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Review Essay: Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination

Kennedy's Last Stand Front Cover
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A Review Essay: Dr Michael Salla’s new book KENNEDY’S LAST STAND: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 and JFK’s Assassination (Exopolitics Institute 2013)

By Come Carpentier de Gourdon

Michael Salla’s books have in common clarity, methodical progression and persuasive argumentation, all intended to convince an uninformed readership of a thesis that is far from easy to accept.  His latest work is no exception. In it Salla focuses on one main topic: the alleged connection between the assassination of President John F Kennedy and his documented attempts to gain knowledge about and disclose the extraterrestrial factor responsible for the UFO issue, all against the will of a powerful secret para-governmental Cabal that controlled and still appears to control that elusive area of scientific research and technological development.

In ten chapters, Salla surveys a vast amount of documentation drawn from across the spectrum of “ufological” literature and lists many documents, some officially declassified and others anonymously leaked, to support his theory, providing precise references for every statement and quotation he makes. His conclusions are hence abundantly supported and cogently argued in the form of propositions. He also takes pains to analyse contradicting claims and assess alternative hypotheses on their factual merit. Any reader who takes the trouble to familiarize himself with some of the sources will have to conclude that while not all the book’s deductions are proven beyond doubt, they all display a high degree of plausibility.

After using as a starting point President Clinton’s well known request to his friend and confidant Webster Hubbell to try finding out the answer to two questions that greatly troubled him, namely who killed JFK and what was behind UFOs, Salla dedicates his first chapter to Kennedy’s early years as a Naval Intelligence Officer who became close to then Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, a fellow American Irishman and former journalist. He follows the two men as they toured defeated Germany in 1945 at about the time when President Truman authorized Operation Paperclip that was to clandestinely bring to the US thousands of high-level German scientists and engineers, many working on secret weapons programmes. Some of those according to various Intelligence sources, including CIA agent Virgil  Armstrong and Capt. Edward Ruppelt later in charge of the Air Force’s Bluebook Project, involved the development of very advanced spacecraft made possible, according to the father of  the Third Reich’s rocket technology Dr Hermann Oberth, by the help of “people from other worlds”. Numerous documents and photographs from the Nazi archives attest the existence of those disc shaped aircraft. That fact might explain the resolve of the allies to gain complete control over the Third Reich’s scientific establishment and to utterly destroy a regime that posed so great a technological and military threat to all other powers.

The first chapter ends with the analysis of the circumstances of Forrestal’s mysterious death on May 22, 1949. which appears to have been the result of a political assassination while he was in Government custody on direct orders of the White House. Although Forrestal himself claimed to be under continuous threat in the last months of his life from Jewish agents who were allegedly stalking him on behalf of the state of Israel to whose creation he was opposed, there is strong evidence that the first US Secretary of Defence’s participation in a recently created secret government committee called MJ-12 (Majestic 12), dedicated to the management of Extra-terrestrial and UFO related affairs, played a role in his “termination” as he had reportedly become hostile to the official cover up policy and sought to make at least some of the knowledge he had gathered available to the public.  Salla quotes William Cooper, one of the researchers on MJ-12 in his conclusion that Forrestal was not only fully briefed on the UFO situation and had seen both the recovered crafts and the bodies of the crew but that he had also been abducted or taken aboard an alien vehicle. His tragic death disguised as a suicide is one of the early and well publicised cases that show the US Government by then was operating as a totalitarian oligarchy in which no one was safe from state-commissioned murder. With regard to the American government’s awareness of an extraterrestrial presence on earth, Salla  quotes a leaked top secret memo from General George Marshall to President Roosevelt, dated March 8th 1942 stating that  the US armed forces were in possession of at least parts of an alien spacecraft that had fallen in California shortly before that date.

