:41just like you there at Manatho specifically. Yes, yes. And I can't like enumerate, you know, their examples, but I know it's not a unique phenomenon. So much so that I would say, like I'm having with you, Jesse, this is highly unusual to have an easy conversation on these subjects, right? You can do that. Most people can't. What's been very gratifying is that I never bring it up, the subjects, any of these subjects almost, except the just, you know, obviously the intelligence and all history and all that I do. But any of the religious or focus on God with anybody who doesn't bring it up. And then I usually bring it up and I found some very fascinating takes or additions that people have to make on what I've said that they've experienced.

1:37:30A really close friend of mine, I would never have expected this, came to me especially to say he's had very vivid dreams of flying after reading about that part of my book. It's very gratifying to hear. I've also had more basic things of people saying, you know, why would you join a church with all this that you describe yourself in your book as having all this sex abuse and this and that? And I said, well, I said, I never give up on the church like I never give up on your faith. But those kinds of conversations have been the great gifts of writing the book. So while you're at Mount Athos and you're this character, Odios Maximus, what do you feel like it is?

1:38:12So you feel like it's your mission to get closer to God by sort of detaching yourself from the contemporary world in some ways. And so what are you doing on a day to day basis? You're fasting and you're praying or what's your what's your day to day life like? And again, this feels as real as you waking up in Maryland where you live, right? Yeah, well, I remember feeling a bit of a contradiction of feelings. On the one hand, being there and doing things like tending to the grapes and cleaning the dishes until I become a recluse. Then it's just trying to survive in the wild and that kind of thing, doing continual prayer or that kind of thing.

1:38:58But up until that point, I'm thinking, I'm also miserable. I want to go home. So I never lost the feeling I wanted out. Do you feel stuck? I felt stuck. Yeah, I said that a few times. But I felt very stuck when I was in the recluse phase. But I understood without any, like, there was no messaging or voicing, which I've never heard, by the way, with mystical experiences, any, like, audio. It's interesting. Real audio, real talking words. But it was the idea that I needed to do this to go home. I needed to go through these different levels of this experience in the dream before I could. No one said that.

1:39:39But I knew it. I knew that until I had gone through the different levels of what was expected, I couldn't go home. It was almost like it was a spiritual training. I mean, the Jesuits call it their spiritual exercises that they go through. This was much more intense in the dream. How old were you as Rolf when you went back, when you time traveled as Odious Maximus? How old were you? In my real life? Yeah, in your real life. So it's 1991 and I'm born in 54. So it's what? 37. Yeah, 37. Interesting. Yeah. And so you're communing with Gabriel and the other monks as well. Yeah, yeah. Did you ever tell them, hey, like, I'm kind of trapped here.

1:40:22Oh, I, the only, yeah, no. I actually exist in the future. No, no. It was like a cover. I was living my cover until at the very end, near the end, after, you know, in one of the times I wore the brown, the brown suede shoes in my dream within a dream. And then they were suddenly under my hut. So they're in the dream now. They, they had gone from the dream within the dream to somehow peering in my dream. And that was very discombobulating. Right. And at that point, when Evagrius came back on another to check on me, make sure I hadn't plunged off a cliff or something, I told him. I told him who I really was.

1:41:01And I remember the reaction. I had to—by the way, I never knew exactly all some of the things I said, but I knew that all of it was consistent. And so I had to create dialogue with Evagrius on this scene in my book that I don't remember exactly what the dialogue was. As with waking memory. Right. So I did with my best. So I don't want anybody out there to think I've got this photographic memory or anything. But it's very close. What did you roughly say? The main thing I remember that I based the dialogue I created on was, and to be true to that, was the idea that Evagrius was wise beyond his years.

1:41:39He was a young, spry little monk, wise beyond his ears. And when I told him the reality, I did it because I knew he was wise. And I needed somebody to tell. And it was him. He was a someone I could trust. And he reacted in a way that redeemed my idea that this was a good time to do it by basically reacting as I would have hoped, which is, I hope you get back to your family and keep praying to God and God will take care of you. In a way that I suddenly felt a sense of peace, knowing this wasn't going to go without somebody knowing what had happened to me. And maybe I will get back because I think this guy would offer me some wisdom and insight into that.

1:42:30And he did. Did he freak out at all and say, what, you exist in the future? No, no. Did you say, there's this place, it's called America or the United States, and it ends up breaking off from England in 1776. Did you have to go through any of that? Or he just kind of took it on its more spiritual dimension or something and kind of ran with it? Jesse, there was one thing. No, I didn't do any of that. But I made a big slip up early on that I realized and nobody called me on. And I think they knew there was something really wrong. going back to my presentation of my credentials, so to speak, to Gabriel, when I said I was Odeus Maximus and all this stuff and not who I was.

1:43:12But I did say something really absurd, where I said, you know, I'm an American mystic. Because I knew I had to present myself as a mystic, because I wouldn't be able to go through any grilling on doctrine or theology or stuff they might expect. So I had to play the mystic card. and then you maybe don't, or you can grunt. I was going to fake it in a way that I knew I couldn't if I had actually explained my knowledge of liturgy or anything else. And they saw through it, and he did, but he had pity, right? That was the earlier description. But I said at the time, and I'm an American mystic, thinking I came from this continent, that didn't exist, right?

1:43:51At least in their minds, nobody said anything. And so when I presented the story at the end, my real name and future, I'm from the future, to this monk, he seemed to take it all in stride. And it's really interesting because if there are people, I think, who understand the notion of future time travel, there's no super spiritual person, at least in the Christianity, I think all of them, honestly, and the monotheistic religions, who aren't able to separate time from discussion in a way where they're comfortable with the idea of past-future. Because for one thing, the most credible witnesses to what's going to come and what the past means are the prophets.

1:44:46Right? It's Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, John. It's Christ who talked about the raising of Jerusalem. The history of the church is in question when people—in fact, even Christ himself said he can't predict when the future ends or that's up to God. So there are limits. And I don't look at prophets as soothsayers in the sort of Shakespearean tradition of Ides of March. No, prophets are those who concede into the future what happens. They don't influence it. Hmm. If that makes sense. Do you think right now, as we speak, Rolf is also odious Maximus living in 15th century Mount Athos, Greece, trying to, you know, commune with God?

1:45:36Oh, wow. That's those. See, now we're getting into fun stuff. But, but I mean, everything I've said is a product of. You could speculate, you know. And I will. I'll just say as a preface that everything I say on this subject is really philosophical science. It's drawn from my greatest love intellectually in the world, which is philosophy, which is what? The love of wisdom, the love of knowledge. And so in that spirit, I think that it's possible. And my experiences bear this out for me, that the dreams we create are as real as physical reality we're in, which means the answer to your question would be yes.

1:46:18Because if I dreamt it and I created it. And it felt real. It didn't feel real. And I created it. Now, the more you get into whether you're taking a trip, taking a trip, so to speak, in reality versus like I make this great distinction, which I'm not sure is as great a distinction as bright lines as I make it between when I met the Virgin Mary and when I've had interactions. Just like when you pray to God and you think you're getting responses and telling versus actually like meeting God. Yeah. Yeah. But let's, let's go a little deeper into this odious Maximus example. Do you think that that is a real historical figure?

1:46:58Yeah, I know he is. That's that was one of the ironies. So to my great shock, great shock. This was like a wonderful shock. I went, when I went back to Athos in, so Mary, one of the things Mary said to me at the end of the experience in Paris in 1998, I neglected to mention it, the first iteration. She said, we will meet again, like a reassurance. We will meet again. So I thought, oh, this is so great, you know, because this is like, so this is the highlight of my life kind of thing. And part of that would be come back and visit me at Mount Athos again, where it all started. So it took me a long time between 1998, took me about seven years to go back.

1:47:38Seven years, isn't that interesting? And I went back to Mount Athos and back at the Holy Mountain only because I felt the Virgin Mary would now be my tour guide. So I did something kind of extraordinary. I got the Greeks to allow me. I knew the, I was still like with CIA, like associated with CIA. I was at the Department of Energy at that time, by the way, head of intelligence there. But I still had all my contacts and friends at CIA, including the guy who was head of our office in Athens. Right. And I lined it up with him. He's a close friend of mine. And he's also, interestingly enough, a religious scholar as CIA officer.

1:48:13But he lined me up with a month long visa. normally someone like me i could only get three days and i'd gotten one and i'd never get another one but he had his contacts and they explained my past and they were like oh this good stuff and and i got a month so i i knock on the door at carious i feel like i feel a little like uh alice in wonderland or something and and sort of my mentality right i'm going back and just like i'm just gonna soak it all in and i feel guided the whole time and unlike most people i didn't have to register what monastery I went to, what nights. I just go one of the 20 of the monastery.

1:48:48And they have a number of what they call skeets. Skeets are like miners. They're not considered monasteries. There are one or two monks there, and they're safeguarding a specific tradition or history of monathos. So for example, and I wandered and ran into these things. It's a huge peninsula if you look on a map. But I was wandering around and running these things like I was being guided. And I felt like I was, going from place to place, showing up unannounced, spending a night, going off into the woods. By the way, just as a hiker adventure, it's like one of the most wonderful places on the planet.

1:49:18So I ended up at St. Ann's Key, which is where St. Ann's named in honor of Mary's mother, Ann. I didn't even know that historical fact at that time. Now later, I would, many things, so I got into biblical archaeology and lived in the Middle East. I got into all of this stuff. And just as an aside, I didn't just do biblical archaeology of meaning Christian. I did Old Testament, Judaism, Islam. Did you try to find certain relics? Oh, I tried to find all kinds of... But anyway, at St. Anskeet, they claim to have her bones, some of her bones or whatever. So, I mean, I'm kind of fascinated with that stuff too.

1:49:56And then the next day, I take off from there. I said, well, I've been introduced to Mary's mother. That would be something she would want. So I take off from there and I go down the coastline. I catch a boat, go around the corner, the horn of Monothos. And I end up at this bottom of this pier with a big walk up the side of a mountain. And coincidence, right? Coincidence is this monk walks by with the donkey. He was going to go up there, little monk, and I got my big backpack and stuff. I'm there a month. I got a big backpack, one backpack for the month, but that's, you know, I got everything in it.

1:50:30And he goes, hey, why don't you take my donkey to the top of the mountain? I said, this poor donkey, you sure you want to do it he goes who he's used to it so the guy just slaps him in the rear and off we go and i'm sitting straddling this donkey up this cliff afraid like i wouldn't want to let the monk down i was afraid i was going to go off the side and off the into a cliff and abyss you know it's that kind of a thing and then it starts raining and it's getting very steady donkey just up the mountain get to the top of the mountain there's nobody there are no pilgrims there's nobody there. I walk into the entrance of the skeet, and this guy comes out, greets me, a young monk, probably in the 30s.

1:51:07He's the guy, caretaker there. And he goes, well, let me tell you this history of this skeet. It's called the Skeet Kaflosovakia, Kasasovakia. I said, well, that's hard to say. It's a mouthful. He goes, yeah, this is named in honor of one of the saints we have here, St. Cophonus, who was known as Maximus the Monk. He was not, not Odeus, Maximus. And he was known as a flying monk and he burned his huts and he had these miracles and they were sightings of him flying. I almost lost, I mean, I lost, not lost, it's not the right expression, but I was, had a like gasping for air just at the thought.

1:51:50I hadn't made this up. so this had a this had a historical connection and i was there now normally you could go a month at a month off because you never run into this place but here i was standing right at the front door so to speak well you were you were meant to have that run in well by now i'm not doubting things like that you can take by the way and i don't want to people go now think everything that happens to them is not by chance and but you also have to be attuned to the possibility things aren't coincidence it's not believing everything is not a coincidence it's getting the right being able to make a right judgment of when things aren't just coincidence yeah i think discernment is yeah viewing patterns and synchronicities as right possibly very meaningful and being attuned to them but not always like not always taking them at face value and but i mean yeah you could literally right now google maximus katsikovia and this is this flying monk from mount athos and he was known for burning his huts and so it's it is fascinating that you went back in time not having any you had no context no idea and then you you find real historical corroboration for this through happenstance and this is just online like people can search this open source That's pretty remarkable and interesting.

1:53:09Do you think this was, you know, people talk about like past life regressions. Do you think this was like a past life for you or? Well, I haven't really thought of that. I don't think of, I don't say, I don't believe in reincarnation, but nor do I reject it. I just, I mean, I don't know. I do have a fairly strong discipline in submitting everything we've talked about to a high degree of scrutiny. to the point where, and you and I have talked about this, where sometimes I'm reticent to say the full, to provide the full effect of what I think I've learned or what I experienced because I don't want to, the one thing I can't do is misstate any of this because that judgment comes down on me from God.

1:54:01Yeah. And God knows. So you go through all this trouble to tell a story about your devotion to God and how you fulfill your destiny as being to fulfill God's will and do the right thing and do right by people, which is what it all boils down to, really does. I can't misspeak on that. So I'm not going to inflate or add to an experience. So the idea of like, I love exploring with you. I'm just being careful for your listeners and others. We could talk about that over a beer or something. I'd go way farther. I don't know. I think there's evidence out there that's like all the things, all the phenomena you research, Jesse, it should all be researched.

1:54:43We should be very chery of drawing conclusions to things that we don't have really solid evidence for, but nor should we be so respectful of conventional wisdom and science that we don't explore it. And you should also give yourself the grace to speculate. A, everybody has a game of telephone they're playing in their mind where they don't remember anything accurately that's ever happened to them one-to-one perfectly. But also the ability to speculate, which I know you do. Oh, I do, I do. And the thing about these experiences that I've described is that they do form a pattern, and the pattern becomes a major part of their authentication, you know, as being genuine.

1:55:28Truth-related things, not truth-seeking, rather than self-focused or self-fulfilling. I think part of the dreams at Monathos that I experienced was a necessary part of my own faith-based development. The more you discuss or try to convey a belief in God, the more you have to remove yourself as the object of your intentions. This is one of the most important things I can say. If you're one of the apostles who followed, and I'm not, I'm not putting myself on any level with the people I'll describe, you have to be willing to be a martyr to pull that truth forward and become part of human history.

1:56:16Because God needed, Christ needed them to go out as they did all over the world in the way they did. And they needed, in a way, one of the proofs they were willing to do is lay down their own lives for the truth. and it's easy to say lay down your life for the truth but you know it's a harder thing to do it and the other thing is to not do it for their own benefit because you can even lay your life down for the truth because you think it's to your benefit but it's not even your goal at some point you try to eliminate yourself the the object of the paragraphs i wrote of my time at monathos in my dream i tried to be very very careful to describe the essence of what i was experiencing in the dream, which was this process of shedding myself.

