NASA’s Dark Secrets: UFOs, Pagan Rituals & Time Travel

27:15The Thule Society held seances and rituals meant to contact non-human intelligences they believed were their ancient progenitors, star beings from the far north, beneath the Polestar. They performed these rites at symbolic locations, like the Hearts Mountains, on nights like Walpurgisnod, a festival tied to witches, spirits, and old pagan ceremonies. There are also claims about the Vril Society, a group said to have channeled anti-gravity technology and psychic powers from an ancient subterranean race. Now we don't have to believe any of these occult theories themselves, but what matters is the Nazis did.

27:59And it didn't just stop at mysticism. The Nazis were also pioneers of actual rocket science. One of the key figures was Herman Oberth. Born in Transylvania, inspired by sci-fi writer Jules Verne, Oberth began theorizing about spaceflight as a teenager. In 1923, he published The Rocket into Planetary Space, a landmark book that laid out how a multi-stage rocket could escape Earth's gravity. He was decades ahead of his time. He envisioned orbiting telescopes, spacesuits, weather-controlling satellites, even missions to other planets. His ideas sparked a movement, and when World War II began, Oberth was pulled into military work, building rockets for Germany and later for Italy.

28:50After the war, Oberth became one of the few major scientists to publicly support the reality of UFOs. After so many witnesses have seen the so-called flying saucers, their existence cannot longer be denied. I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system. In a 1954 lecture, he argued that these UFOs had been observed since at least the 1400s. Oberth believed they were piloted by extraterrestrial visitors, monitoring Earth's nuclear sites and military tech. In interviews, he even said, We cannot take all of the credit for our record advancements in certain scientific fields. We have been helped.

29:40When asked by whom, he replied, the people of the other worlds.

29:49Later in life, Oberth was invited to watch the launch of Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle Challenger. But he wasn't part of the official Operation Paperclip transfer of Nazi scientists. That honor fell to his most famous student, Werner Von Braun. Before we jump in, I want to thank today's sponsor, Hexclad Cookware, aka the pans I didn't know I needed until I ditched the warped, flaked mess I've been cooking with since college. But here's what sold me. Hexclad pans are like if stainless steel and nonstick had a love child. And then Gordon Ramsay adopted it. No joke, he actually uses them at home and in his restaurants.

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31:54Von Braun wasn't just a German rocket scientist. He was the architect of the V-2 missile program, a major in the SS, and one of the top minds in Hitler's war machine. Like Parsons, von Braun had dreamed of space since he was a boy. But where Parsons was invoking goddesses in desert rituals, von Braun was swearing loyalty to Himmler and building rockets with slave labor from concentration camps. After the war, the U.S. swept von Braun up in Operation Paperclip, a covert mission to extract Nazi scientists. He was captured in Bavaria, where a young Henry Kissinger was actually helping run counterintelligence for the United States.

32:38Von Braun's record was scrubbed, and he was given a new job, Build America's Space Program. And that he did. Von Braun became the public face of NASA, a media darling, the man behind the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon. But the overall size and weight of the rocket is mainly determined by the 11 tons weight of this top section. This weight dictates the amount of fuel and the numbers of motors needed to produce enough power to equalize the gravitational pull of the Earth. But behind the scenes, many of the ideas, the scientists, and even the weirdness of the Nazi space program had been brought into the American one.

33:24As we'll see, the weirdness didn't vanish. It just changed uniforms. But before we get to NASA's more esoteric side, we need to check in with the other major player in the space race.

33:48Before Parsons, NASA, or the Nazis, another conception of human purpose, one tied to our place in the universe, was emerging in late 19th century Russia, something we now call Russian cosmism. It began with a librarian and philosopher named Nikolai Fyodorov, who believed the true task of humanity and Christianity was not to await resurrection, but to cause it. He believed that one day, technology would allow us to resurrect every human who had ever lived. And that once death was defeated, humanity's next task would be to colonize the cosmos. Among those most influenced by Fyodorov and his ideas was a deaf, self-taught young man named Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

34:41He would become known as the father of Russian spaceflight. Tsiolkovsky didn't just believe space travel was possible. He believed it was necessary. He saw humanity as part of a cosmic process, destined to leave Earth and populate the stars. In 1903, he developed what we now call the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, the fundamental formula describing how a rocket accelerates based on its mass and exhaust velocity. Like Oberth, he anticipated breakthroughs in rocketry and space exploration well before they were technologically feasible. And here's where things get especially strange. As Diana Pasolka points out in American Cosmic, Tsiolkovsky believed that non-human intelligences, what he called ethereal beings, were communicating with us through celestial symbols.