Chapter 2 provides a summary account of the Roswell alien crash in early July 1947, since confirmed and corroborated by multiple witnesses and documents, including secret instruction letters from President Truman and General Dwight Eisenhower to certain military commanders. Salla establishes that the momentous decision to retract the initial Army news release about the UFO recovery and put out a cover story about a fallen weather balloon was almost certainly made by Eisenhower, then Chief of Staff of the War Department, for reasons of national security. He also shows that Kennedy, a first term Congressman was informally briefed on the real event, probably by his friend Stuart Symington who was then Assistant Secretary of War for Air, under Forrestal. In the weeks following the Roswell incident which the government rightly saw as a world changing event, the Department of Defence was reorganized into three separate services, while the CIA was created together with a number of new agencies, including the super-secret MJ-12 intended to place the country on a war footing. Salla also gives official documentary evidence for the existence since 1942 of a secret Military Counter-Intelligence Department called the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, apparently set up by President F D Roosevelt soon after the UFO retrieval near Los Angeles.

By now the book has made it abundantly clear that the US Government at the highest level was working under the assumption that it was under a very high potential threat from an “Alien” entity which also however represented a phenomenal opportunity for a technological quantum leap into the future, light years ahead of the civilisational achievements hitherto mastered.

In a Cold War climate, the rulers of the country decided this factor had to be hidden from most people at home and abroad and the most stringent precautions were taken to deny the truth. I wrote several years ago in an article that the very ratcheting up of the tension with the USSR may have been engineered in order to provide a convenient motive for the introduction of emergency policies motivated by the unacknowledged UFO “elephant in the room”.

Chapter 3 deals with the leaked 8 page Eisenhower Briefing Document on the Alien situation which was allegedly presented to the newly elected president on November 18, 1952. Extensive technical analysis of the document by the Dr. Robert and Ryan Wood team and by Stanton Friedman has led them to confirm its authenticity. One independently established fact mentioned in that document is that on September 24th, 1947 Truman had by Special Classified Executive Order set up Operation Majestic, on the day of his meeting with James Forrestal and his chief scientific adviser Dr Vannevar Bush who had headed  military research and development during World War II, including the Manhattan Project.

There is hence no reasonable doubt about the existence of MJ-12 as a central organ of the permanent, unelected secret government that was being set up in the early fifties on Eisenhower’s order (Executive Order 10432) by no other than Nelson Rockefeller who was simultaneously appointed Special Assistant to the President for Cold War Planning.

The secret government had under its control the most important issues related to national security, including advanced military R&D, Intelligence and more particularly all matters related to UFOs and Alien visitors. Additional evidence for the existence of MJ-12 is provided by the declassified Cutler-Twining Memorandum dated July 14, 1954 that specifically refers to it and lists a series of plans (for psychological warfare, unconventional war, cover and deception, command, communications etc…) that had been developed under its purview.

Rockefeller remained in charge of the committee in charge of reorganizing the government until September 1959, a few months before the end of Eisenhower’s second term. By then the CIA,whose director since 1953 Allen Dulles became MJ-1 in succession to Admiral Hillenkoetter, first head of Central Intelligence, when the latter retired, had been made the sole gatekeeper to Majestic to which not even the President could have access. The notorious Directorate of Plans, headed by Frank Wisner Sr. who retired in 1959 was tasked with the protection of MJ-12, through its Counter-Intelligence (C I) Division which was under the authority of James Jesus Angleton.

Originally, MJ-12 ran its research at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio where it concentrated much of the “alien” technological and biological material recovered in diverse circumstances and it reportedly held its meetings in the nearby Battelle Institute. However in 1955, the need was felt for a completely autonomous facility outside the control of the Air Force. Accordingly, Wisner’s second-in-command Richard Bissell together with top engineers from the Lockheed Corporation, selected a site owned by the Department of Energy, located on the edge of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Nevada Test Site, around Groom Lake. The new facility was codenamed Area 51 and extensive underground silos and labs were dug under the dry lake bed. Furthermore a few miles away another, even more secret facility was set up under the named S-4 for the sole purpose of studying and reverse engineering UFO alien technology. Funding comes from the CIA’s black budget which is virtually unlimited (“without regard to any provision of the law”)  and is not under any legislative or executive outside supervision. While the “official” black budget for the year 2013 amounts to about 57 billion dollars, according to the cost breakdown leaked by Edward Snowden, the annual  “unofficial” one according to some estimates may well exceed one trillion or even a trillion and a half dollars in the last decade or two.