1:57:01It's the reason when I read Meister Eckhart or somebody like that, he talks about looking down at God, not up. It's a psychological thing, you know, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The more you can remove yourself from any honor or glory in faith. So the closer, the more responsibility God will give you, if that makes sense, to promote the faith, because it can't be about you. And there's a, yeah, well said. There's a Yale professor, he's very well respected, a religious studies professor named Carlos Ayer. He wrote a book called They Flew, and it's all about flying saints and monks. and St. Joseph the Divine, St.

1:57:44Joseph of Cupertino is probably the most famous example. I think he was 16th century. You have Teresa Vila who also seemed to experience, you know, bilocation and all these sort of other paranormal things. Even St. Francis of Assisi, by some accounts, might have levitated. And so this is actually, and this guy went into this research thinking, oh, you know, this must have been written about sort of historically in this sort of metaphorical way. And he came out of it being like, no, there's enough eyewitness testimony around these flying saints to call it history. And it's well beyond the threshold of evidence we'd need to say that the War of 1812 was fought or whatever.

1:58:25and and he i think he truly believes that and you know i have a friend named diana pisolka is a religious studies professor at unc wilmington she's gone very deep on saint joseph of cupertino and she has gone through a lot of his files and she agrees with that so and it's it's across like you said it's across different religions so maybe this is a real phenomenon where you do shed the baggage of individual ego and you you become one with god and you and you fly there's even in fact jeffrey kripal who's a religious studies uh professor at rice university in houston he was giving a lecture on flying saints at mit oh wow and a guy who i've met actually who's run runs revolutionary technologies at skunkworks it's their most advanced r &d division obviously of Lockheed Martin, and he's running their most advanced R &D division of Skunk Works.

1:59:22He attended the lecture and was very interested in flying saints. That's so great. It's interesting. That's so great. Yeah. Well, I don't think there's any question that once you start believing in certain mystical experiences, either because you've experienced them yourselves or you've heard such compelling tales. I read Virgin Mary, which I didn't know, as I stress a lot, really the history of those appearances. Now, of course, I sort of study them to look at the similarities, to hear the different descriptions, see how close they were to mine. And then what's very reassuring is I see sort of so many similarities and commonalities.

2:00:02But the point is to your explaining, yeah, you got to be willing to believe all kinds of manifestations, what I would call the holy, meaning things that are not of human construction, whether it's our minds or even what we call the laws of physics. They come from something else. What's the physics of that or where is that? The where might even be, you know, not a real question because it may not be anywhere in that sense. We understand location, right? Because what's location outside of distance and motion? And it's really nothing, right? So is it over, under, or aside? I'm sure it's relevant.

2:00:39But then you're getting closer to all the mystics. Because when they get together, I've read some really cool stuff, and I'd love to be in one of those gatherings. When Merton used to have them in Asia, and you had Buddhist mystics, and you had Islamic mystics and poets. Hafiz, for example, one of my favorite, talking about his love of God. And the heretics who were burned and things for going too far with things that were mystical, they couldn't help themselves because they were just devoted to the truth. Their crime is always, which is why Elijah was sought in half, is speaking truth to people who don't want to hear it.

2:01:21Or sounding enigmatic because their prophecies or what they see in the future don't accord with the conventional wisdom of the day. that's usually the problem. So is there some version of that you think you have some truth that from all of these mystical experiences you've come back with that the average person might have kind of an allergic reaction to, or might not want to hear might be an uncomfortable truth. Well, I think, I think frankly, an average person is probably uncomfortable all of this. Yeah. Right. I mean, let's be honest. Right. And, and it's the idea, well, who do you think you are?

2:01:54It starts with things like that. It's, and it's, The mistake, of course, is over-interpretation. Because I've realized also, this is just something I've learned, because I continue to occasionally have enigmatic dreams. I don't have anything as vivid as in the past. In fact, with age, it's fewer and fewer. When I was living in the Middle East, I once went to my Jesuit priest friend, a friend more than a spiritual advisor, and said, I just don't know what my purpose is anymore. now that I'm not meeting the Virgin Mary. I said, I don't want to sound like I should be meeting Virgin Mary, but I sure miss it.

2:02:33And he goes, well, have you tried praying to her? I said, well, I don't really pray to the Virgin Mary. I feel her presence. But I pray to God, and I pray to Christ. That's it. I don't pray to other people or other things. He said, well, you can pray, but don't get hung up on the Word. You can interact. You can talk. And so I asked. I said, well, you know, Mary, what's my Why am I here? Like, why am I in the Middle East? I had the sense I was praying or thinking that there's a reason I'm here. And then you brought me here, because why would we be here? And I was spending all my time in five years in the Middle East, 2011 to 16, spending all my time on the road.

2:03:14I did biblical archaeology. I went on tour. I went all over everywhere many times over. Then later on, you know, in Saudi Arabia, et cetera. And I said, there's got to be a reason for this. So I used to say, just tell me so I know what I should expect kind of thing. And got back kind of a, again, nothing verbal or just an answer, which was, you're here to be here. And it put me at ease. It was the idea, okay, this is almost like, I don't need to overthink this. I think in other messages, she says to you, don't strive, don't try, don't reach. this was in well 1998 was when i seven years after i met her at monothos i met her in paris met the virgin mary so that none of this discussion would be occurring if i hadn't actually met the virgin mary not and we call the apparition and i mean the virgin mary so i had a was in paris on a work trip for cia uh i was doing actually russian things i was heading up a lot of our Russian, CI's Russian activity at the time, 1998.

2:04:23And so I'm in Paris for those discussions with one other colleague. And we both went, you know, we signed up at a boutique hotel, five-minute walk from Arc de Triomphe kind of, you know, place. No, not from Arc de Triomphe, from the American embassy down in the southern part of that lane, Arc de Triomphe, down there, Hotel Creon area. And I'm in the hotel. It's a nice little room. And it had a bed with a old-fashioned hotel, really old. And it had a table in front of me and had a light switch on the wall, but small room, typical French style. And as I went to bed, thinking nothing in particular except maybe my last thoughts before going to sleep was going through my notes in my mind of what we were going to raise the next day.

2:05:12And as I like to joke, I didn't have any weird food or anything else. And went to sleep and immediately was there, like in one of those dreams again. And I knew it right away, but it was a dream. I knew I was dreaming. So I'm by a river bank. So I'm thinking of the river dream from way back, which was a more raging river. This is a nice, gentle almost stream type river and i'm sitting at a river bank of grass lush grass it's beautiful day again balmy nice weather i'm sitting on the top of the little little mound that goes in goes down into the stream and there's nobody around and i'm just thinking just relaxing and then an old woman comes dressed in a brown uh brown cloak with a hood up and sits almost within touching distance but just outside my reach and sits there and stares looks ahead too and i didn't want to disturb her so i didn't like introduce myself or say anything i just thought uh maybe wait for her to say hi or something i won't do it and so we're just sitting there and then it starts sprinkling and it was the sun stayed up the sun didn't go away so i thought it's just a little sprinkle when the sun's out and it's as it's hitting my skin i remember hitting my arm and hands first i see brown like oozing brown dirt and i thought wow this is really kind of strange and then i looked at see what reaction the woman was having to this strange rain.

2:06:48And at that time, she turned towards me, and I felt this kind of ease. I felt really at ease, and I fell kind of backwards, almost like, whoa, into her arms. And then I realized it was the Virgin Mary. And I thought, at that moment, I thought, okay, it's a dream, and I think this rain is like, I don't know, purifying me or something. I just had that weird thought. So then I wake up. So I wake up in my room and I get up to turn on the light because I need to clear my head. You know, it was very jarring. It was very jarring in a nice way, but very jarring. How'd you know it was the Virgin Mary in the dream?

2:07:33I just knew it then. You just knew it. I just knew that was the Virgin Mary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unlike the other things I said. Where you weren't as sure. Where I wasn't as sure. this, I knew right away, this was a Virgin Mary. Because I had had the one experience, too, in Portugal, where I met the Virgin Mary, but not in the flesh and in the mind kind of thing. So this was like completely normal to me now. The dream, that I would have a dream like this. It was not no longer some, maybe what all this was, was preparation, right? Because all along the way, I was getting more and more used to the idea that this wasn't strange.

2:08:03None of this was strange. This was all part of a sort of a process in a way. so i get up on the from the chair i hit my shin i forget i hurt my shin bone as i got up and that's how i kind of knew i was awake and then i saw this like like we're sitting in a room here was in that corner coming from the top of the corner a light coming down like this radiant light and thomas merton described the light better than i could when i read it in one of his books because he had some of these experiences. It was a light so bright that it bore no resemblance to visible light, if that makes sense. So it didn't shine.

2:08:45You'd have to look away from it. It was very bright. And it came and sat straight in front of me when I was standing up. I was still standing up where the curtains are, like right across from me when I'm standing there. And off the ground was the full image of the Virgin Mary. Wow. In your room? In my room. Wow. So she was in the dream, and then she comes into your room. Yeah, and I knew, as I was standing there, I specifically had the realization, clear, absolute realization, this is not a dream. In fact, I kind of pinched myself. This is reality as opposed to, and the dream must be preparation.

2:09:28what happens next so she's in your room she's in my room and then i i don't have any conversations but i can read her mind or she can read my mind or vice versa there's an exchange there's communication going on at a non-verbal level and it's very intense i'm feeling combination you know, at the one time, a rushing sense of grief that she's feeling at the same time, the hope of the message she's conveying that in the end, it will all come out fine, but there's this tremendous pain and suffering. And she said at one, like said, I knew the message clearly, got the message, write a letter to the Pope, no instructions what to write or what you've seen, seeing me, but no other specific instructions what to say or why.

2:10:20No explanation, but just write a letter to the Pope. Then I was looking for some form of greater understanding, I'd say, and she sensed that. And I think she sensed I was still shocked, in shock, right? But I went into a state of ecstasy. So I've never had that. only time in my life 71 years old that i was in a state of ecstasy i could i remember my teeth chattering i remember that i remember the sound of them going and my head going back like it was like and it was incredible it was like an i mean i had an incredible orgasm of like beyond that without a real orgasm obviously but it was like more than It was just an incredible feeling.

2:11:13The bona fides of the moment, so to speak, were right there. I mean, this is absolutely what it was. And then I sought like more of a, if I'm so graced to be here in your presence, you know, I've sent, you know, then there must be something specific you want me to do other than the letter to the Pope and that sort of thing. And then little things came out, like, for example, a sense of, tying together, there was no numbers, but I sensed that it was all related. I just sensed that it was all related to this, plus my encounter I'd had with her in Portugal where I hadn't met her, but I felt her mind and thoughts.

2:11:54She was explaining when she told me there, deliver the message, write what you see. Whatever you do, you do in sin. I wrote that down after Portugal, which was a few years earlier, said, keep all that in mind as you go forth on this mission, or you go forth to fulfill God's will. And she made it clear everything is God's will, not her will. There was a major distinction. I wasn't doing anything for her. This was all in accordance with her serving God the same way she was asking me to or anybody else. now you asked earlier i at this moment this point i had never read anything about her you know encounters with the virgin mary but i became of course a hobby student of that as well great detail but the thing that you mentioned earlier i i think she sensed that i was not losing it but like needed further reassurance in some way that i could do this because the first thing anybody has is an expectation of getting any mystical experience that's genuine is, well, why me?

2:13:02There's no reason. The answer to that is there is no reason. It's you. I wasn't being singled out because I was noble or worthy or no such reason. When Paul was on the road to Damascus and he was struck down by the light of Jesus standing over him, the light, the divine light of Jesus saying, Paul, why are you persecuting me? He turns from a person going to kill members of this Jewish sect to the leader of that sect because of the mystical experience with Christ. Without that, none of that would have happened. So I'm very well aware that these aren't only real, but they're incredible important moments in human history every time they happen to anybody to continue to gather them up.

2:13:48And as you're saying, tell, relate the story. So at the very end of the encounter, it was, you know, it's funny, time kind of like, I got lost in time. I don't remember. It was just minutes, the whole thing. I know that. Where she said, like encouragement again, this was the important part. Don't reach. God lies within you. Don't want. You have no needs. don't strive, there is no purpose. And it was incredibly important guidance because it reminded me of things I thought I knew, but then I got to get lost, right? Particularly the one of the reach. Don't go out and try, you know, it's all there.

2:14:35It's all inside you in the end. And even the experiences going on the mountain with the monks and going back in time, all that was a way of intensifying that it's here and being confident in that. Did your life change after that? Did that fundamentally change? Oh, yeah. It was a culminating moment. It was a culmination of all the dreams in a way. Because in her, the images I associated with her presence in the room, there was the idea of war and conflict and apocalyptic things. I could sense the wars and things of previous dreams all being present with her as well. So it was her great suffering, you know, particularly of women and children in war and conflict, lives being lost, that kind of level of concern and need to get people do things to minimize it or to end it or to be part of God's will in writing the course of human history.

2:15:44She visited you every seven years, three times. Is that right? So 1991, 1998, and then again, 2005. Well, then she didn't visit me in 2005, but it's one of the coincidences that ties the connections together. In 2005, I didn't have an experience with the Virgin Mary, but I found myself through the Chief of Europe at CIA. I was back in Paris, probably the first time since seven years maybe i don't know i didn't go there that often but i'm back in the same hotel creon which is two blocks from the one i was in i remember thinking this is autumn so close to where all this happened because by now i'm intensely aware and thinking and looking into what all that was meant for me and what should i do more from a practical i didn't need evidence.

2:16:31I just needed to know practically what to do now that I had these experiences. So on that particular seven years fulfillment of things was the night that John Paul II died. And it was the idea that this is related to that, the explicit idea. Of course, I had to write a letter to the Pope, and I sent that letter to the Vatican, and I got a response from the Vatican, actually. What was the response? Well, it's that His Holiness had, you know, appreciated the gift. And I suppose they send some of these things out, but it seemed like it had a personal touch to it. What did you say to the Pope? Well, I put the letter in the book.

2:17:12So the letter I sent to the Pope, I put in the book. And I want everybody to read what I said because— Go check it out. Did you say just high level? Did you say, the Virgin Mary told me to write to you? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And I put the experience, I put all the numbers in it. I mean, all the numbers are in the book because again, the idea is. The numbers from the original download you got at West Point. Yes. 747 and all the numbers, I've seen the numbers. Yeah. So if you read the letter in two pages, two and a half pages, it's a whole story in a way. I met her in Portugal. I met her in Mont-Athos and it's the same letter I shared with the Orthodox Church because it's, it's not about me.