35:35He wrote, We are made as the ethereal beings, existing beyond our dimensions of recognized reality. These higher beings are in communication with us, reading our thoughts and sending us messages through celestial symbols which most of us do not even perceive, much less understand. A genius is one who comprehends and channels these messages from higher beings into technologies, products, and even art. Tsiolkovsky seemed to believe that his rocket science, the very math that would take humans off Earth, was received through this kind of cosmic transmission. He may have seen himself not only as an engineer, but as a medium for an intelligence beyond human understanding.

36:24another example of someone who saw the spiritual dimension of science as fundamental to the work itself. Even as the Soviet Union officially rejected religion, it opened the door to a different kind of cosmic mythology, one in which ancient contact with extraterrestrials was treated not as fantasy, but as a legitimate scientific possibility. These ideas were often framed in speculative or scientific language, a political workaround that allowed Soviet thinkers to explore humanity's possible contact with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations without invoking the supernatural. Figures like Alexander Kazantsev and Felix Ziegel proposed that alien visitors may have influenced early human development, seeding myths and technologies that were later taken on by ancient cultures.

37:19Unlike in the West, where such theories were typically fringe, in the USSR, they were sometimes discussed in academic circles, covered in state-run media, and even investigated by military and intelligence services. This made paleocontact, as they called it, not just a conspiracy theory, but a semi-legitimate line of inquiry into humanity's cosmic origins. But it was the Americans who won the space race when they made it to the moon. And maybe, just maybe, that mission carried within it a hidden reverence for the esoteric dimensions of spaceflight that men like Tsiolkovsky and Fyodorov had long envisioned.

38:01Maybe the space race wasn't just a Cold War pissing contest, but a transcendental mission, which brings us to NASA, where the weird gets even weirder.

38:23NASA was officially established on July 29, 1958, by the National Aeronautics and Space Act. On paper, this document laid out that NASA was supposed to be a civilian agency for space exploration, devoted to quote-unquote peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind. But that idealism is tempered in the very next paragraph. The act makes clear that the general welfare and security of the United States requires such an organization. And that any activities peculiar to or primarily associated with weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States fall outside the civilian mandate.

39:04In practice, that meant if NASA found anything deemed strategically sensitive at all, a breakthrough in propulsion, a powerful new sensor, or even contact with non-human intelligence, it could be withheld indefinitely. It's a reminder of something we've talked about before, the echoes of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. If you read the definition of special nuclear material in the Public Atomic Energy Act of 1954, it basically states any material that releases any kind of atomic energy. That would be retrieved crash material. So it's kind of a sneaky way. No, it is. If you actually read the Atomic Energy Act, if something is not a nuke, but it has radiological energy coming off it, you know, alpha, beta decay, whatever.

39:54Same secrecy. Same secrecy. So how did the Nazi rocket scientists get in? After Operation Paperclip, Werner von Braun and his team were brought into the U.S. to work on ballistic missiles. Many of them ended up in places like Fort Bliss in White Sands, where they were housed in military camps and worked under tight control. Swastikas and Nazi memorabilia were reportedly on open display in some of these facilities. FBI documents even showed that at one point von Braun was caught sending classified documents to his Nazi counterparts in the USSR. But it seemed like no disciplinary action was ever taken.

40:35During this period, von Braun caught the attention of Walt Disney. The two collaborated on a series of educational films about space exploration. Von Braun features a lot in them. explaining the future of space exploration and the capabilities of imagined rockets and space stations. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes.

41:14Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Extended scene. A team of astronauts travel to the far side of the moon for the first time. That's when a radar engineer yells out that some kind of radiation is being picked up on their sensors at 33 degrees. Something that turns out to be a very constructed looking feature on the terrain of the moon. Get some flares in that area quick.