GroomPapooseSalla points out that Area 51 and its advanced aircraft development work leading to such cutting edge planes as the “Oxcart” and U-2, have always provided a reliable cover for the even more exotic programmes being carried out at S-4. People, whether officials or members of the public, who show curiosity about the mysteries of the area are given some information about the experimental aeronautical vehicles being designed and tested there and sometimes are told that “UFOs” are just a cover used by the Pentagon to keep enemies and busybodies in the dark about the real military technologies under study. He cites the testimonies of a number of Area 51 and S-4 whistleblowers while pointing out that their allegations are in most cases unproven though they are generally congruent even though those former employees did not know one another.

A major result of the system devised by Nelson Rockefeller was that the activities of Majestic and its related CIA-sponsored operations became unknown to all, including President Eisenhower himself. He tried to regain control in 1958 and reportedly had to threaten MJ-12 to send the 1st Army from Colorado to occupy Area 51 if he was not fully briefed on the situation there but got only a limited update through two envoys that he sent to the base which by then had became a state within the state. A coalition of Intelligence organizations and major military industrial corporations had taken exclusive control of the research programmes connected to UFOs and no other president would be able to change that. Eisenhower warned the nation in his famous but cryptic farewell speech about the “military-industrial complex” three days before leaving office on January 17th 1961 but few people could understand what he was referring to and even fewer had the power to act. His successor John Kennedy was one of those and he was to try repeatedly to take control of a rogue secret state that had emptied the presidency of much of its substance, according to documentation that has surfaced since.

Chapters 4 and 5 document reveal when and how Eisenhower briefed Kennedy on the UFO files and on the situation he was to confront within the government in that regard. Indeed, shortly after assuming office, the new president issued Executive Order 10320, dated February 19th 1961 whereby he abolished the Operations Coordinating Board of the CIA, the successor to the Psychological Strategy Board set up in 1951 and placed all its activities under the control of his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy and the Department of State. Then, on 28 June 1961 he wrote a top secret memorandum to Allen Dulles asking him to provide a full review of its psychological operations, the bracket under which all UFO related research was reportedly being carried out.

The book highlights that Dulles, whose hold over the CIA was weakened by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs operations in Cuba, his brainchild, saw the President’s investigation as a critical threat to MJ-12’s power and prerogatives. Accordingly in September, before replying, he sent a memo to six other members of MJ-12 (the infamous “burned memo” rescued from destruction by a member of his personal staff after Angleton’s death) in which he asked them to respond before November 1961 giving their opinion on what was to be done to deal with “Lancer’s inquiries” which he pointed out significantly “we cannot allow”.

It is well known that “Lancer” was President Kennedy’s cryptonym in the Intelligence community. In his answer to him dated of November 5th, 1961, Dulles eluded the issue, alleging that security requirements did not allow him to disclose the activities of MJ-12 and that the rumors on UFOs were “soviet propaganda” though he conceded that some UFOs might be non-terrestrial in origin but added that they did not pose a military threat, a claim that has become a standard – though unproven – line in official statements from the American and other governments. On November 19th Dulles resigned under pressure from the President but not without leaving another classified document in the care of the counter-Intelligence chief, his confidant Angleton. That document refers cryptically to “Project Environment” and states that if the Government continues to hamper the growth of the “environment”, “it should be wet”. In CIA parlance, that is interpreted as a provision to kill and Salla concludes, like other researchers before him, that in effect Dulles laid the ground for assassinating a President whom he and his colleagues regarded as a traitor and a dangerous meddler into matters that were above his “need to know”.

Critics will allege that it is impossible to prove that Dulles indeed ordered JFK’s assassination through such an ambiguous document and that there is no evidence that such a decision, even if it was made, was motivated by the UFO issue since there were several other matters  (the expanding Vietnam war, the powers of the Executive vs the Federal Reserve Board, relations with the USSR, Israel’s secret nuclear programme) over which Kennedy was in conflict with the Deep State that existed since the days of Truman at least.