2:17:54Yeah. I mean, it is my story, but to the extent the story serves a purpose or is relevant. So you were just relaying your experience mostly to the Vatican. So it's 2005, Pope John Paul II dies, you're in Paris. That night, yeah. Ironically, at the same spot that it's almost this like Nietzschean eternal recurrence or something. Well, that satisfies your sevens. You know, we have three sevens here. Three sevens. Yeah. Exactly. So that seems significant maybe for the numerology aspect. So you're there, you're in Paris. And then what happens as far as your third experience with the Virgin Mary? Well, the third experience preceded the first Paris.

2:18:32It was the one in Portugal. Okay. No, wait a minute. No. Gosh, I'm losing the date on that. But yeah, it was before the Virgin Mary appearance because it was in Portugal where I was encountered. her in, in, I already told you what that conversation was all about and what she relayed more guidance at that meeting. So there again, it was idea of a presence, not seeing anything, but I realized this presence is continuing and it's, I'm getting more, if you will, aware of what I should and shouldn't be doing related to, to all this. And in between all this, you know, there's. But in Paris, you see her again.

2:19:13Yeah. Yeah. And what's, what's that experience like? Well, there's only the only one time I've seen the Virgin Mary was in 1998 in Paris. Yep. But in 2005, you see her again. No. Oh, you don't see her again. Okay. Got it. Got it. No, as I've got down there, there were only one, only one. It's, it tied everything up where she appeared in a way that, you know, you examine phenomena, right? And I like to present this in various ways. One is phenomena. I have to know for my own satisfaction. I want to know, I should say. I'm not supposed to want, but I do want to know the explanation of the physiology or the reality aspect of what was she?

2:20:03Where did she come from? there has to be some where she came and went when she retreated back into the at the end she went back into the top corner of the wall and she was gone so that's an event that's a real thing we talked some about it Jesse because you do a lot of inquiring research into these subjects there's an explanation for it based in physics just like there has to be an explanation of what heaven and hell are in physics. Do you have a best explanation in physics for kind of metaphysical or spiritual experience? Well, I have one that I favor, and I'm hesitant to share it, but I want to give a direct answer to a direct question because I don't know.

2:20:46I mean, I don't know. Sure. But to me, the most sensible explanation is that things we describe as divine or part of permanent things that aren't prone to being affected by time anymore, meaning they're not in the physical universe in motion because time is a function of motion and matter, right? Mass and motion. So without those things, if you had a universe at rest, then what we call heaven and hell, God presides over everything, including our universe, including where angels might come to give us messages or how prophets get their insights because it doesn't come from our universe. It doesn't come from the Big Bang universe.

2:21:28It can't come. The idea, I think if the great thinkers like Thomas Aquinas, and you pick your favorite, pondering the theological basis of God, even someone like Leibniz, a mathematician who said God has to create the best of all possible worlds, which is one I love because I think he's absolutely right. But that's because God isn't in our world. God, to be perfect, to be great, to be everything we ascribe, including indivisible, so massive we can't even contemplate it. it can't be rooted in the big bang universe emotion because everything in our universe is relative so it's like there's an alternative universe that's at rest that's more or a universe that i don't know i use the word alternative well that perfectly valid i'd say a universe that lies beyond or above or in which our universe is just a small part and you're saying the big bang universe because that is the proverbial kind of, you know, first prime mover event that scientists now herald as, you know, definitely true, that then kind of deterministically kind of, you know, you get this entropy from there and then you end up with this, you know, what a lot of scientists would now say this happy accident of, you know, our Earth and the world and the universe as it is.

2:22:46And you're saying that there is something next to that or outside of that? Well, the only explanation I can come up with, which is, you know, I'm embarrassed almost to say these profound things when there are so many scientists and physicists and philosophers. But, I mean, the simplest way I think of it, it came to me kind of as an insight, as a possibility, was sitting in my porch with screens all around my porch and picturing the Big Bang for the first time in my life. I'm God. I'm sitting in my chair. and picturing the Big Bang as being a ripple in that space-time in that room in the corner of the room, just a little ripple.

2:23:21It starts with a little tear in the corner and just goes, spans out. And you're God, you're looking over at that, but to you it's just a ripple. Everything we take as the ultimate reality and the accumulation of all things is just possibly a very small sideshow occurring in a big room. Is the implication of the title of your book, a state of mind that your mind can get to this universe at rest this timeless universe yes and so the the clues because it's not completely just a stab in the in the dark of the big room it's as much as to say you have to have an explanation of how people can reliably this doesn't just happen to a few people this has happened throughout his human history being able to see into the future and and sometimes claim to go into the past so there must be a way of if you will overcoming time which means time can't be an absolute in our equation you have people like einstein saying time is but an illusion which harry hiller said to me in my book when i went to monothos and sure enough he proved it was an illusion because i kept going back in time so in a way the dream was a manifestation of a very basic potential truth which is time is just a an aspect of space time that we create in the big bang because we're all in motion.

2:24:40There's nothing not in motion. But who is to say that there's not a universe at rest? Because I don't know how you can have something called everlasting life. If Christ went somewhere, he didn't go somewhere in a big bang after crucifixion and resurrection. He didn't stay in our earthly realm, even if we extend that meaning to the whole universe as we understand the universe. You know, it stands to reason then that every species, intelligent species in the universe would be beholden to this rule, not just humans. Yeah. I, you know, question a lot of people who are more fundamentalist in their beliefs on these things.

2:25:22If Christ is, you know, immortal, like, where is he now? Like he should be on earth. And they often talk about like an ascension body, you know, that they're, they exist in maybe the ascension body is where this other sort of universe lies or something? I don't know. I'm speculating here. Well, I mean, I think you got another clue that's a really fascinating one. And I don't want to overstate any of these, but they're just things that come to mind. The transfiguration of Christ, which for many people, they don't know what that is. There was a period after crucifixion where he appeared to the disciples in a form where he wasn't yet in heaven or wasn't at earth.

2:25:57And that's where he had the famous Doubting Thomas putting Jesus saying, if you out that it's me because you're not supposed to be here. Put your finger in my wounds. And it is, and he's called Doubting Thomas. But if you look at that beyond as a religious kind of story, you know, it has to be true again. If they witnessed Christ in some form, then what is that? How would you explain that in physics? I think you can. I think it's a deliberate staging of before reaching the next period. I absolutely believe, as a result of my religious experiences and growth, that we don't die when we die. We just go past—this better word would be a passage.

2:26:40There's a passage from this state. I think if you truly believe in Christ, you have to believe that. As I always say, it doesn't matter how often you go to church and how much you donate to this or that. What matters is, do you really believe the heart and soul of what the faith is about, which is there's life after death. So once you posit there is life after death, you're not really trying to determine what is that, like Dante's stages of hell, which is kind of fun to think about. People deserve the different levels of hell. That kind of explains why. You're a little sinner, you go here. You're a big sinner, you go down here.

2:27:17But it's all silly, right? It's silly. The idea of hell as a place is silly. Now, the idea of hell as being the absence from God, being separated from God. Ah, now we're getting somewhere because God doesn't exist in the Big Bang world. God exists beyond it. So the closer you get beyond the Big Bang world to a world not in motion. so maybe when we die we we pass to a world at rest we we pass to a world where time no longer exists which then creates consequences of what you've done in your life because you're suddenly aware of them if you're we can't even accurately go back and recreate any moment of our time much less replicate it again it happens we have memories of it and all our memories are fading all of them but there is a place where all the memories are the events themselves, if that makes sense.

2:28:13All the events are occurring always as they occurred in what we would describe as this year, this place, this time, because in that world, none of the time exists. That's all. It's a very simple concept. And all it presupposes is that physicists have told me where we've discussed this, and I've learned a lot from good physicists, um especially young ones i find that were really into this subject like you are um they're really interested in in constructing ways of thinking of metaphysics in ways that aren't just traditional physics where if you can't prove it experimentally forget it yeah no of course not yeah that's that can't be true like if something is phenomenologically real or experientially real it's not fake because you can't experimentally reproduce it in a lab like that's absolutely It's a really ridiculous thing to say that is the epitome of the hubris of enlightenment.

2:29:07But time in physics is also extremely weird. You know, general relativity is a theory of gravity. But even in general relativity, you have time dilation. You know, you have, you know, time moves based on, you know, the speed of the observer, which is really weird. Gravity, you know, itself is really weird, you know, on a macroscopic scale. you know you basically are justifying the weakness of gravity with with dark matter which seems like this undetectable mathematical placeholder and time and gravity are kind of super linked you know the the more you you get closer to a kind of a dense gravitational source like a black hole time seems to slow and so you know if gravity is is kind of weird you know and then gravity is obviously weird on a you know it's irreconcilable with the other forces on a quantum level and then time is also on a quantum level it's taken as this sort of classical classical axiom and something like frodinger's equation so it's just time seems like this not super well understood thing like at most maybe you can think of it vis-a-vis the movement of bodies on a macroscopic scale and on a microscopic scale maybe the oscillations of an electromagnetic wave or something right but it's it's you know it's the most commonly used noun in the english language but it always has to be defined with respect to other things.

2:30:29And so it seems a little bit like the eye seeing the eye or like that David Foster Wallace, you know, Kenyan commencement speech where he's, you know, this is water. And it's like, if you're a fish talking to another fish and you're in water, we're all in Zeno's arrow of time. You can't really get out of that sort of epistemological framework. But simultaneous to that, you have all these interesting thinkers in physics, like you cure Aronoff or Kramer where there's like a, the present is a handshake between the future and the past, which is, it's a legitimate interpretation of kind of quantum mechanics.

2:31:06And, um, you know, you have ideas of retro causality and the future sort of causing the past or the, the present being constricted and the, there being probable futures and probable fast, probable past. Schrodinger talked about, you know, if you measure a particle and it's present, you might affect its past. You know, they're all, it's, it's just it's way trippier than sort of meets the eye i even think you know even position momentum super positionality spooky action at a distance which einstein grappled with till the end of his life you have spooky action over time as well where you know looks if a double slit experiment is performed in the future it looks like the measurement of that double slit experiment is affecting someone that's done the present or the past which is crazy right and so you know it's almost like quantum mechanics implies, you know, people say it implies, you know, there's an issue with position and momentum measurements.

2:31:59That's Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But there's also level of energy and time, quantum indeterminacy as well. And what if the Schrodinger's equation, which is more position and momentum based, what if time superpositionality is causing the position and momentum superpositionality. And just like, you know, you can place Newton within Einstein, but Einstein better describes Newton than Newton. What if you could place Schrodinger within some time agnostic modality equation that describes Schrodinger better than Schrodinger? You know, we don't know the answer to these questions. No, and the hardest part of exploring them is separating the influence of scale from the actual reality.

2:32:49So because we are at the scale we are, everything we measure is measured proportional to our scale. And we can obviously go beyond visual and we have lots of ways to measure things other than our senses. But what we can't avoid is our scale. So if you go up in scale to cosmic level or down to subatomic levels, you've got the same problem. Your ability to measure anything gets less and less. And then your worst ability to measure anything is when time changes on you and you get into black hole physics or whatever, where suddenly you realize mass goes infinite and time stops. But that's a clue. That's another clue.

2:33:34The idea, again, of time being a variable that we take is in a way an absolute reality, even though it changes, but the existence of time I'm talking about isn't necessarily real. It's real for us in the Big Bang world. But if you stop everything, which we don't contemplate because we can't, at least in science, contemplate a world at rest. So why don't we, we'll kind of take a page from the book, so to speak, and can weave in and out of some of these more mystical experiences and your more prosaic life. What were some of your early missions? So I would say in the early years, there was no mission there other than basic conclusions I drew.

2:34:19Like, okay, I'm drawn to Russia because it's the action. There's no better place to be in the CIA than the belly of the beast. So I had those kinds of connotations early on, But nothing explicitly linked to religion or faith or apocalypse or nuclear weapons or any of that. It was very just a kind of basic career until the things I described that happened later. Yeah. And so you have a lot of story. I mean, you were almost overrun, right, in the Yeltsin coup. So there's this attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin. 1993, correct. 1993. And I came back. And you're the Moscow station chief for the CIA.

2:34:59And it seems like you're kind of, you know, in this very dire situation, they end up having they end up helping you. Right. Is that is that right? That's correct. I mean, it's one of those things where the idea of a liaison, we call liaison relationship when we cooperate with other countries, intelligence on the face of it, there was nothing really to cooperate between the CIA and the KGB. You read all the story. They're all true. As we say, there's a lot of blood in the water. We kill, you know, not kill, but their agents, our agents end up dead, killed, executed sometimes, imprisoned. So it's a very ugly history.

2:35:35And we weren't going to be friends. But the idea was when I laid out the first CIA directors that ever went to Moscow for, to visit, even visit Moscow, much less deal with the Russians as partners. It was Bob Gates was the first when he was CIA director. And I'll never forget that trip in 19, except the fall of 1992. He came there and laid the groundwork by giving a great toast. We had dinner. Russians love toast. They love dinners. And you got to win. You got to be good at the whole heart of toasting. And so I learned a lot about that. But his essentially was around the theme of we're not friends.

2:36:12We're not here because we're ever going to love each other and be real partners. We're here because our countries demand that we put aside some of our differences and cooperating meaningful ways for the security of our countries. That was when Yeltsin had just emerged. There was the hope then, right? But it was a realism he attached to it that was very important, needed to make it real. Because otherwise you would have been pretending and playing games, which there's no point to play games if you're arch enemies. You just do what you need to do. So a year later, it all culminated in this coup in Moscow when hardliners tried to overthrow Yeltsin.

2:36:49But the one thing it showed is that at a time of extreme need, we could work with the Russians because we had a common interest to keep Yeltsin in power. Russian intelligence decided they weren't ready to overthrow Yeltsin through force and violence. They ended up doing that. This is 93. It was eight years later, of course, when Vladimir Putin came to power legally, the right way, if you want to call it that. And the Russians don't like coups and violence any more than we would like in our own country. So we worked together and it was astonishing. I didn't know when I first called Russian intelligence chief and said, hey, we need help.

2:37:28We need you to protect us. It looks like we're going to be taken hostage. When I was leading a detachment of people outside the embassy and coming under fire from coup plotters, snipers and things, I called them for help and I didn't expect any help. In fact, it was the ambassador at the time, ambassador Tom Pickering. He's the one who I called him in desperation and say, there's no way you can help us, is there? Because of the embassy, everybody in the embassy was underground in the embassy compound, except for us. We're out doing reporting and things like that to tell Washington what was going on.

2:38:02Otherwise, they wouldn't have known anything going on at the time. All the news networks had shut down. And you end up like holed up in an abandoned building or something? Well, we holed up. Everything was abandoned, but we were in the ambassador's residence. Okay. which we opened up and used just as a command post. I think that started as five of us. I think we ended up with seven or eight. I put the whole, like, all the details in that. I was a little surprised. Again, it was nice to see they had no problem with telling that story. Because I think it's important. The purpose of the story and the purpose of me describing it is that, you know, intelligence is almost always unexpected.