42:02The film moves on without too much attention being paid to the set of ruins on the moon, almost like it was just included for those that would notice it. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, an imaginative nod to the unknowns of space. The coordinates, 33 degrees, are hard to ignore. especially given the prominence of that number in the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. There are a few Scottish Rite Masons you might have heard of, and those that were awarded the highest honor of becoming a 33rd degree. This includes the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, as well as the President, Harry Truman, and another astronaut we've already discussed, Buzz Aldrin, James Webb, NASA Administrator, Scottish Rite Mason, Kenneth Kleinecht, director of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, also a Scottish Wright Mason.

42:55We've also got Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., who flew on the Mercury and Gemini programs. And then you have Walter Shura Jr. and Don Eizel, who flew on Apollo 7, as well as Virgil Grissom, who flew on the Mercury program but sadly passed away in the training capsule fire for the first Apollo mission. Thomas Patton Stafford flew Apollo 10. All Freemasons. Later, on Apollo 15, the eighth person to walk on the moon was also a Mason, James Irwin. And another man we've already mentioned earlier, Edgar Mitchell, who spent more than nine hours walking on the moon's surface on Apollo 14, Freemason. So by the mid-1960s, the structure of NASA, and I mean the actual power structure, was a strange cocktail of former SS officers, Freemasons, and occultists.

43:47and then there's the Teos cave story. You know where I do want to go though you know there are all the conspiracies that the moon landing was faked and then there's the UFO conspiracy that Neil Armstrong saw like UFOs on the moon or whatever. I'm not proposing that I don't necessarily think that that's true but the one possibly kind of funny piece of additional evidence would be that the second expedition Neil Armstrong did was in 1975 and it was to a cave in Ecuador at the edge of the Amazon, and it was called the Teos Cave, and it was supposed to contain ancient alien metallic artifacts. And so clearly, Neil Armstrong believed enough in the possibility of that thing to go into the Amazon and risk his life and try to look for it, and a BBC documentary crew followed him in there.

44:47What we've seen throughout this video is that there's something more than a sterile materialist view of reality behind the engineering and physics of space exploration. There seems to be a kind of ritual element to it. And one of the clearest signs that NASA wasn't just about nuts and bolts science is something hiding in plain sight. The mission patches. Take the official Apollo program patch. At first glance, it's simple. The Earth, the Moon, a path connecting them, and a large letter A. But look again. Behind the A is the constellation Orion. And the crossbar of the A is deliberately aligned with Orion's belt.

45:30The three stars, Mintaka, Al-Nilam, and Al-Nitak. In Greek myth, Orion is the hunter. But to the ancient Egyptians, those three stars were Osiris, god of the afterlife, death, and resurrection. And in the patch, they're outlined in blue, given special emphasis. Strange, right? Especially for a mission named after Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. Why name the mission after one deity but center its symbolism around an entirely different pantheon? And which pantheon are we talking about here? Was the big A for Apollo? or for Assar, the Egyptian name for Osiris. In Egyptian myth, Osiris is murdered by his brother Set and resurrected by his wife Isis and their son Horus, who then defeats Set and restores cosmic order, a myth of death, rebirth, and celestial destiny written into the sky.

46:27NASA's primary launch pad at White Sands, where von Braun ran early tests, was Launch Pad 33. Same thing at Kennedy Space Center. There's only one runway. And it isn't runway 1 or A, it's runway 33. Even key mission planners had surprising backgrounds. Farouk El-Baz, who oversaw lunar science planning and helped select Apollo landing sites, was nicknamed the king by the astronauts. His father was a scholar of Egyptian religion. And of course, NASA was never shy about a little syncretism. They would mix and mash and pay homage to all sorts of ancient traditions. Juno, the Roman queen of the gods, lent her name to one of the earliest launch vehicles.

47:11Mercury, the Roman messenger god, was chosen for the first human spaceflight program. Then came Gemini, the Zodiac twins. And finally, Apollo, the Greek sun god of light, knowledge, and rebirth. One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole story is how the symbolism doesn't stop at names or patches. it carries into the actual timing of the launches themselves.