The Israelis, according to some researchers such as Michael Piper Collins had good reasons to order the killing of a President opposed to their acquisition of atomic weapons and US military leaders faulted Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion which had been planned under Eisenhower’s watch and of which he did not approve. Some on the Far Right accused him of being a Communist appeaser, unwilling to fight the Red takeover in Vietnam, as documented by Col. Fletcher Prouty, not without some justification as we will see further on. However the connection between JFK’s proven demands to gain full knowledge of the secret activities of MJ-12 and the CIA while cutting the latter down to size and the equally documented reactions from Dulles strongly suggests that a hidden war between the White House and the Secret Government was being waged over the UFO issue. Moreover, those who killed the 35th president may have had more than one reason to do so and it is significant that Angleton, seemingly entrusted by Dulles with the execution of his “termination” order, was in charge of both Counter Intelligence and Liaison with Israel’s Intelligence until his own retirement in 1975. He might hence have fulfilled two complementary agendas in one blow, so to speak.

In Chapter 6, Salla names the twelve members of MJ-12 in the year 1961 when the decision to kill JFK was apparently made under the protocols of “Project Environment”. By then several of the original members had retired or died and their successors are even harder to identify in view of the extreme secrecy of the programme. Among them, Edward Teller was reportedly MJ-2 and a few generals, Curtis LeMay, John Samford and Marshall Carter were then members along with eminent scientists Detlev Bronk and Donald Menzel and veteran Intelligence Operative Gordon Gray. The book makes an educated guess about the identities of the six (MJ-2 to MJ-7, listed as recipients in the heading) to whom Dulles’s memo about eliminating the President was sent.

Chapter 7 provides a fascinating insight into the initiatives taken by Kennedy in the years 1961 and 1962 to gain inside information about the UFO issues by circumventing Majestic and the CIA that had stonewalled him.

It is now known that his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy was extensively briefed on behalf of the President, by Colonel Philip Corso,  head of the Army’s Foreign Technology Desk from 1960 to 1963, who had extensive knowledge of the Alien situation. Further there are unconfirmed reports, including references in a leaked CIA account for James Angleton of a wiretapped conversation between Marilyn Monroe and two friends, including society reporter Dorothy Killgallen that Kennedy had gone to a medical facility in a US military base in Florida, possibly Homestead AFB, to see alien bodies that were kept there.

Additionally on June 6, 1963 he visited, together with Vice-President Johnson the contiguous military bases of White Sands Missile Range (the home of many of the German scientists hosted through Project Paperclip), Fort Bliss and Holloman in New Mexico, in the vicinity of Roswell. According to investigator Tim Cooper, on his specific demand Kennedy was given a classified briefing on UFOs and the ET situation. Finally, the famous ET contactee George Adamski affirmed that he had been secretly received by the President at the White House in October 1961 and had conveyed to him a written message containing an invitation to meet with certain Alien envoys on board their craft at Desert Hot Springs in California. Adamski asserted that such a visit indeed took place shortly afterwards. When one takes into account the proven high degree of access enjoyed by Adamski in high places in those years, one cannot dismiss his testimony lightly. It has now been established that he was received privately by various heads of state and by Pope John XXII himself at the Vatican. They all took seriously his status as a messenger of  visitors from other worlds.

Back cover of Kennedy’s Last Stand. Now available at Amazon.com

The following chapter recapitulates the circumstances that led to Marilyn Monroe’s sudden death on August 5th, 1962, the day before she was supposed to give a “tell all” press conference, promising to reveal quite a few damaging secrets about the Kennedy administration and the private life of the President. By then, the Kennedy brothers had distanced themselves from her on the advice of FBI director Edgar Hoover who had warned  that the disturbed actress was a security threat. Multiple witnesses have testified that the Attorney General visited the jilted and angry Star twice at her house on her last day, in the company of two secret service agents or police detectives. The general view is that Robert Kennedy had been given a mission from the President to convince her to keep the secrets he had unwittingly shared in her and in particular, to recover her “red diary” which allegedly contained many incriminating details of their relationship. It would appear that Marilyn was given a “sedative” injection which may accidentally or purposely caused her death and Salla concludes that the agent who performed may have been under CIA orders to compromise the Kennedys in order to ensure their silence. As a matter of fact, the red diary has never been officially found and Marilyn’s suspected secrets died with her. Both John and Robert Kennedy were to follow her in the grave within a few years.