2:38:38And its greatest value is proven in the most difficult times. pro and con. And you can't fear or avoid the difficult circumstances. You have to kind of run into them and embrace the difficulties. So they ended up sending a team to protect us from being taken hostage. And the only rules we had, I'll never forget the phone call from the director. He said, okay, Rolf, there's very extraordinary circumstances. We're going to send you a team heavily armed guys to try to keep you from getting captured. But here's the deal. One is do not commingle. Our guys and your guys are separate. We'll do our work outside your perimeter or whatever, so don't mix.

2:39:25And he goes, if you are stormed or they get in a firefight or whatever happens, die in your separate foxholes. And he didn't have to explain why. Because however that day turned out in Russian history, didn't want to leave any evidence of who would work with whom along the way because it was in doubt i the one thing i learned personally in a way that helped me even with the spiritual stuff later missus mystical experiences is history is not inevitable history isn't history comes together because of the decisions people make and you're experiencing it live like in a war or in a coup or in a change of government, you realize it could go that way if these things are done and goes that way if another thing is done.

2:40:12You've been in the room with Vladimir Putin. What's your impression of him? Well, it wasn't as extensive as so many of the people, you know, obviously in the U.S. government who have had a lot of interaction with him. So I don't want to put it on. So I just happen to have a fairly unique one-time thing where we met in his first foreign trip. I was in Norway. I'm Norwegian-American, as I said, so it was a great honor for me to go back to Norway. And I happened to be there. Again, one of these things I thank God a little bit for the privilege of to be there during the last meeting of what was called the Oslo Peace Accord process.

2:40:48It was started in Oslo, Norway, and now was culminating. So this was in the November 1993 93 no no 1998 1998 the last meeting oh okay and uh the last meeting was one amazing no I had no role of any appreciable nothing I was there as as literally a appreciation gift something I knew the prime minister and other people in the Norwegian government they said invite me and my wife to the to the dinner but at the dinner was President Clinton came, of course, Vladimir Putin's first foreign trip as prime minister. And then, of course, the main ones, Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak, who was the prime minister of Israel at the time.

2:41:40Now, I had never met Arafat, Ehud Barak. I had met Clinton just, you know, kind of like formalistically, and Putin. And I got to see them all in this kind of as an observer vantage point And if anything, anybody would say, well, who's this guy? Because everybody there was more important than me, literally everybody at the dinner. But that was great. There was no pressure. I could literally just observe Putin and others. And it was just amazing. There was a moment after dinner when everybody got up and mingled, went to the king's library to visit the castle in his library to have cognac and chocolates.

2:42:17And everybody's walking there. And I'm going to catch everything on the way. and I see Clinton literally grab Arafat in the middle of the room. And Clinton was, whatever one thinks of him politically, that's not what I'm talking about here. He had a presence, right? Oh, everybody says that. Everybody says the most charismatic guy. He just had a natural charisma. He didn't do anything. He just stands there, right? Sure. So he grabs Arafat, who also in his weird way had a charisma too, a presence, right? Because he's iconic, head wrap, and et cetera. And he says to Arafat, take the deal, Yasser.

2:42:50take the deal it's your last best chance for peace and i remember listening to that thing wow so like important but i just heard i thought it's very important yeah and i just felt so depressed as i knew it was no no no you know foreshadowing or future i just like instinctively my gut was all this is not going to turn out well yeah yeah and of course it's turned out terribly well it's turned out terribly i mean partially yasser arafat would speak out of both sides of his mouth and he would speak to his own population, say certain things and then speak to the West and say other things. But also Yitzhak Rabin also, you know, taken out by his own, you know, people and Haredi, you know, Jews who are just really extremists and wanted, you know, to cede nothing at all costs.

2:43:37And, you know, I think in many ways that whole the Middle East, you know, conundrum, quagmire has been has been so stuck for so long and maybe we you know maybe we've made a little bit of progress in the last year but it's been so so stuck uh because of kind of extremists on on both sides and because in many ways the incentives of the leaders are to like actually maintain the conflict yeah so unfortunate it is it is it's a factory of yeah well my my my then watching putin just to point of your your question was i already had the impression that he would be more consequential than I thought he might at the time by any standard of reasoning or what I knew about him.

2:44:22I, but I just had, he had the presence too. He was boring, the gray man on the corner, but that in itself impressed me because he wasn't trying to fit in. He wasn't trying to like speak loudly to be heard. He, he, he was way too self-assured, you know, for, for that kind of a reaction to the situation. And I respected that. I thought, okay, this guy could end up being way more of his own man than we think he might be going into that time period. One last thing, because it ties to Russia and the Middle East again. Five years earlier, 1993 again, after the coup and all that, I was meeting with the Russians.

2:44:59Yevgeny Primakov is his name. He was the head of Russian intelligence. I got to know him very, very well. We'd meet almost every week and had all kinds of discussions about everything. We talked almost like we are, Jesse, about all kinds of big subjects. And he was a guy who felt very comfortable. I thought he was a brilliant, brilliant man, actually. And he probably would have been a prime minister before, instead of Putin, in the mid-90s, after Yeltsin left, had he not passed away from health problems and old age, etc. But at the time, he was always musing with me about, what can we do to be serious people?

2:45:36There's a Russian expression, seriosny chilebek. It's the most important thing to a Russian. It can love you or hate you, but you've got to be a serious person, serious professional, serious about what you do. Don't give me bullshit. And he says, you know, we got to do something, but I can think of one thing that would be unbelievable if we could find a way to do it. I said, what's that? He said, well, you have your means, meaning CIA. We have our means, meaning the SVR, which is the foreign intelligence component of Russian intelligence. And we have them in the Middle East. So let's apply all our efforts in the Middle East where we really need something to happen to break this longstanding stalemate problem.

2:46:20Our goal will be to keep Arafat alive. Your goal will be to keep Rabin alive. And I thought it was genius. Of course, I sent it in. Everybody thought I was insane. And I never got a good explanation as to why it really wasn't even considered. Maybe you just offered it. Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, we've talked about this, you know, too, in our last interview, you know, where, you know, people always talk about a deep state. And, you know, I think clearly there is no sort of cabal in a back room smoking cigars or something. But there is, not only is it a conspiracy to say that there are all sorts of misaligned incentives when it comes to big bureaucracies.

2:47:04And that's any institution. And so, yeah, no, just going back to like, you know, why would somebody senselessly say no to a thing like that? Or, you know, I am sympathetic to a lot of the John Mearsheimer arguments as well that like, you know, we've totally reneged on Putin a million different times. And, you know, we've encroached a lot on, you know, their territory and, you know, not to at all, you know, apologize for a lot of his wrongdoings, which are very real. But, yeah, the incentives are often wrong in these organizations. Well, when you talk about people like Mearsheimer or others who try to express a different way of thinking of our policies and their impact, I mean, there's utility in those points of views.

2:47:49I don't agree with him on a lot of things, but I think he should be saying some of the things he's saying, and it's helpful. The biggest thing we habitually do wrong in terms of follow-through on policy, some of our policy ideas aren't so bad, but it's usually the huge flaws in the implementation usually. And it's not so much the underlining motives that line up with as much as people think they do with sort of deep state agendas. It's just either a mixture of incompetence or I'd say more the idea that we mirror image too much. So our biggest problem in understanding, for example, the Russians.

2:48:25Now, what I'm saying is not acceptable. It's not accepted thinking, but it's widely accepted. But some people understand it is our biggest mistake is not seeing things through their eyes. And it doesn't justify what they're doing or thinking, but it's understanding it. And if you want to know why we are where we are with the Russians, you have to understand, see the world through their eyes. It doesn't mean you accept that view or more importantly, what they do is a consequence of what they feel. But at least understand why you're there and don't be surprised about it. Isn't there a Kennan quote about understanding the Russians or something?

2:49:04It's like once you ascend to the top of the mountain, you know, you end up equally confused as to the Russian motivation or something. I'm totally paraphrasing and botching this, but there's something like that. I don't remember that, but I suspect, yeah. It's like they're always mystical, confusing. There's no way to ultimately understand what they're up to or something, which feels somewhat right. You know, the idea of a Politburo is like this, you know, concealed, sealed off, hermetically, you know, enclosed sort of organization that, you know, you can never fully sort of understand. And Putin's always keeping the people around him on his on their toes.

2:49:41And there's this really hard kind of hermeneutic game of reading the tea leaves at all times with, you know, governments like that. I think you read tea leaves and see everything as being unscrutable when you don't have any real depth in either living in the country or having enough experience with the people of the country where you can understand where they're coming from. One of the biggest mistakes we make with Russia or Xi Jinping in China or anybody for that matter, all the leaders, even some of our friendly countries, is not understanding that the country's not the leader. So the thing I'll never do is think of Russia as Vladimir Putin.

2:50:23I've read too much Russian history, philosophy, gotten into Russia. I've known too many Russians. I lived in Russia for enough years where I think of Russia first as the people, right? And then you can assess what Putin's doing. And the most important way you need to assess it is not what impact it has on the U.S., but what impact is what he's doing having on the Russian people. Now, I would make an argument that what's happening now is very damaging to the future interests of ordinary Russians. the same way I might assess what different presidents' impact has on America. I don't care so much about how the president's policies affect the stock market as I do how the president's policies affect ordinary Americans.

2:51:11So I think we have to look at foreign countries the same way. If you look at China's meteoric rise in the 20th century, you're not compelled to think of China as an enemy or a deep rival and everything that's progress in China is being antithetical to our interests. Look what they've done for the Chinese people in a remarkable period of time. That's not all good, obviously, but start from a more solid basis to understand why the leaders do what they do in their own history, traditions, culture, environments, and religion. If you look at the reason I've always said, and a lot of Russia experts disagree with me on this.

2:51:51I've always said Russia can't embrace, cannot be a democracy like the United States. The Yeltsin years were a mirage. They weren't a missed opportunity. There was never an opportunity for Russia to go West. Even when famously, you know, Peter the Great talked about Western orientation, it had nothing to do in the context we would like to ascribe it to, like he wanted to be more connected culturally, et cetera, with the U.S. Russia is what Russia is, which is a deeply orthodox, homogeneous country with a very rich history and very rich. They're very smart people. They're very educated people. And they want what they want.

2:52:31They don't want what we want. Yeah. And I think that's a big mistake of what we try to impose. Not so much our any way of controlling countries, but our idea of imposing our culture. For sure. Well, they had, you know, under Gorbachev, you know, last leader of the USSR that disbanded it. You had Glasnost and you had Perestroika and you had, you know, open minds make open markets or whatever and or open markets make open minds. Right. And I think what a lot of neoliberals sort of like miscalculated is that you'd inevitably you'd get this like opening up of markets and then, you know, you'd end up with all of the amazing things about liberal democracy in the West, you know, in both China and Russia.

2:53:16And that's just not happened at all. And like it took us a long time to, I think, update on that. You know, you're right. There's this neoconservative sort of hubris of like, you know, this would just happen on its own. And that's just not. You also have things like, you know, with Putin, I think there's this guy Vladislav Surkov. Oh, Surkov, of course. You know, this advisor who wrote this book Almost Zero. And it's like all about like performance art and how that has to play into like your, you know, how you do politics. And so I find it so fascinating. you know that whole that whole world it's just so different or even like i think this is to a true you know alexander dugan who i don't think he's i don't think he's that close with putin actually like i think people think he is yeah but i mean it's putin is i mean that whole world is definitely trippier than we than we you know realize like some of these guys are like they're more esoteric than you know we might realize and so it's like how do you really understand how they make decisions at all.

2:54:18Right, right, right, right. Yeah. No, I think it's a little like our previous discussions on faith and mysticism and analyzing other countries and understanding what, more importantly than analyzing it, is understanding what's happening. What track are they on? What road are they on? Especially in a world where our notions of individual identity are changing through, of course, social media and the internet, our ideas of technology, or it's blowing up around us in ways we don't really understand. Now, that's affecting all of us. The cultural reaction to it is different everywhere. The thing it's testing most, in my view, is the idea of individuality and identity.

2:55:01So in a country like ours, which started at the point of our creation as a nation, the idea of very unique, historically, completely unique ideas of individual freedom and the role of individual liberty identity in a collective society where the collective part was put way down. I mean, the idea of a right, an intrinsic right to life, liberty, and not property like John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, but pursuit of happiness. Yeah. What a weird idea. Franklin came up with that, I understand, when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence. It was a change made, edit to Jefferson's original.

2:55:44That's only something Americans can come up with. It's a very Western concept. It's not even European Western. So when we're decrying and criticizing all the Europeans for being socialists, I would maintain, we have no idea what we're talking about. I've lived in most of those countries. Whatever I call that socialism, I want those pensions. We make fun of the French because I got a four-day work week. Okay, well, you know, I like the idea of universal health care. Okay, you got to wait. First thing I always, American will say about, talk about Danish health care or Norwegian, is, oh, you got to wait in line.

2:56:16Well, you got some health care, right? We're striving to try to create some normalcy around the idea that citizens also have a right to maybe some form of universal health care. We can't even agree on that, really. So that's there. Then you go further. you go to the Russians or the Chinese or pretty much anywhere in Asia, just the notion of the individual's place in society is far more collective. They're part of something. The idea of the culture, of the societal framework, is that your individual rights only go so far, and then you're part. And most people feel that. And it's not a religious-based thing where they're members of the same church, because particularly in Europe or Asia, those organized religions don't hold as much a hold on people as even they might in the United States today.

2:57:08But it's the idea that society itself was constructed with this idea of collective responsibility. So when the Russians drew up the philosophers, the great Russian philosophers, I call the religious philosophers, working with the political scientists after the breakup of the Russian Empire, the Tsar, which first yielded the Soviet Union and the Bolshevism, They were drawing up a system of government that would resolve the question of how can you have a true democracy that wouldn't be corrupted by special interests and foolish leaders who would be not up for it. You need more of a Plato's Republic, a republic that was based on people having roles, which we all have collective responsibilities.

2:57:51And you have distinct classes like Plato's guardian class that manage the government, et cetera. responsibility is conferred to individuals within their collective obligations not just and we really struggle with that we've struggled that for decades but it's really coming to a head i think in a way where every country is sorting through that but the bias in most country is much more towards limiting individual freedom for the collective good yeah yeah well does that make sense to you? No, it makes total sense. Well, if you look at like Marxist dialectical materialism, the individual has very little place at all.

2:58:29It's very, you know, the individual can go through a meat grinder. And as long as the byproduct is social progress on the other side, whether it's, you know, Mao's great leap forward or, you know, any of the Stalin's initiatives, you know, send people to the gulag, like that's, that's okay in their, in their model. And so, you know, know, I think human suffering is inevitable in that model, and there are no individual rights, and it's all about this sort of collective sense of progress. And I think that is very alien and foreign to somebody thinking about Western liberal democracy. I also, you brought up Plato.