47:39Back in 1936, while Jack Parsons was still testing rockets in the Arroyo Seco, his team managed their first successful liquid fuel test on Halloween night. That date, October 31st, was originally Samhain, a pagan festival marking the midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. Over 20 years later, Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite built by JPL, was launched on January 31st, 1958. That day is known in the Christian calendar as Candlemas, but in the pagan tradition as Imbolc. The odds of the U.S. space program being bookended by Samhain and Candlemas, two cross-quarter days with deep ritual significance in European pagan tradition, are striking.

48:28Even if not consciously planned by the engineers, the timing seems to follow an occult template. Samhain as a symbolic gateway and Candlemas as a moment of rebirth. Together, they framed the dawn of American spaceflight. But we're just getting started. This alignment with sacred dates was not a one-off. During the Apollo era, launch planners sometimes chose dates that aligned with celestial or symbolic turning points. One of the clearest examples was Apollo 8, the first crude orbit of the moon. It launched on December 21st, 1968, the winter solstice, the day the sun is symbolically reborn after the longest night of the year.

49:10Apollo 8 marked the first time humans left Earth's gravitational field. And from lunar orbit, the crew delivered the famous Genesis reading on Christmas Eve. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and divided the light from the darkness. But was it just convenient scheduling, or was some deeper archetypal pattern playing out? a subconscious script of death and resurrection.

49:56I'm going to give a little warning here. What I'm going to lay out next is highly speculative. I'm not saying I definitely believe it, and it might sound a little bit out there. Let's take Apollo 11 as an example. Launched on July 16th, 1969, it coincided with the 24th anniversary of the Trinity Atomic Test, the dawn of the nuclear age. But the moon landing itself on July 20th happened under the astrological sign of Aquarius, symbol of the water bearer and bringer of knowledge. Aquarius is often linked with enlightenment and radical change, and it's tempting to think that the moon landing, timed as it was, might have been more than a technological milestone.

50:38It could have been seen as a ritual passage into a new cosmic age, the so-called Age of Aquarius. Remember, Aldrin poured wine into a silver chalice during his private communion ceremony on the moon. Humanity, in a sense, poured itself into another world. What's especially fascinating is that these symbolic alignments haven't gone away. They've continued into the 21st century. In a presentation, former CIA officer John Ramirez described one particular case, the 2005 launch of NRL-16. The mission patch was strange. It showed a pelican, a sun, several pentagrams, a silhouette of Bigfoot and palm trees.

51:21Ramirez said that the pelican caught his attention because it matched the aviary codename of CIA scientist Ron Pandolfi. Pandolfi has been a mysterious figure long tied to the UFO topic. He has worked on exotic physics, was connected to the Jasons and Mitre Corporation, and was part of the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. A lot of people say that Pandolfi works the CIA's weird desk. According to Ramirez, Pandolfi was directly involved in this NRL-16 launch. The launch itself happened on 1250 AM on April 30, 2005. This happens to be the same day of Walper Gisnacht, the traditional pagan holiday tied to the idea of gates opening between worlds.

52:08The vehicle carried a payload named Prometheus, launched on a Titan IV rocket, and headed northeast towards the constellation of the Big Dipper. This alignment has uncanny parallels to a ritual described in the 1977 grimoire known as the Necronomicon. According to the text, the best time to perform the ceremony of walking, a kind of spiritual journey to the stars, is when the great bear hangs by its tail in the sky. The ritual is said to work best around midnight, facing north, with specific emphasis on the northeast, the direction the Big Dipper rises. The number five is the sacred, and the launch occurred at 050, five years into the millennium, on a patch covered in five pentagrams.

52:56One.

53:01Some researchers, like Peter Lavenda, have suggested that figures close to these launches encouraged people like Tom DeLonge to study Greek mythology, especially the story of Prometheus, to better understand the UFO phenomena. That name, of course, matched the payload on the NRL-16. After the launch, the remaining Titan IV rockets were retired. One went to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The other went to McMinnville, Oregon, the site of one of the most famous UFO photographs ever taken in 1950. All slightly schizo coincidences? Maybe. But Lavenda has said that he's personally received letters from inside the U.S.