Chapter 9 takes us to the central argument of the book: Kennedy’s last stand that resulted in his violent death in Dallas from what the 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassination formally defined as “probably a conspiracy”, contrary to the whitewashing conclusions reached by the Warren Commission. Recently Robert Kennedy Jr. has said that the assassination of his uncle was likely carried out by a “rogue” faction of the CIA; that amounts to a polite verbal device to exonerate the highest authorities in the land, including Lyndon Johnson who seems from many accounts to have been a party to the murder plot as he was a zealous supporter of the “black” government and of the UFO secrecy it enforced.

Indeed, the major reason why Kennedy was killed, according to Salla was his commitment to enter into a comprehensive programme of cooperation with the USSR for arms control, scientific research and space exploration, as he stated as early as his inaugural address on January 20th 1961.  Subsequently, after pledging to fight and limit government secrecy in a famous speech in April, from June 28, as we have seen, he issued the first of three successive National Security Action memoranda to release information related to space matters. Although his initial overture to Soviet Premier Khrushchev was shunned, Kennedy persisted and on September 20th, 1963 he gave a decisive speech to the UN General Assembly about his intent to cooperate with the USSR for space exploration. According to various inside sources, Khrushchev relented in his opposition on or around November October 11.

On the very next day, after holding a “hotline” conversation with him on the UFO problem, transcribed in a leaked NSA intercept, the American President issued National Security Action Memorandum 271 to the NASA administrator, James Webb, instructing him to prepare for cooperation with the Soviets and in parallel sent CIA Director McCone a top secret memo to order a “classification review of all the UFO Intelligence affecting National Security” which was to be submitted no later than February 1st 1964. That could be regarded as a frontal attack on the Majestic “black government” system and significantly, the leaked copy of the Memo bears a note at the bottom signed William Colby, then a Deputy Chief of the CIA (Far Eastern Division) saying “Angleton has MJ directive, 11/20/63”, which can be interpreted as referring to Dulles’s “Environment” contingency. The operation to kill the President, codenamed “The Big Event” according to veteran covert agent Howard Hunt, took place two days later and involved a few shadowy intermediaries and hitmen, including George de Mohrenschild, Cord Meyer, Clay Shaw Franck Sturgis, David Morales and, probably at a lower “Patsy” level Lee Harvey Oswald but the chain of command went all the way back to Majestic 12 through Vice-President Johnson.

President Kennedy’s murder appears in the light of Salla’s investigation even more ominous and consequential for American and global politics than is generally believed. It consecrated the takeover of the US State by an secret para-military and industrial unelected and unaccountable junta, capable not only of killing the head of state but also of controlling subsequent investigations in order to protect itself from exposure. Immune from any democratic or public oversight and mustering unlimited funding, the secret government has been able to develop under a cloak of secrecy a colossal technological and scientific infrastructure, partly on the strength of its access to at least one very advanced alien civilization, mostly for its own strategic and financial benefit. Although many of the breakthroughs achieved by that clandestine privatized system have since percolated down to our civilian economy as attested by the technological revolution of the last few decades, it is highly probable that the most life-changing discoveries are still hidden away in the dark folds of the military industrial complex as Ben Rich, the former head of the Lockheed Corp’s Skunkworks department openly  confessed not long before his death.

The End

‘THE RETURN OF THE AEONS’ The Planetary Spiritual Ascension

Book Review by Come Carpentier

Aeons
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform SC, USA, 2012

Richard Cook has undertaken in this work to write an autobiography or rather a ‘periplum’ of his rich and adventurous spiritual life journey that illustrates his conviction that, in his own words “a huge transition is underway in human consciousness”. He goes on to state that “…it can be demonstrated that for the last two centuries at least, the Higher Powers and Divine Beings that help God oversee the Universe are also here, accelerating their activities on earth collectively. I call these beings the Aeons, using a term from the ancient Gnostic texts”. He identifies those Aeons as the Elohim –gods and goddesses – clearly designated in the Torah as the creators of the Universe and of all beings in it, including man and he equates them with the Angels of later biblical passages and with the Bodhisattwas of India and East Asia. In that light so-called “monotheism” is inseparable from its “polytheistic” counterpart as all religions attest in one way or another.