2:59:04Plato himself, you could think of him as, you know, he's a really obviously deep, interesting thinker. I think he had all these kind of interesting ideas about ontological truth and metaphysics, you know which maybe modern scholars would disagree with me on or something but um also if you read the republic like it's sort of like this proto-fascist book it's like you're separating the kids from the adults and like you know you have this guardian class that's like pretty hierarchical and stratified and you know it's it's it's not at all like a non-violent you know like egalitarian like you know book at all but um 40 was one of the numbers that you got in your download as well.

2:59:43And something very interesting happened to you at the age of 40, another sort of metaphysical experience. Do you want to talk about what happened to you on the train? Yeah. So I've been, this is between some of the Virgin Mary things. And of course, many years after the introduction to not only mystical experiences, but what they might mean in terms of my work, my role in life, and trying to reconcile the sacred. So I was just on a normal, I'd say, everyday espionage travel trip in Europe from Zurich to Vienna on the night train. And I'm sitting on the train. I carried my Bible with me, which was engraved and glossy, my full name on the cover.

3:00:32We all got this Bible when we were in our first year at West Point. And I'd kept it over the years. But I have a superstition. I have to carry it with me everywhere I travel. So I stick it in my box. Then I have to have a cover story for it because many of the times I traveled over the years, I'm an alias person. I've got a cover story. I've got even phony passports and things that the agency provided. Right. So I may have to explain who this Ralph Maltlarsen friend of mine is. It's almost a little bit like the odious maximus story. You know, I have to come up with a reason why I'd have this guy's Bible with me.

3:01:09So I opened the Bible and I had a pencil there that I just used to mark, you know, something. And I just usually just pick out something random, read most times 10, 15 minutes. I wasn't someone who spent pouring—I don't pour over biblical texts or Bibles or things and never did then and now. Plus, I'm very distracted by my mission. I'm going to Vienna to exchange documents and going on the next day. And so I look up at the clock. There are very few people on this particular train in my car, so I'm not paying attention to them. I look up at the clock that's in the center, the Swiss train, right?

3:01:46Everything's clockwork. and I look at the clock and the hands, the second hand is starting to like get heavy. It's like, and I'm feeling like a weight. My body's feeling heavier and heavier. I feel like something's like overwhelming me, almost like I'm experiencing some sort of thing, but it's like space and time are slowing down around me. And I remember thinking that even, But I didn't say, wow, this is very strange. Is it like having an epileptic fit or something? I mean, I was really kind of worried for a minute. And then, you know, as it slowed down, my pencil I was holding, I dropped it and it just crashed onto the Bible.

3:02:33And then I just, and then it was okay. I had always said I was aware of God's presence, but I didn't really know what, not in this way. God was like there. Didn't see anything. You know, like I said, it's not a visual thing. I just was aware God was that close. Did you get a message? Well, it was, yes. But the thing about the presence that time that was different from just being aware is it was scary. It was really scary because it was like the almighty creator who's also personal. I mean, great minds like Thomas Jefferson could never reconcile that. He had to be one or the other. I wasn't going to reconcile it on the train.

3:03:14But it was the idea that it was not good to be in God's presence. That was my reaction to the intrusion was, whoa. I already knew he could hear, understand, interpret everything I'm thinking or will do or might do because he's way ahead of me. But this was kind of different, right? So then I did hear, it was a very definite, short, this was all very short. But this started with, I am, have, the verb was interesting. I never known it was one church. One church. So I grained that in my mind. Do not criticize my church. The old and the new are one. Just old and new. I interpreted that to be a testament, but it's old and the new are one.

3:04:07Swallow them whole.

3:04:12And finally, read it as a child. So I know that's exactly what it was because I wrote it down exactly like that. I still have that original note somewhere. Exactly that way. Because I said, that's it. And that was it. What does that mean to you? Well, I think it's pretty obvious. I didn't think it was obvious. And it really has taken years to just kind of like, in a way, it's my Sunday school in a way because I never left as a child because I learned more from this what I think it is. But the one church means, you know, don't think of a church as the various churches, Protestant, Catholic, even Buddhist.

3:04:49My church is the church of believers, whatever they call themselves. Even people who consider themselves atheists or agnostic. I mean, labels are labels. Even what you label yourself, what does God see? God sees way beyond that. So that's how I interpret that. Do not criticize my church. which is make a distinction between criticizing the sins or the crime of organized religion, which we have every right to do, from dating from the Inquisition to the Crusades, to anything you want to take your hand on. And you can get so obsessed by it, and so many people do, that you're incapable of loving God anymore, being part of this community of believers, because you associate everything with the fallen angel, right?

3:05:32And then the really cool ones for me, because I immediately reread the whole Bible cover to cover after I heard about the old and the newer one. The inspiration that gave me was to, for the first time in my life, I was 40 years old on the train, was to go reread the Bible from cover to cover just as a history. No longer, you know, is Jonah's whale really a whale? Is it a metaphor? You know, Red Sea parting? No, just read the damn thing, but read it as a child, meaning have that same receptivity to me. I've had the most—my own grandkids, like I said, I've got nine of them, but they're all—have asked me the hardest questions on religion because they just ask the most important, obvious ones.

3:06:18Where's God? Why did Jesus die for our sins? My daughter said to me when the first time she went to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and watched Jesus' cross, And she was just standing there for a long time. She was like nine years old. I said, honey, what are you thinking? She says, why did Jesus have to die for us? That's a kid reaction. But you need to kind of like recharge completely on the Bible that way. To think of it in that kind of a room. We're given this document. It's what it is. There's nothing holy about the thing itself. And there are things in there undoubtedly that are wrong.

3:06:54And it's a language. As soon as you've got a language, you get misinterpretation. interpretations, reinterpretations, everything else. But don't think about all that. It's like a lot of the other things we've talked about, Jesse, don't overanalyze it, just let it go and think, read it. And so I did. And do you think it's a coincidence that this happened at the age of 40 and that you received 40 in your dream and that, you know, it was 40 days of Jesus? I don't think it is. I don't think it's a coincidence. And 40 years in the desert for the Israelites as well. It's almost 40 years of being away from God before you experience a communion with God.

3:07:35And in your case, 40 years of maybe more nihilistic, less believing youth or something, and then you experience this Gnostic direct connection or something. Right. That's a good explanation. I can't say it's definitive, but I mean, I love your fascination with numbers. I think the really interesting thing you do is not just my numbers, but the idea of tying numbers into a deeper understanding of reality itself and how that can help us tie together disparate kind of fields that we think of as separate. One of the problems we have as human beings is when you get too deep into the specialization of different, you know, faculties, you tend to think of them all as standing alone and needing to justify themselves.

3:08:23So the number of people I've run into who can speak across various disciplines in that way to tie them together in a meaningful way, that's pretty unusual itself. You also, you have another dream, final dream we'll talk about, but you have a dream about the Order of the Broken Cross, which is this apocalyptic cult in Jerusalem. and you have to sort of fly in there behind enemy lines, be a CIA case officer and recruit some spy. And then you kind of infiltrate this order and systematically, you know, figure out what's going on with them. And then you give their coordinates or something to the West and then they end up getting bombed and they, you know, the apocalypse is sort of saved or whatever.

3:09:12Is that symbolic? Like now, after having led a long life of trying to, you know, being anti-proliferation of WMDs and, you know, going after people like Zarqawi and stuff. So do you think that in some ways you are like this, like almost like biblical prophet like character who is your mandate or your mission in life is to stave off the apocalypse? And that the instantiation of the apocalypse in the modern day is, in fact, just the proliferation of biological weapons and WMDs and that sort of thing. And that that's your kind of divine purpose, if you will. Yeah, I think I can say this in a way that doesn't sound too grandiose, but it's certainly not a personal mission that I feel I'm on, that if I don't do this, somehow we fail as a species.

3:10:05or I'm just very aware that all the work I've done, particularly in nuclear and proliferation, I've gotten into trying to stop networks from trafficking in nuclear materials and doing, which by the way, a lot of people do. And that's a lot of my solace or I take comfort in. In fact, there are a lot of really great people working on this with or without a sense of divine purpose. I mean, and I never expressed or carried into my work the divine notion of purpose that I feel because I do keep that separated. I'm a very strong believer in separation of church and state, not just as a way we think of ourselves as a country and a society, but as a principle of keeping that separate.

3:10:51I have to unite them in my mind, though. I have to reconcile them when there's conflict. I learned at West Point, duty honor country, which is a very high-minded principle and difficult to—I say it's the greatest thing West Point gave me was a sense of principle of having honor, doing your duty, and doing it with integrity, and understanding country not being the president, but country being the people and our history and what we represent. So that's almost religious, right, to do it right. And so there's not that big of a gap. But when it comes to the apocalypse and and those ideas. Yeah, I'm very aware of.

3:11:29I became very aware of it. I didn't start aware of it except through my dreams. Typically, all my dreams and the sequence of things I've described here today, Jesse, are ways of saying I was conditioned, preconditioned, prepared for both my work and my spiritual growth and growth and faith the same way. They were assets to me to have some ideas is what this was all about. And I had to connect it still. And I was sometimes reluctant to do that. It took me a long time to write the letter to the Pope that Virgin Mary told me to write, and it should have done it the next day. And there's a whole story there that I think could guide a lot of people.

3:12:12We're always reluctant maybe to do the things we know we should do. I'm no different. I'm certainly no warrior that's out in the lead of everybody in stopping the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons and proliferation. But I'm one of them. I'm there. And fortunately, there are a lot of people like me. And I think people should take great comfort that I have found that most people in public service, which is a counterintuitive conclusion to come to in today's world, are amazing people and do great things. And the best people, including a lot of the scientists in the Department of Energy and our nuclear labs, things like that, could get a lot more money not working for the government or working on the outside.

3:12:58So for them, it's like for me, it was never about money or fame or recognition or reward. And you mentioned the Department of Energy. What was your exact title there? I was the Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the Department of Energy. And you gave me this Department of Energy Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. And it says, we keep the real secrets. And it's a little gray alien. Now, as you know, and we've spoken about this, I've run into all these connections between UFOs and aliens. and, or I don't know if they're aliens, but some sort of like non-human presence and the DOE.

3:13:46And you mentioned actually like in your book that there was some sort of like hazing ritual brief that you got, is that right? Yeah, because it's such an obvious thing to pull a thread on. We like to do a thing, which I was introduced to, I didn't create it, which we took a director level. So Deputy Secretary of Energy was involved and several other bigwigs and me as the director of intelligence. And we take a newbie. The newbie would be a political appointee, very high level, maybe a deputy secretary or assistant secretary or some level who had just signed up and gotten their clearances and were taking their jobs.

3:14:22And we bring them down to the bowels of the Department of Energy where some of the most secretive things are guarded. And you know where those are, kind of everybody whispers when they come by. And you pull them into this back room like Maxwell Smart in the old TV shows, going back through layer and layers of secrets back into the vault and you get back into the deepest vault in the doe and you bring them back so the person's back there and they're already and you have a briefer and you have about six seven people seniors sitting around a table looking very grim and the hazing ritual is to explain to them that we really did have aliens uh we covered aliens one was injured one was not we got the alien techno space technology of through through roswell you know etc and it was a real thing.

3:15:05And the briefing is so good, it's got all the real DOE, what we call tickets, you know, we call secret access program, SAPs they're called, and things on this to make it seem as real as possible. And then the briefer goes through and has a very convincing story that he is now this person that's come in, is being brought into this ultimate secret access program, SAP, ultimate one, And as a member of a very rare team that transcends all the different presidencies and parties, because you can't obviously brief every president coming in on this, you got to be very discerning and only bring in people when they can contribute.

3:15:43And you're going to be part of the expedition that goes to, we hired you. In fact, you were hired for this job, but you're really going to go on this expedition to this planet. they've helped us develop the technology to travel to their location and greet us when we get there. So it's got all this. And there's, you know, obviously there's corpses on tables and stuff to make this all look. At what point do you tell them it's a joke? Well, somebody cracks up and somebody can't keep it in any longer. We betray our own. And the Secretary of Energy. We're not that good actor. The Secretary of Energy is literally in on this.

3:16:18It's a deputy secretary who, in my case, was in the room. Oh my God. Yeah. So we raised it to the highest level. And what's funny is there are, but there was a serious side to that chapter I put in the book. I wanted to first take a, I wanted to take a break from some of the subjects. It was a writing, a writing technique involved. But part of it also was to raise a bigger point that is something you are doing a lot of inquiries into and others. I don't know what secret that I don't know myself. I don't know everything, obviously. I used to know in CIA, we got so paranoid at one point, got so paranoid, I couldn't pass a polygraph anymore.

3:16:57They actually let me publish a chapter on that, which I was really surprised when I was failing the polys, because I knew too much. And I was one of the few people that knew everything about a certain subject that I couldn't even tell the polygrapher. I didn't trust the polygrapher, let's put it that way. So you get to this Wilderness of Mirrors. It's a famous poem, but there's a famous book on it, too, about espionage, where you start looking at everybody and everybody knowing something you don't. And the fact is, I used to marvel at people walking around the halls of CIA that thought they were so smart on everything.

3:17:36They used to talk smack, and they don't know what I know. And then I thought, well, there's probably stuff that this guy over there knows that I don't know. So you start looking that way. And DOE is even worse because I tease my CIA colleagues and friends. I said, you know, I learned some of this nation's most important secrets at DOE, not CIA. DOE does stuff that, man. Do you feel like that is true? Oh, I know it's true. You know it's true? I know it's true. What years were you at DOE? 2005 to 8. 2005 to 8. And now the point in the story, though, is it's a valid thing to wonder, does the president know?

3:18:11This has come up a lot in UFO history. It started with really Reagan and Gorbachev musing about they need to get together. So when the aliens come, the U.S. and the Russian—Reagan mentioned that. He was joking, but it was on his mind, right? And then later it was President Clinton, I know, was interviewed by somebody and said, do you believe that we have signs of alien life and we're hiding or there's a program or something? And he basically said, I don't think they tell me even though I'm the president. He said that. So it speaks to both the dangers of secrecy, really, because you can't get to that point.

3:18:49You can't get to the point both of this that you don't want to share secrets because you just they're secret. Or you're thinking you've got to withhold this from the president. it. I don't think you can go there and have a small group of people. That's when you could get into your deep state. If groups form around, subgroups form around the real government and start to do things the real government's not aware of, well, that's kind of the textbook. I don't believe in the deep state. I've been, since I was 17 years old and I'm 71 now and I'm still very connected. If there's a deep state, I want to know who's in it and where it's operating from and what they're doing, because I have no idea.