53:46military praising the Necronomicon for being quote-unquote spot-on, including some from officers in Strategic Air Command. For years, his book was even a bestseller at Fort Benning. In just a few minutes, we're going to be left. Annual surge costs 400 ,000 vacationers. Then there's the symbolism of the Big Dipper itself. In Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the first UFOs to appear above Devil's Tower form the shape of the Dipper in the sky. Jacques Vallée noted that Betty Hill's abduction story also began with her seeing one too many stars in the Dipper. Even Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who's very humble in his claims, has said that pilots reported UAPs emerging from the Dipper, and even dogfighting near it in orbit.

54:34Ancient Egyptian rituals used Dipper-shaped tools to send pharaohs into the afterlife. Taoist sages would trace its stars in ascension rituals. Ptolemy, one of the fathers of modern astronomy in 2nd century AD Alexandria, would also say that souls would ascend through Orion's belt. Even the Thule Society saw the circumpolar stars as a point of origin for non-human intelligences. And then look at modern super experiencers like Chris Bledsoe. Bledsoe believes that the non-human intelligence he is in contact with, which he has termed the Lady, is linked to the Dipper. and that her companions call themselves, quote unquote, the Guardians.

55:18Coincidentally, Guardians is the term now used by the U.S. Space Force. And the emblem of Space Delta 7, the Space Force's intelligence wing, shows a bear holding a key in front of the Big Dipper. So we return to the central question. Are these patterns just coincidence? Are we connecting the dots in a crazy way? Pareidolia, finding patterns where they don't exist. Or does the pattern these disparate dots create suggest something deeper?

55:55We return to Diana Pasolka in her discussions with the enigmatic Tyler D. Timothy Taylor, the NASA mission controller. One of the most curious aspects of Taylor's story is his claim that he receives downloads from an intelligence he believes is non-human. These downloads appear as sudden flashes of insight, full mental blueprints, or instructions. He says they come to him through specific protocols, and they've led to real patents and technologies. They have also shaped how he approaches his ongoing work within the U.S. space program. Even if we take the most skeptical approach, assuming Taylor is simply a high-ranking engineer with strange personal beliefs, it still leaves us with a wild but undeniable fact.

56:40Someone overseeing major NASA launches believes they are influenced by a non-human intelligence. I'm fairly sure Tim Taylor is a known entity at Kennedy Space Center. I personally tried to meet up with him once, but he had to go to Florida for a launch. And finally, I found this bizarre connection between Tim Taylor and mid-century anti-gravity inventor Thomas Townsend Brown. Brown's daughter Linda reviewed Tim Taylor's book on Amazon before anybody knew who Tim Taylor was, well before he was written about even pseudonymously in Diana Posolka's American Cosmic. And then Tim Taylor apparently told Christopher Bledsoe's son Ryan that he was part of a secret time travel program in Nassau in the Bahamas, and that Thomas Townsend Brown was the president of that group.

57:30I know a ton about Thomas Townsend Brown, and I can tell you definitively he was obsessed with time travel. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in the Bahamas with the inspiration for James Bond and Winston Churchill super spy, William Stevenson. And then there's Tim Taylor telling Pasolka that he was part of the quote-unquote adjustment team, an homage to Philip K. Dick's great book about a team of time travelers. And if we're going to entertain this speculation for a second, then how would a secret time travel program actually work? We know in general relativity that gravity and time are highly related.

58:06So maybe you do an experiment like Thomas Townsend Brown's. You might create a high voltage environment that bends space time itself. Or you might launch a very oddly timed rocket that happens to coincide with ancient traditional rituals.

58:27Who knows? I doubt we'll ever know. But even if you dismiss all of those crazy theories, it is clear that the modern space program is not just a technical story. It's a story about consciousness, belief, and the role of the human mind in space exploration. This same theme shows up in other unexpected places. Take James Ryder, former vice president of Lockheed Martin and a director at Skunk Works. In 2018, he gave a talk called The Garment of God. In it, he emphasized the relationship between mysticism, consciousness, and technological progress. In a separate lecture focused entirely on UAPs, writers spoke openly about ritual, altered states, and the overlap between ancient spiritual entities and modern contact experiences.