In his preface, the author lays out his goal and though his initial textual reference is the esoteric tradition stored in the many  volumes pertaining to the Chaldeo-Egyptian Gnosis, he aims to relate those abstruse teachings to many of the other ancient and contemporary spiritual schools of wisdom of East and West which he studied all along his life. Indeed the Greek term “Aeon”, alluding a very long period of time, is an etymological cognate of the Sanskrit “ayus” which also means quasi-eternity and is applied to certain deities and Buddha’s of the Indic pantheon. Cook has concluded from his many years of peregrinations among the most varied mystical and metaphysical communities that “the ultimate goal of Ascension – to attain God realization – (is) to be experienced by many more people to the extent that it becomes the guiding principle of human and planetary life”.

An American who spent thirty two years in the service of the Federal Government, including twenty-one in the unromantic Treasury Department, Cook has been able, sometimes at great personal cost and sacrifice, to juggle a bureaucratic career with a quest for Truth that also helped me to live as a polymath indulging in the most diverse manual and intellectual activities. What may appear confusing to some at least at the beginning of the book is that he weaves together with great confidence topics that are not generally seen as related, such as meditational practices, sacred texts of various religions, contemporary channelings of parallel world entities, UFO sightings, the interpretation of crop circles and expert analyses of American and global political and financial processes of the past and present.

Though some of this inevitably reminds his readers of the theories of Von Daniken, Graham Hancock and many other advocates of extraterrestrial origins and alien spiritual guides, Cook suffuses his narration with the glow of his own meditational practices and experiences so that he never lapses into mere theoretical speculation based on sundry readings. He quickly points out the similarities between allusions to the divine essence in the most diverse testimonies, beginning with Jesus’ own citation of Proverbs 22: “Ye are Gods and all of you children of the Most High” and concluding that “…modern science is beginning to understand that the universe is an embodiment of intelligent infinity”.

One of the early formative influences in Cook’s spiritual journey was the school of Gurdjieff who had such a profound, though relatively little known effect on many prominent personalities of the last century. It is noted in passing that in his often-puzzling volume entitled Beelzebub’s tale to his grandson. Gurdjieff’s eponymous character travels in a celestial vehicle called “Karnak” and run by a perpetual motion engine. Gurdjieff also refers to Aeons in the higher Heavens, thereby hinting that he was an heir of the Gnosis, which our author describes, briefly in its main teachings before drawing the conclusion that the only choice open to human beings of any culture and spiritual tradition is between service to others and service to the self, between altruism and egoism. In subsequent chapters the notion of ego is analyzed, both in terms of yoga as a compound produced by a mind fixated on and deluded by the three lower chakras of the body and as the “false personality” diagnosed by P D Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most famous disciple.

In another part of the book Cook comments that all yogas are passages to God realization and that hence all religions have their yogas as “a spiritual path or religion without yoga is an impossibility”.

Some chapters are dedicated to a review of some of the most significant channeling material collected over the last few decades mostly in the US under the alleged dictation of various extraterrestrial, alter-dimensional or divine entities, such as The Nine referred to by Andrija Puharich and Phyllis Schlemmer in their popular tome The Only Planet of Choice or RA channeled by Don Elkins and Carla Rueckert who also wrote Secrets of the UFO. Some of this material is regarded with suspicion by many in America and even more so outside that continent but Cook shows that it fulfilled a very significant function by reviving the awareness of a metaphysical reality in an agnostic and materialistic society and he points out that “truth can only be known by awakened consciousness”. Furthermore those neo-gnostic arcanes inspired Gene Roddenberry, a member of the group gathered around the oracle of The Nine to create his world famous cosmic epic.