3:19:28But when you get to something like this, somebody would say, and I told you it would be me, if I knew that we had evidence of extraterrestrial visits to Earth, I'd go to the press. What about if we just had evidence of some sort of anomalous phenomenon around our nuclear sites that we can't explain? Well, see, that's intriguing. You've talked a little with me about that, and that's the first I heard of it. Yeah. Interesting. Cause you, if you Google or even chat GPT, like, uh, UFO incursions to around like, you know, national labs and nuclear sites, even in that time range, 2005 to 2008, you'll see stuff.

3:20:13You'll see. Right. I believe you. F.E. Warren. You'll see Malmstrom Base. And you'll see literally people, missile security officers who've signed affidavits saying that they've seen incursions. And this is, there's a great journalist who's a friend of mine named Robert Hastings. And he's written a book called UFOs and Nukes. And it is ubiquitous. He has 167, you know, top TS, you know, secret cleared, you know, missile security officers, radar operators, guys on the PRP program, which I'm sure you're familiar with. where you have to report if you're on ibuprofen, you know, because you're guarding the crown jewel secrets of American defense.

3:20:50And they just see saucers, tic-tacs, orbs everywhere around our nuclear sites. And in some cases, these sites are getting shut down. There's a 2010 case in F.E. Warren where literally Obama gets briefed because it was down for, you know, they say it was 59 minutes. But I think so this Bob Hastings back channeled with this retired missile technician and he was in touch with some missile technicians on site and they attribute it to this cigar shaped object that literally, you know, this this sort of tic tac thing that shut down the base. And so did you not hear of anything like that? Well, I can say completely openly and transparently when I was in DOE and I was director of intelligence, I never was briefed on any of that.

3:21:38So it doesn't mean it didn't occur. And I take very seriously what you said. I think in all likelihood, a lot of those reports are true or at least being truthfully reported. Yeah. And I don't know if it's because they're handled somewhere else, which gets to kind of some of the big questions, or whether because they're individual things that never get resolved, they don't go anywhere, but we can never resolve it because we don't know what's going on. I would believe that because I guess I would worry if the head of intelligence and counterintelligence for the DOE isn't hearing about these encouragements.

3:22:15Like that seems so fundamental to this, you know, the safety of and maybe that's why it's impossible to talk about on the kind of the civil side, on the open side or something, because how can you say, you know, these things are flying with impunity over our sites? But I don't know. I wish there was some better way to talk about it. I think, you know, obviously I'm not the president or anybody who would be in that decision making, but I think it would be a strategic mistake of historical proportions for a body of government at any given time to conceal that truth from the American people thinking we can't handle it or somehow it compromises.

3:22:56If our security is being, or national security is being compromised that way, I can't think of a scenario where it's better that the people don't know it than if they do know it. Because if there's a problem, we need everyone to know, kind of have some things to go on. And I don't believe in like the mass panic sort of things and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's really a question of trust. And when you get to trust, the government has very little trust. The whole deep state phenomenon is rooted in mistrust of government. Right. And the assumption that if we don't know what the government's going on, we don't believe what we're being told, there must be something really bad going on.

3:23:33My experience is really kind of the polar opposite. It's been, you'd be very disappointed at times if you knew what we're doing because it's not always very good. Sometimes it's malicious and just bad, wrong, illegal. Because you're getting, if you're doing a certain amount of things, some people are going to do illegal things. Like it's just inevitable. I think the public on this issue is probably so confused by the government's messaging because you have people like James Clapper, Jim Semivan, guys who are like, you know, James Clapper's DNI. I know them all. Yeah, you know them. Exactly. Yeah.

3:24:09Jim Semivan, very high up at the CIA. So like, if you know them, you know, they're out in this movie Age of Disclosure saying, you know, this is non-human intelligence is real. We're in an arms race with China and Russia on this stuff. We have a reverse engineering program with UFOs. Like, have you called them up? Hey, guys, like, what are you talking about? Like, this isn't really like. Well, no, I haven't called them up specifically, but I certainly, and you've helped not only whet my appetite, but give me some things to work with in terms of broadening my, I'm open-minded on it. I truly am.

3:24:46I, I'm not dismissing it at all. I think that's a big mistake. I was more going to the, the idea of that we got in our hazing ritual is how do we handle these things? And are we actually prepared for the reality that could come to us at any time? You talk about your ultimate intelligence. The thing we worry about most as intelligence community is the fear of surprise, strategic surprise. 9-11, collapse of the Soviet Union, Arab Spring, aliens coming to Perth and we not being able to have a clue. I mean, every time there's an interstellar object coming now and you've got this astronomer saying it's nothing and this one's saying, I don't know, not so fast.

3:25:31I mean, I pay a lot of attention to that as a reader because I think one day one of those things won't be just a comet. Do you think nothing happened at Roswell or do you have a take? Well, what we know has happened at Roswell, maybe then or certainly over the years, is I suspect something happened, right? And so the question is, is it something we created and contained, like experimental flights or development of new aircraft? I mean, the whole history of, which is a lot of CIA's history, is on the technical side of the SR-71 and all these different aircraft, secret aircraft. The key to that is secret, you know, to be ahead of everything on that so we can fly them around the world and not be seen.

3:26:17So the idea that we're doing exotic testing and there are accidents and crashes and things, that much I'd be surprised if there's not more of them any of us know. And again, I wouldn't know that at CIA because I wasn't in those, you know, those saps or whatever you call them. The thing that did surprise me at DOE, for all the incredible secrets, some of which were nuclear-related things, is just how few of them related to this. So, again, that could suggest two explanations. One is it's done somewhere else and even I was hazed by him. Or, you know, there's less to it for the more banal reason, or I'd call it, that no one's pulling it together.

3:27:03You know, you talk to someone like Jim Sammy Van Goodcock. By the way, the people you mentioned I have immense respect for. So why would they? Because, yeah, I wouldn't imagine they would want to lie about this topic. No, no, I don't think, I don't think they're lying. Okay. They don't, they have no motivation to lie about it. Yeah. So I think it's well, I think it's sincere and well-intended, uh, statements. You take it. But you wouldn't put your money on them being right. Um, I don't know what being right is. See, one thing I haven't been able to get from, we had congressional testimony. We've had this movie, which I haven't seen yet.

3:27:35So, so I'll defer judgment on the, on the movie. But the one thing we haven't heard from any of them, and the question I would ask Jim Clapper or Jim Samivan or anybody, if I called them up as old friends, is to say, okay, you say this and that. I've never heard that before. You say that before. Why don't you then say exactly what you mean? If you have that as a statement, you say a summary of what you think, you're not going to provide any specifics of what you mean by that? When, where, how, Where is it now? What is it? I understand it might be deeply classified. They provide some specifics.

3:28:14They talk about Roswell as a real event. There were beings that came out of, I think they say four beings that came out of this craft. You know, I think they even mentioned one surviving or something. So they do mention some specific details. Yeah. So, you know, I don't know. Those are real claims. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I see no reason to discount the people you mentioned among some of the other people I've heard are in it just because they don't have the proof. Again, I'd implore the government to think hard about what they're trying to do here. What's the purpose of not disclosing? Yeah.

3:28:56Of non-disclosure? secrecy one of the things i've always felt strongly about is there's too much secrecy in the government yeah and it's this kind of insidious secrecy that's disruptive it's corrosive to democracy yeah and and this is coming from me in my community i just too much too much and other damn good reasons not to talk about certain nuclear data or who's a spy and when you have evidence you know you're starting to pick up evidence of a spy in your ranks or you're going to compromise the thing and lose it. But other things we just keep secret way beyond its time for no reason. I won't even say apparent, which is a qualifier.

3:29:37I could state categorically we just keep things. Do you think the UFO thing could be an example of that? Well, I think it is not by virtue that it wouldn't be revelatory. Therefore, somebody would say keep it secret because it's like, Q's going to change our whole impression of life in the universe. Okay. Yeah. But that's the reason I would say they got to declassify it. You can't keep something like that secret. Yeah. You know, you can't, you got to share that everybody in this country ought to know if the U S government has concluded that there's life on other planets because we have evidence, not because we've seen, you know, Tic Tacs or I get all that, you know, there, and there's still the big joke, of course, which you know all this better than I is, you know, why are all these images always fuzzy?

3:30:26But it's the idea that. But they even have explanations for that. They say it's like, you know, gravitational lensing and blue shifts. The guy who talks about that is this guy, Hal Puthoff, who's at University of Institute of Advanced Study, Austin. And he, you know, is, I think, a longtime CIA guy as well. and he talks about Stephen Hadley in the Bush administration as going through this whole exercise of should we disclose or should we not disclose and them reading the three-body problem as part of this exercise to figure out whether, you know, this is this Chinese science fiction novel that involves this, you know, trisolarian alien race or whatever and the aliens having a lot to do with frontier physics as well, clamping down on our physics because that's our tip of the spear ability to defend ourselves as the human race.

3:31:19And he says they go through this whole exercise and they come out saying, you know, it's actually, it's not worth it to disclose. And Hal Puthoff said this on, you know, Joe Rogan, on like the biggest podcast in the world. And I'm like, what's going on? You like, you have on the one, you have this indetectable, undetectable dark matter. You have on the one hand, people like Elon Musk, like yourself, who like, you know, super like amazing bona fides, extremely respectable, like highly intelligent, you know, know a lot of stuff. And then you have Jim Semivan, how I put off Jim Clapper, and they're all like, so pro UFO and they have like discrete stories of these things.

3:31:57And I'm like, what's like, how do I make sense of this? You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's so confusing. Well, I think, I think the way you make sense of it is to keep, keep pushing it and keep interviewing and, and keep. Do you think Hadley ever went through an exercise like that? I mean, there's really no, I'd put no value in my, in my judgment except to say, you know, I know Steve Hadley and I respect him too. Yeah. I've never heard anything like that. Never heard anything. No. I mean, I, I, I said, you know, I just want you to know one thing. Yeah. I don't know. And if I knew, I probably would. I can't say categorically.

3:32:34I know I would, but I can't see why I would keep that a secret. Yeah. even at risk to myself of being punished in some way. Yeah. I just, I, I feel that fervently. No, I appreciate that. And I also, you know, I think if that weren't the case, you probably wouldn't come on the show because I, I mean, like, I mean, I, and I, and I, you know, I'm not, I won't belabor this too long, but like, there's so much, it's like a whole ontology that has basically you can, you can create around the DOE being like holding the crown jewels of US foe stuff. There's transclassified foreign material and, you know, special nuclear material from the, you know, 1954 Atomic Energy Act where you have restricted data.

3:33:17Anything that could be radiological in nature is immediately born secret upon sort of retrieving it. I know that. Yeah. I'm sure you're familiar. So, like, there's this idea that that is sort of this Trojan horse for UFO material and that, you know, NEST nuclear emergency support teams. Right. Of course. You know, I spoke to my buddies, UAP Gerb, and then this other guy, David Grush, who's this whistleblower before this, and they were talking, you know, about those two things. And so there's nothing that you know about any of that stuff. No. And I hasten to add, when I think back at myself in all modesty, some guy coming in from CIA to head up intelligence for three years, obviously the intelligence shop is not the place to go for this information or having access to it.

3:34:08Now there might be one person they trust with it there. And it is an organization, Dewey, that you could easily imagine because I described going in through the multiple vaults back deeper and deeper into the recesses of the building to the point where there's not a sound coming in and out of there other than the people talking in the room. So you have a culture where this is all very possible. Yeah. And I have known other subjects, a few, that I've got roped into where there was a very exclusive group of people looking at it. And to the point where this was even at CIA where we didn't put anything, well, very specific thing, not generally done and very highly unusual, irregular, I'd call it, where nothing pertaining to that was even put into any kind of a record.

3:35:00Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anything's imaginable. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. I mean, at the Soul Foundation, there's just a Stanford organization that's dedicated to UFO research. These NNSA guys, National Nuclear Security Administration guys showed up. And so it's like, why are you interested in this stuff? And then there's this News Nation, which just covers UFOs a lot. There's this slide that was like advanced gravity propulsion research. And it was a guy who had incurred some sort of Havana syndrome like, you know, biological effects. But it was, you know, it was like that was his title. And so I'm like, OK, DOE is doing this exotic gravity research.

3:35:45Well, that doesn't surprise me at all. OK. No, no. But the UFO stuff surprises me. Well, there's a major distinction here. You know, looking into, I would call, all forms of materials and advanced propulsion techniques and energy-related. People think of Department of Energy, just for a very quick explanation of what it is, which most people don't know, is Department of Energy consists of really three main components. It's a hybrid that shouldn't exist together, but it's a product of a lot of politics that created DOE. The one side, there's the energy part, which contrary to a lot of common belief is not just gas and oil and fossil fuels.

3:36:28It's also advanced form of renewables. It's for nuclear power. And of course, it's for looking into advanced energy forms, some of which we don't, gravity, magnets. So all that's in the energy department. And there's an overwhelming thought. It's just, you know, Jimmy Carter created it during the crisis with the Middle East over gas and oil. So that's no, but it's all this other stuff that's strengthened by the second major component of DOE, which is the science part of DOE, which a lot of which does pure science. So the pure science part of DOE is some of its research for ongoing needs of the U.S.

3:37:09government. Some of it's just advanced things. I've met some of the most fascinating people who do things like chaos theory and look for numbers. They're looking for the equation, you know, the equation of chaos. It got me on a whole track of thinking of my philosophy and my beloved philosophy in a totally different way, which is, wow, what if every human decision in history is just permutations of choices we make freely, but no matter what we do, it's a determined outcome because all those choices inevitably, because they're driven by an equation of human nature. So they all drive you to the same result.

3:37:45So I got some of those ideas from DOE scientists who are doing—and some of them are into that esoteric, those esoteric kind of aspects of their work. And again, wonderful people to talk to. Some of them, you know, very eccentric or whatever you want to call it. And then the third part is the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is almost like I describe as an autonomous republic within the DOE because it's got some independent status. because for a time, the NNSA was seen as not getting the attention and freedom of action it needed within a dysfunctional DOE. It's not dysfunctional anymore.

3:38:24DOE is quite functional, but there was a period, as I refer to the politics. So you had those three, many ways complementaries, but in some ways independent. And then the National Nuclear Security National Laboratory Complex serves those three things, Energy, nukes, and pure science. And they're proportioned in their work and what the basic priorities are. Have you ever seen a one-of-one material? Like a super unique material that you've never seen elsewhere? No. Okay. I would remember that. Okay. The other, the other, you know, common attribute is you realize how vast what I just described is.