59:15Dr. James Lekatsky, the DIA physicist involved in the OSAP program, made a similar point. Within the U.S. government covert UFO program, Lekatsky writes that the team gained access to a non-human craft and entered it. The United States government has in its possession a craft of unknown origin and you are able to access the inside. Is that correct? Yes. But elsewhere, he's taken things further, saying that if full human capabilities were known to us right now, it is not something that we need to fear. Our capabilities never have been fully revealed, and we're still learning. We've got a long way to evolve still.

59:56Then there's Dr. Jeffrey Kripal, Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Rice University. On the Danny Jones podcast, he revealed that Charles Chase, director of Lockheed's Revolutionary Projects organization, once invited him to give a private talk to top engineers on one topic, levitation. Kripal spoke about shamans, saints, and monks from around the world who claimed to float during intense spiritual or meditative states. Apparently, Chase felt these accounts were worth studying. He wanted the engineers at Skunk Works to hear about it. And Chase wasn't alone. Other senior Skunk Works figures, Robert Weiss, Steve Justice, and Eric Schrock, along with Air Force Research Lab Commander Neil McCaslin, all advised Tom DeLonge and Peter Lavenda's Secret Machines project.

1:00:45These men weren't UFO YouTubers. They were among the most technologically capable individuals in the defense sector. It should come as no surprise then that the core thesis of the book Secret Machines is that UAP are mystical machines. According to both DeLong and Lavenda, these elite scientists frequently circled back to one concept in their conversations, human consciousness. So when experiencers say they fly the craft with their minds, it might not be as far-fetched as it sounds. It seems like people in the most elite circles of aerospace... When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

1:01:26It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Seemed to entertain the same possibility. When Diana Pasolka asked Taylor why he was interested in her work on religious studies, his answer was simple. The next development in my field, rocket science, will come from yours, religion.

1:02:10As the 20th century philosopher Henri Bergson put it, the mystical summons up the mechanical. The origins of the process of mechanization are more mystical than we might imagine. He also said, the eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend. It seems like an inescapable conclusion that the history of rocket science and physics is intimately connected to mystical traditions, the occult, and ancient mythology. Whether it was Einstein dozing off as a patent clerk in Zurich, or Dirac staring at the fire in Cambridge and downloading the Dirac equation, or Wolfgang Pali receiving the architecture of the hydrogen atom in a dream, or Heisenberg receiving the mathematical underpinnings of quantum leaps at Helgoland.

1:03:00Throughout history, genius and inspiration have been described not as invention, but reception.

1:03:10It may be something that extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence is sharing with us, or it may be the truth that is being protected by secrets, as referenced by the first man to ever walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong. We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered. Breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers.

1:03:44It was Neil Armstrong who asked to sit with my father and family. and turns out that he did talk with my father and they talked seriously about creating a new UFO research group. Wow, which was... Which, well, I think became CUFOs because Neil was, he was fairly reclusive, not like Buzz Aldrin. He didn't really enjoy the spotlight. And especially in the early 70s, there was so much more stigma attached to the phenomenon that he decided it's just not for me. But for me, some of the most telling evidence are these things. The fact that Neil Armstrong publicly sat with my father, who had good astronomical bona fides, but was known for UFOs at that time.

1:04:33He sat with him, and I know he talked to my dad about pursuing this. So I don't know what he saw or what he think he may have seen. but he was a you know jet pilot a test pilot and he decided that there's something going on and he wanted to work with my father to figure out what it was wow

1:05:03alchemist did you enjoy that well here's the thing that episode was just the tip of the iceberg So much research went into this script, and a ton of wild stuff had to get cut. I'm talking Nazi occult expeditions during World War II, debates about whether the moon is inhabited or hollow, and a lot more. If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substack. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange forgotten and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness.

1:05:43So join up today at our free or paid tiers on Substack. I am including the full link in the description of this video. And the first subscribers all get free American Alchemy hats.

1:06:32We'll see you next time. the season's most desirable menu has returned to Sweetgreen, featuring fall's best dressed. Make your move. Order on the Sweetgreen app.