In Chapter 8, Cook argues that our planet and mankind are currently in a process of transition to the fourth dimension which he relates to Alexei Dimitriev’s theory of a cosmological vibrational shift linked to the entrance of our solar system into a new area of the Milky Way. He also refers to the Course in Miracles channeled by two Columbia University researchers, Schucman and Thetford in the sixties to highlight the nearly universal message that old age, illness and death are among the illusory perceptions that stem from the ego and have no reality outside of it.

The “Alien” factor reappears in chapter X which quotes the aforecited Only Planet of Choice in its affirmation that Adam is said to have been created by visitors from the sky in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia some 34 000 years ago, more or less as recorded in ancient Tibetan literature. There is also a discussion of the fascinating implication in various Gnostic texts that the so-called Archons, often thought nowadays to designate some of the Extraterrestrials, figuratively “put to sleep” the first humans to keep them in thrall or in a state of ignorance of their real selves. An allegory of that intervention may be found in the Biblical Genesis when the Serpent incited Eve to share with her husband the fruit of the tree of Good and Evil, thus leading to their metaphorical eviction from Eden.

The Kabbala and its very powerful symbol of the Tree of the Sefiroth also holds great fascination for Cook who studied the writings of the Bulgarian master O M Aivanhov, himself a pupil of Peter Deunov and also of Yogi Balaji, Yogananda’s master. After spending years immersed in the rather cold and unsentimental atmosphere of a Gurdjieff study centre run by Hugh Ripman, a World Bank official, near Washington DC, he acknowledges that he was eager for a more emotionally fulfilling and loving way which he found both with the Sufi master Abdullah Dougan from New Zealand and with the Indian spiritual teachers Swami Ramdas and Shivabalayogi (in his ‘second” incarnation as M P Singh), two in a long series of Hindu gurus whom he followed in their writings or in person over the years.

He observes that all those Eastern masters did not turn him away from Jesus Christ, the divine icon familiar from his childhood but rather helped him to discover him, just as the channeled teachings quoted earlier disclosed the cosmic nature of the Christic symbol as the embodiment of a being descended from a higher world or dimension. Some of the writers who contributed to the redefinition of Jesus in his allegorical and archetypical function according to Cook were, after the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, Emmet Fox and Joel Goldsmith, the New Thought school as well as the books Love without End by Glenda Green and A Course in Miracles. They all tended to describe the phenomenon of Redemption as a spiritual awakening, fundamentally similar to the Hindu Moksha or Buddhist Sambodhi or Satori as to the Sufi Haqiqa or Marifa or the Chinese Tao. There is even a parallel with Nieszche’s controversial address in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “Lo, I teach you the Superman, he is that Lightning, he is that Frenzy”.

The popular Course in Miracles, also related to the RA Material and to Andrija Puharich’s channelings, professed a similar view of the Christ, echoed also by Aivanhov and the neo-Gnostics Bordeaux-Szekely and Samuel Aun Weor, supporting Cook’s conviction that some of the most fundamental breakthroughs in science are rooted in spiritual insights. He reminds us that Nikola Tesla stated that his discovery of the mechanism of wireless transmission of electricity was inspired by a meditation on John’s Book of Revelation and he relates the work of the great Serbian inventor to the insights enshrined in all those wisdom traditions of the past and present.

Cook’s spiritual development appears all in all to owe the most to the Indian traditions, both through his readings of some of the ancient philosophical classics such as the Bhagavat Gita and the Yoga Vahsista and his many years of study at the feet of various living Indian yogis (including Swami Satchidananda who gave him the Sanskrit name of Ramcharandas), who according to Gurdjieff’s classification in The Fourth Way embody the third and highest level of human unfoldment above the Fakir (physical) and the Monk (emotional). Our author remarks accordingly that “the spirituality of the modern world has been defined by Indian teachings more than by any other source” ever since the first Indian philosophical classics were translated into European languages, beginning with  Wilkins’s English rendering of the Gita in 1785.