3:39:09So the probability that I know a lot of it is small and, but it's prescribed. So by that, I mean, I'll be kind of vague, but everything that's exceptional. Yeah. typically you get read into individually yeah it's not just yours as a result of the job you hold yeah if it's important enough then you get like someone will tap you on the shoulder and you have you know special things happen things happen that are different so it's entirely possible that there are very few people that know a lot about all the most important things if that makes sense because they're divided yeah and i could easily see things like we're talking about being in a separate category, which is even curtailed further by people who really need to know.

3:39:56Because the ultimate, the need of the chapter that I have in my book for this is called Need to Know. So the other, I'm trying to also illustrate a principle I've never been entirely comfortable about intelligence and government secrecy is the idea that need to know governs it all. Well, that's fine if need to know is perfectly interpreted. Well, I think the public has a need to know for the ontological truth. It's just like nuclear science is taught at every university, but nuclear trade secrets should be classified. I think that should be applied to this if it's at all real. And to me, when people ask about, you know, my conviction in UFOs, I always say you have to view everything probabilistically.

3:40:43The idea that we're in some reverse engineering arms race, I would probability weight much lower than I am sure that there are these objects showing up around nuclear assets all over the world. not even there's a town in japan we have our american alchemy japanese shirts here there's a town in japan next to the fukushima prefecture which is their civilian energy grid that has a muse it's this mountain sengan mori they have a whole museum dedicated to ufos and all these geomagnetic anomalies and they're obsessed with ufos so i do i do think that is this ubiquitous you know commonality and and that that is that is the thing i think you can be most high conviction in the UFO world.

3:41:23Well, then I can also see that there's just such an obvious tie-in with other than worldly life forms or intelligence and our highest forms of intelligence or most destructive things like nuclear. I mean, because there, again, the whole idea of— I've tried to get accustomed or adapted to the reality of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrets my whole life. Even having spent, by accident, as I unfolded, it unfolded as a big accident. But when I look back on it, yeah, it's like nuclear here, nuclear here. And it's a little bit like your appearances at all the nuclear sites. It's like, it keeps coming to me.

3:42:08And you could even make a case, if you wanted to write that script, that some of these appearances were a divine awareness in sense of messages and of the need to warn. Because the essence of the Ezekiel warning as a watchman, the watchman is a specific type of, you know, it's not a messenger, it's not a prophet, it's a watchman. Only responsibility is to warn. So specifically in biblical terms, the idea of the watchman warning the people will be held accountable, not for if it's true or stops whatever's going to happen from happening. That's not the accountability. the count of explicit accountability of being a watchman is to warn your job is to warn so when you ask me did you prevent or you you have to banish that idea from your mind that you are going to prevent the apocalypse or shape it in some form because i don't think any human being is going to have that responsibility but it's pretty hard just to do the warning part yeah because like you said if people genuinely believe that this is part of it and maybe you're watchman for, for, you know, shining a light on so, so much on this factor, particularly depending how things turn out.

3:43:22Yeah. We'll see. I'm curious to see where this whole topic goes. You know, in the, in this, in this kind of hazing ritual brief that you had on UFOs, do you remember the date of Roswell that they gave you? Uh, no, not off the top of my head. I think I had it in the, I think I wrote it in the book. It is in the book and it's July 7th, 1947. Yeah. Do you think that connects with your download 747? Oh my goodness. Good. You know, that's the first time I've ever thought that, that it might. Are you, are you trying to tell the audience in coded fashion that you might know? I'm being as what I've tried to be throughout the complete, and it's even better in complete honesty, which didn't even cross my mind.

3:44:06So I couldn't possibly have fabricated that to make it more compelling. There's one other one that's really interesting. There was a, this will fit, you need to look this up if you don't already know it. So one of the scientists at DOE kind of knew my stuff with numbers and this, maybe even a red, explained to me the famous Vela, have you heard the Vela incident? Mm-mm. Nuclear explosion. Mm-mm. It's called, they labeled it the 747 incident. Whoa. And it's a nuclear test that South Africa made, right? But the suspicion is they did it on behalf of the Israelis. It's a suspicion. I'm not saying to your viewers, you know, this is, but this is into the murky secrets of the development of the Israeli bomb, which, of course, the U.S.

3:44:54kind of gave the big thumbs up handshake deal to, you know, you know, you need this kind of thing. At least that's what I, what I've heard. So the point being there is, boy, that's a very Vela 747. Look it up. Fascinating. Yeah. I don't know. No, I think there's something very ontologically interesting about nuclear and it's some sort of energy unlock that if I were some sort of concurrent civilization, whether it's extraterrestrial, you know, which the people who deny UFOs at the highest levels often say extraterrestrial because I think it's a we don't have evidence that's extraterrestrial. You know, I think it could be like, you know, some sort of non-human or even ultra terrestrial, some past civilization on Earth or something.

3:45:40But it seems like they would want to monitor nuclear. Like that just seems like this really important unlock. And that seems to be corroborated by all the evidence. But as to what that means, I just don't know. Now you're thinking of other people looking at us maybe way past this point. There's some secret we may bump into. I don't know that they're as worried about us blowing ourselves up as we, you know, They probably have no reason to worry too much about that. But what if they're worried we're going to cross a threshold of knowledge that they're already aware of? And that has grave implications for them.

3:46:14That's really interesting. I mean, it's like the building blocks of life or if life is, if you think about the universe as like information theoretic, like maybe you're getting into the root access or something. Well, you know, but it adds another element to this that isn't, I don't think, well enough understood or absorbed by the public is we take for granted the kind of the expression of this incredible God's secrets, we call it, as manifested in our discoveries of those secrets. And yet in every domain, whether it's AI or nuclear or biological life sciences, in every one of those domains, our knowledge is so limited of what we're dealing with.

3:46:58And if you go to, we think a little about the implications of AI, and I've heard some in various places, I've heard talks, and even by some of the top guys on this, and it scares the hell out of me. Well, it does. They don't know what they're doing. Well, you could call it a process of like umwelt hacking or something. So umwelt is like, this is my old colleague, Eric Weinstein talks about this, where it's like, you get to deeper layers of ontological truth, the better your measurement instruments are. Or there's even a physicist who was at CERN for a while, Ken Wilson, talks about phase transitions in materials.

3:47:36And the more you put them under duress, you get these whole new properties as you put them under duress. And so I wonder if, you know, it's kind of what we were talking about before, it's quantum indeterminacy between level of energy and time. If you have particle accelerators or nuclear blasts, you might get ontological weirdness around those events. particularly as little as we know the physics you know and especially since uh the people at the top of those fields are guiding all of us and and it's the same with these other fields right and that's the i mean cloning yeah what stunning yeah i never i never thought i had a dream once on cloning yeah long before clones and i thought that's never going to happen in my lifetime well you know Pets are being cloned, brought back to life.

3:48:31And that in itself, we're playing God. So we're at the point where we're, in a way, we've earned this as the only, in biblical terms, again, we're recreated in the image of God. I was always seized by that. At an early age, even, I recognized this is special. Image of God means, really, it's a two-way thing, means God has a responsibility for us in a way that I'm sure God will fulfill. and that's been the essence of everything we've talked about. God's going to send messengers. God's going to send his own son. God's going to do X and Y, send a prophet, Mom. But all the things that—and with the typical characters behind him, always the same people, Angel Gabriel.

3:49:10And they're always the same people, always the same entities, right, behind all. And then all that's going to be his way of guiding us, making sure we don't screw up entirely before—in the end, okay, I'm going to give some reassurance, which sounds awful, but Judgment Day and Apocalypse, that things are going to turn out, because that's really what it's about. It's not about punishing us. We punish ourselves. It's about reconciliation. It's about judgment, meaning there is a reward and a penalty for what you do in your life. You're not here anonymously. Like, that was the thing on the train. It was like, God's aware.

3:49:45He's there right now. He's, like, standing there. That's why that's in the book, because I never had that feeling before or after. It was the one time it was that deep. And so the same thing applies with handling God's gift. So we're entitled, we're given access to things that we, in a way, have no right to have access to. But we're not. There's no point to give us freedom in the whole Garden of Eden story unless it's full freedom. Which, because of the way we're wired, we're going to screw that up for the most part. And so that's all known. Yes. You can write your equations now. God is. God knows.

3:50:23It'll play out how many Hegelian dialectical histories you want to write. They all might be different, but guess what? They're all going to end the same way. But when it comes to how the handling of the power of God turns out, that's the unique test. So I never get into prophecy. I don't prophesize anything, but predict when's the apocalypse, when's it start? One of the things about my dream that I specifically remember was 2060 in the chameleon dream of the future where I was trying UFOs and going out and trying. I was already in an apocalypse. I'm going back and forth. Part of the world had been destroyed with the great nuclear war of 2034.

3:51:00And I was going back and forth trying to find people trying to make bombs. This is way before I did the terrorist bomb stuff. by the way. Whoa. Yeah. You had a dream about this. This is the dream that you asked me about in 1981. And you said you were flying on what the DOE would call UFOs. UFOs, yeah. And I had the dream in 1982. But these were our crafts, like American crafts? Our crafts sent from CIA. Yeah. All managed and all connected to a massive supercomputer we would call a quantum. him. I didn't know that back then. In the bowels of CIA, underground. Do you think that we have propulsion modalities that transcend chemical combustion?

3:51:46I don't know. No idea. But in the dream, certainly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the dream, certainly. I didn't know what it was. I just was flying around like it was all known. But my dream didn't reveal to me how it, but it was a manifestation of Reagan's Star Wars thing, which before Star Wars. So he gave the great Star Wars speech, I think, in 84. And my dream was in 82. So I was already anticipating, I'll call it that, this idea of a shield. So my dream was basically the world had been divided in two, the world in the shield, the world out of the shield. And the whole point was to keep, of the UFOs and intelligence was a global intelligence service that would keep out the people trying to break through the shield.

3:52:29Well, yeah, that's fascinating. So now we're into what? We're into exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. And in fact, the Bluegill triple prime thing was it was a high altitude nuclear test, but it was a defense against Russian ICBMs and Soviet ICBMs. And there's even a Rand Corporation paper a couple of years before it was pulled off around speculating as to how that would be done. And Malmgren was at the Institute for Defense Analysis at the time, and they've been involved in every missile defense system since then. And he directly ties Bluegill Triple Prime to Star Wars and to, you know, a strategic defense initiative.

3:53:12And so then there's, again, there's this like weird question of like, is there some dual use around UFOs for that or something? I don't know. And you have the Golden Dome now, you know. Well, I think one of the questions, I know people are asking, but just like when you're hearing us talk, muse about this is we're sort of due for another big transformational change. I mean, we've had, of course, the industrial age. Then we had more recently the internet age. And it just strikes me that we're due for something. Like this idea of something propelling us into a future we really haven't anticipated.

3:53:52activated as over, in a way, overwritten on everything, every possible permutation of our future, something that's going to change all that. We're going to say, well, it's not that future after all. It feels like we're on the verge of a paradigm shift for sure. It does. And it feels like, at least for the stuff I'm investigating, it feels like the dam is going to break because there are, if the kind of incumbent, you know, current paradigm is like, you know inside of the dam or whatever there are like 15 different vectors of like holes in the dam and that thing is just it's about to burst like it think that when i hear you you know talk about all these different things that you're working on too that's the immediate reaction i had is what we we just said there with with one another it's just we're ready for a big paradigm shift it's probably going to be something we've never anticipated yeah based on something we didn't see coming and the most important thing of that is it's happening at a time and i think very few people understand this i'm not trying i don't want to talk be condescending but i just i myself struggle with this a lot uh where time and scale is time is rapidly shrinking on us everything is more accessible so fast we can't process it much like make make good back in the day when you mailed things and you set cables and you mentioned how easier you could contemplate things you can make that even then it was rough making good decisions and at a certain point we reached a happy medium where this where speed increased to the point where you can better decisions faster but now we're at the point i'm sure of this in government or even maybe the private sector i think where the amount of things we have to decide at the speed we have to decide him is overwhelming us at the scale it applies because of population growth and how everything's interacting and the way the internet is tied everything together well that's what that movie age of disclosure felt like it felt like the government trying to get in front of uh all these kind of truths coming out and figuring out a way to frame it or something you know i hope so proactively.

3:56:05That would be good. Sure. Yeah. But, you know, it feels, it does feel like that is inevitable. Like this stuff is, is sort of coming out. And I wonder in some ways, like you believe in angels, right? Yes, I do. Yeah, of course. So these, all these things have literally happened to you. And I wonder if like, it's like the age of disclosure has their veneer of like extraterrestrials. Your veneer might be angels, demons, eschatology, the Bible. if I were like, would you believe that angels might show up around nuclear sites? That might seem more plausible to you. Well, in a way, in a way. And I'm, you know, I told you, I'm so hesitant to link UFOs to faith and mysticism.

3:56:47Sure, sure, sure. So with that gigantic caveat. Yeah, yeah, and I'm sorry. No, no, no, no, don't apologize. It's fun. It's fun, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't think it discredits religion or faith or in any way insults. Well, it's trying to figure out some underlying truth between, you know, the way you're describing what's happened to you personally and then these, you know, all these other intelligence officials who are saying we are not alone, you know. Right. Well, I think where it ties, I was getting to my big however, you know, is if you believe the one, like you said, I'm utterly, there's not even any doubt on my mind about all these things.

3:57:21And also the existence of angels like Gabriel. And now how you describe that or what that reality is, whether, you know, obviously the wing figure coming from is, I think, symbolic of a messenger from a different state of reality. but now we're getting very close to being visited by life forms in our own universe that are that technically shouldn't be much intersection with us it's i've never really doubted the the sort of actuarial realities that intelligent life must exist in the universe i've really never questioned that what i've i want to see is the evidence of it and begin to understand what that means for us But I've also wanted to understand how space-time makes that work because everything is so distant from us that even with advanced forms of Star Trek forms of travel, which I loved that show when I was growing up, it's hard to imagine we're going to intersect at precisely that moment of advanced development of our civilizations in this place, in our place.

3:58:25That would be a very low odds. Not impossible. but and then but then when you introduce something that we just talked about as being some breakthrough of truth somewhere that changes entirely our notions of reality we already know we haven't unified physics well that's a big one right there yeah there's a reason for that and i don't think einstein just got lazy after you know his earliest part of his life when he was at his greatest I will sort of reinforce one idea, though, is I have a much greater belief in younger people like you and others pushing us into the future than I do my generation.

3:59:03And not so much because we've done and achieved what we want to do. But, you know, your minds change. You know, I don't deserve to be the person I was getting all the insights and things to guide my life and my work now that I had then. So if I want them now, it's more for my own, you know, satisfaction. And that's not good enough, right? But the idea behind this is that we need... People who don't consider themselves experienced or informed through advanced degrees and all this to think like you and others think and to push us. That's where the inspiration is going to come. I mean, Einstein was a clerk when he was doing his greatest work.

3:59:47And there's so many scientists who were like that. Now, yeah, maybe he's a genius, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens. It feels like there are all these kind of heterodox threads of science that weren't taken seriously at all, you know, for the last 30, 40 years. And increasingly, they're kind of in vogue and being taken seriously. And in certain cases, I think they've been behind, you know, walls of secrecy or stigma. You know, things like documented is, you know, the CIA's efforts in remote viewing and parapsychology. And, you know, that's, I think, a well-respected intelligence modality and, you know, at Langley.

4:00:30But, you know, only until the last few years, you know, that was that was kind of arrested out of the government with the Freedom of Information Act request in 2017. And only the last few years are people saying there's something clearly here. And I think the problem I have with the super anti-UFO people are like they say, oh, this can't be possible. This observable thing that you've seen a million different times with all these credible people coming out and saying it can't be real because of our current physical model of the universe. But if you were to bet on the anomaly historically and against the physical model of the universe, you would always be right.

4:01:09You know, you're always wrong if you bet on the physical model of the universe. So I do think we're on the precipice of something exciting. Well, yeah, I agree with you totally. And I hope it's very positive. I worry on one aspect that I think as we learn more about the reality we're creating rather than the reality that exists, we need to make sure we continue to make that distinction. And that can take the smallest form of knowing when you're a virtual reality figure in an app you're playing on your iPad or if you're a kid, making sure that kids don't lose their minds in a fantasy reality. And this is coming from someone who's had these very vexing, disturbing, disorienting dreams that I've had and who am I to talk.

4:01:58But it was a problem for me in some respects, too, that I've outlined. And then it goes up one level from that where you have people relying on chat GPT to be their girlfriend or boyfriend or give them life advice. I'm saying, wow, this is more than dangerous. People are, you know, the idea, I said at one point we talked about identity a little bit and how culturally that was different from people who are more individualistic societies versus, say, common bond societies. Yeah. That depend on one another, have a perception they're more involved with one another. But think about it from the standpoint of how that changes when you can create a reality that doesn't exist and replace your reality because it's not a very good life you're leading.

4:02:45Yeah. Right now you might go buy opiates or do something because you see no hope in your future and you don't have good health care, you don't have a good job. You don't really have any hope you're going to break out of this terrible cycle. we put we i think that's a we thing personally yeah some people bring it on themselves but we as a country owe more to people than we've given them this isn't a now problem that we've created this has been a growing problem for decades and and into that environment comes the temptation to create alternative lives and realities um i wouldn't was watching you know watching uh zuckerberg and mark zuckerberg and others trying to create this idea of having people why do they want to do this i want people to come on these virtual realities so they can buy imaginary plots of land so they can make money off it yeah i mean wow yeah no it's dystopian that's part of the reason i'm into the ufo thing because i think it's if our life is if this is somewhat of a simulation i think there's a life-affirming version of the simulation where we're in a platonic cave and you can ascend outside and see the light that's lighter than light and and you you know, witness great things in this reality.

4:03:54And so why would you go into this sort of bit compressed reality? And so that's what motivates me when I'm trying to close this gap between super well-respected people like yourself and then these other people like, you know, Chris Mellon, deputy assistant director of intelligence for, you know, under Bush and Clinton. He even, he just said he was like, you know, we want to put the CIA's director of science and technology. I think it was one of the last ones. He was like, we need to figure out what she knows about UFOs. And so I'm like, it's maddening to me. Like, how would you advise that I figure out what's going on?

4:04:34Well, I think you're doing a good job. The best thing you can do is what you're doing is interview credible witnesses. Avoid drawing conclusions until you have to. But by the same token, I think most of the mind-shut phenomena, whether it's UFOs or, frankly, a lot of traditional things. There's a whole massive number of people, I can name any but I won't embarrass people, who just flat won't deal with terrorists having nukes or big biological weapons simply because they want to think that, you know, men wearing rags, you can't do it. But it's the idea, though, that you just miss something because, you know, you underestimate them.

4:05:14And that's what you're not doing. And you can't underestimate. And the people who tend to do that and dismissive people on anything I've ever dealt with, there's a group of dismissive people. Because you're usually placing your bet on probability basis, not impact basis. And the real risk equation for any good national security person or someone doing what you're doing is to assess risk as intent times capability times consequences. Yeah. So we sometimes assume intent. That's typical. That's done a lot. Assume intent. They can, they don't. Part of our failure on 9-11, frankly, as an intelligence community was we didn't assume they had the intent to do that.

4:05:55And then the capability you don't even really look into. You don't see it because you haven't really ascribed that intent to them that they do something that audacious. Yeah. And then, of course, the consequences, all they're really looking for. So, yeah, you multiply those things out. But it's the same thing with UFOs. It's like your best bet as an observer trying to maintain some credibility, like astronomers who cast judgment on every new visitor to our solar system, is to dismiss it as anything. And then if the day comes at some point when it's a real thing, oh, they're nowhere to be found.

4:06:32Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, exactly. Yeah. Did you know Glenn Gaffney at all? Yeah, I did. Because this guy— I like him a lot. He's a nice—he's a good guy. He was—he's, I think, currently on the board of ARO, the All-Domain Anomalies Research Resolution Office. Okay, I didn't know what he's doing. He was the director of science and technology. And technology at the CIA. And there's a couple of people, one of which was under oath in front of Congress, said he blocked the transfer of UFO material from Lockheed Martin to Bigelow Aerospace. Do you know anything about that? No, but it's pretty specific.

4:07:12It is specific. It's a specific, yeah. Anyways, well, okay. Well, I appreciate you indulging my crazy question. No, I'm not indulging. I'm burning and it's fascinating. I will say one more thing about, it wasn't when Glenn was the head of director of science technology, but I've had a lot of interactions with him over the decades. And one thing I did learn from the interactions is that most of what they do, most of what they do, I wasn't privy to. I had no reason to be brought into from a need to know perspective. So there's all kinds of things I probably don't know. And you swear to God you know nothing about UFOs?

4:07:47Oh, yeah, yeah. I swear to God. Okay. Wow. I'd hedge in a way. And I know that means a lot to you because you're— Yeah. You know, it's a whole different conversation, but I try never to be deceptive or lie. That's what it would be. Even when I'd have a reason. Like you're given an alibi because, oh, yeah, you're told not to tell. so you can lie. No, I'll find a different way to not say it than lie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I've learned that actually it's extremely important being in a manipulative business, which you can't deny intelligence can be, it's even more important to maintain your personal integrity and ability to be credible with people.

4:08:29So if I'm dealing with the Russians, we've had some stories about that, or I actually, there's a chapter in my book where I'm dealing with Syrian intelligence or any other intelligence service in the world or country, my credibility lies in not lying to them. Yeah. And because then what I tell them is suspect, so then I've contaminated whatever CIA has to offer. So I make it not only a habit, but my personal integrity. I also believe, and I've given lectures on this, there's no contradiction or conflict between recruiting agents and running them and they're, we obviously use aliases and things.

4:09:10That's not deceptive if your goal is to protect the agent, the agent knowing your real name is bad for the agent. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Those kinds of things. Yeah, of course. But when it comes down to a real litmus test, how far am I willing to go for the agent versus what the agency tells me to do with the agent? I will defer to the agent's welfare because this is a human being. So ultimately, I'll find a way to reconcile the two. I don't like to flat out defy headquarters if I can help it, but I have done it. And then the test is a different test when I flat out say no or defy them and don't do what I've been told to do, which I don't recommend to everybody out there.

4:09:53But in those cases, I'll own up to it. Usually before, I'll say, no, I'm not going to do what you just told me to do. then there'll be a discussion. And this is, again, a test of the integrity of your organization, whether it's CIA or any other in the U.S. government. How does an organization react when you've done something you think is either, you're told to do something that's either illegal or immoral or both? How do you handle it? And it's a test of the organization whether you're asked to do that. Now, what I personally, I've said to myself personally over all my careers and I never had to go to the mat on it to the point I quit, but I would have, if I can't reconcile that, I will do what I know is the right thing to do.

4:10:43So we did some bad things, but I understood the reasons for it and we did it for not doing the wrong thing, but just because things, sometimes you're faced with a terrible choice and you don't have an option. But I just wanted to stress that because it's, it's come up again in recent times, You just have to be very careful about work through the whole—for example, I'm forgetting his name, Edward Snowden defected to China and the Russians. And he's been described by people as a whistleblower. And there was a whistleblowing aspect to his motivations, intentions, and actions. But it was far exceeded by the damage he set out to cause to the U.S.

4:11:25government for no whistleblowing reason. So you have all this. It's complicated with him because on the one hand, I do think it's important that the public know that the NSA is a backdoor and every big tech company, they have these programs like Prism and Bull Run and they can just spy on you through your smart TV and your phone. And like, that's a that's messed up. That's not that simple. OK. No, it's not that simple. But the other part of the answer to that question is the government should, in fact, have done maybe some things different than he alleged. And so there was a— But he went far— Well, he definitely, you know, compromised.

4:12:05He went far beyond that. Sure, sure. And things that had nothing to do, just pure immense damage to national security with no whistleblowing benefit. So he knew exactly what he was doing. And then you look into the whole background. Now, why do I single him out? I'm not trying to make him a particular target of my wrath or ire, is that this is the problem in a nutshell, is citizens, individual officers, integrity, everybody comes together on trying to maintain the integrity of what we're doing. And the more it's secret, the more it's dark and deep, the more we have to do it and the more disclosure is necessary at the right level.

4:12:42And we've talked so many ways about how we limit it, where we limit it, you know, this kind of thing. Do you think anything's going to happen further on the UFO front? Do you think more is going to come out? Yeah, I can't imagine it's the end of the story, right? It's just almost in a way feels like it's just beginning. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that would be my expectation as well. I mean, like in the world in which we have reverse engineering programs, material, all that stuff, it is actually like a serious national security issue. If the left hand's not talking to the right, you have these bigoted special access programs that are like unqueriable, not answering to any sort of civilian organization.

4:13:24There's zero congressional oversight. And then you're competing against Russia and China who have these central bases where they can just, you know, pluck scientists from wherever and place them there and get them to work on whatever they want. Like if in the world where that's real, it's, it would seem like a dire issue just for the, and like, I always say that as a dog whistle to the national security people, all I care about is the truth. I care about the truth coming out. There you go. There you go. The watchman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one more thing on that, I think it's, can't reach a conclusion, but when you start thinking Area 51 and the crash, and you've said this, I haven't done that research and I haven't looked into, aside from.

4:14:09And you've been to Area 51, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you've never seen any UFO, alien UFO type things? No, no, I'm sure that, yeah. But I mean, there are kind of two explanations. One is it's our testing crash and we're covering that up. And two is it intelligent life was there watching what we're doing. And that's an area in which you would be in at that point with all the nuclear testing. I think it's that. Yeah. Because you think maybe it was that? No, it's plausible. I don't dismiss it. Because in 1945, over Hanford Plutonium Base, you have this pilot, Bud Clem, following this ball of light around.

4:14:47You had stuff happening super early. In 47, I mean, Robert Goddard, who was a rocket pioneer in the U.S., had just been testing V2 rockets right at Roswell. So it's like, I don't think we were testing super advanced propulsion. You know, there was some interesting stuff happening in Nazi Germany to that effect. But, you know, you had Kammlerstab and you had these interesting scientists doing some stuff in that world. But I think what happened at Roswell was otherworldly. I do. And that's why I wanted to reinforce the possibility. I don't see how you can dismiss it unless you know it's not. In other words, if someone, this is another reason to declassify.

4:15:34Because if there was an internal experiment or something, maybe it's the problem with that. Even if you then declassify and put it out there, then there's this possibility we've continued over the decades to work on whatever we were working on. And it was an early miserable failure. There's always that explanation why we won't release. Yeah. Well, that's also maybe my take. I don't think we've done much with what we've recovered. I think it's like, you know, caveman with a USB drive. Caveman doesn't understand, you know, information theory. They have nothing to plug it into. there's no interface it's not like an iphone you know that would be my guess so well when you consider the fact that probably one of the most at least plausible continuations of our species over the next hundred years is that we evolved to the point where the ai crew we create doesn't want us around anymore per all the all the movie but that seems so plausible the problem with being so clever as we are on artificial intelligence is it's easy to imagine us out programming the reality of our lives in ways not, the old lose control aspect of this is just one thing, but I could easily see humans deciding that the perpetuation of the species and the continued evolution of human beings will no longer follow the script of what might have started as a biblical kind of idea and to the point where the one thing God would have wanted to preserve in the evolution of not just human species but all life on earth, if it's a God plan, is the idea of mutation and the idea of the weak moving on to take over the earth as it goes in, a definition we wouldn't think of as the stronger and the superior.

4:17:30And even the idea Darwin laid out of the survival of the fittest, I kind of, because of my faith, look entirely the opposite now, which is really that it's the idea of sacrifice drives everything. And certainly, if there's truth to the idea behind Christ, it's the idea he came to sacrifice, and therefore the way forward is sacrifice. And then all the truly great people, almost all of them, we would call great people, who we don't emulate, by the way. Nobody emulates Christ, mainly. But also people like Gandhi or Mandela or people we admire, you know, who took the path. Tolstoy was one of the greatest pacifists of world history, the way he wrote and thought.

4:18:10We don't really follow that lead. We kind of respect it, but we're on a completely different path. Yeah. On that note, yeah, I think it should, you know, everybody out there should try to imitate, you know, sacrifice and, and be, be, be Christlike. And, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it's fascinating model of human evolution is, you know, your, your, uh, upward path through natural selection is actually selflessness. And it's not, it's not the, it's not the Richard Dawkins selfish gene. It's the, the, the selfless gene or something. Yeah. Well, I mean, you think about it, human beings are at this point at the apex of, of, of the global domination on the basis of what's really our conquering aspects, our animalistic side.

4:18:56And we have this other side we're aware of that's more charitable and sacrificial, but we have a choice whether to obey one or the other. And the way forward looks like it's domination, looks like it's control. And in fact, I've always felt, but even more so as faith developed, that I don't look at world history as sort of Marxist-Leninism versus capitalism and all the rest of that at all anymore. I look at it as even people whose life's committed and dedicated to making money is for control. It's all about control. And the opposite of what God gave us all was to let control go and allow us to explore creation on our terms.

4:19:40And we spend human endeavors to enslave everybody again. That's it. That's an upshot. It's almost like that's my Sermon on the Mount. Right. Well, that's a beautiful note to end on for Alphimau at Larson. Thank you for taking the time and sharing your remarkable mystical experiences and indulging my UFO questions and for being here. Really appreciate you. Thank you, Jesse. It's been a great session for me. I appreciate it. It's been an honor. All right.

4:20:20Thank you.