Gurdjieff did not ostensibly acknowledge his own intellectual debt to India and Tibet which is apparent in various ways, also through the influence of various Sufi masters from the Naqshbandi and Chishty orders who adopted many precepts of yoga and Vedanta in their own teachings. His own interest in Sufi silsilas (lineages) leads Cook to reflect on the current resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in its most militant and violent form in various regions of the world and like most objective observers, he cannot help concluding that modern Western civilization through its aggressive expansionistic materialism and its neo-colonialistic policies, consisting in the inoculation of that individualistic, spirit-negating virus everywhere, is contributing powerfully to the arousal and growth of that ominous phenomenon.

As a government servant, aware of some of the murky and nefarious practices and manipulations commonly resorted to by the powers-that-be, our author could not fail to notice the obvious evidence of an insiders’ conspiracy and cover-up behind the dramatic events of September 11, 2001 in the US and he connects the real planners and causes for that atrocity with the long-standing subversion of the American Republic by a banking-financial oligarchy enforcing its will through criminal syndicates and “black operations” which produced repeated bank crashes, the Lincoln and JFK murders as well as the assassinations of other presidents and several wars. He notes philosophically that “government denials in this and other areas (such as the reality of UFOs) mean nothing. Government officials are trained to lie. It is called “security”.” This situation leads him to heed the many doomsday predictions made in recent years about the fate of the United States which appears set on a self-destructive course”.

Among the many intriguing bits of information on many subjects spread throughout the book there are various references to the spiritual progeny of seeds planted by Eastern masters on American soil such as “Sufi Sam”, an heir of both Levi-Strauss Jeans and Rothschild banking fortunes who became a disciple of Pir Inayat Khan, studied Zen Buddhism and Yoga, was given the mystical name Ahmed Murad Chishty and wrote among others, a long poem entitled Siva Siva. Another spiritual “hybrid” of East and West known to Cook is the Cherokee medicine woman Dhyani Ywahoo and yet another unexpected “soul child” of India is Olympic champion Carl Lewis who follows the Indian yoga guru Sri Chinmoy. Cook himself founded the Chesapeake Dhyan Centre and wrote the earlier book In the Footsteps of the Yogi retracing his travels with Shiva Balayogi in the United States in the service of the latter’s spiritual mission.

A critical question raised by this book is the ultimate significance and value of the great syncretistic fusion between Eastern and Western traditions, involving ingredients from India, the Middle East, Central Asia, China, Japan and Tibet as well as from Ancient and Medieval Europe, Pre-Columbian America and even the legacy of some outstanding personalities from the young United States, such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the later Transcendalists Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman. Many people, in Asia, Europe and the western hemisphere are disturbed by what they regard as a threat to the integrity of their respective and distinct traditions in this growing mixture of teachings that for many centuries developed in relative separation from each other.

Can the widespread adoption and combination of sundry elements from Christianity, the Kabbala, Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist, Taoism, Islam and Hinduism not lead to the loss of those authentic schools of knowledge through their merger in a global crucible?

The answer to this legitimate question is necessarily complex. Though there is every reason to fear any attempt to blend seemingly heterogeneous diverse superficial cultural ingredients and practices into one globalised hodgepodge, there is no doubt that the history of mankind is made up precisely of such encounters, combinations and tradeoffs without which none of the major religions and civilizations would be what they are. Furthermore there is a fundamental difference between the systematic “imperialistic” tendency to annex select elements of a foreign culture in order to strengthen one’s own while flooding it with one’s own concepts and products (as the colonizing West has done for many centuries in Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas) and the instinctive human urge to exchange and spread knowledge and mutual understanding in order to avoid increasingly devastating misunderstandings and conflicts. Richard Cook’s book provides a telling testimony of the synthesis that has effectively taken place at a certain level in America at least since the Beatnik revolution of the sixties if not before.

The driving impetus of many Indian and Tibetan spiritual masters, even prior to Swami Vivekanda’s address to the Chicago World Religious Council (Cook reports that Shivapuri Baba, a member to Sri Ramakrishna, born in 1826 taught yoga to Queen Victoria in the 19th century) is to spread the Sanathana Dharma to the West, whether in its Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sufi or Sikh form. Yet they see no conflict between their age-old precepts and the actual teachings of Jesus although they are aware of the opposition they always face from the “Abrahamic” clergies and the latter’s dogmatic faithful afraid to lose a self-styled “chosenness” in the eyes of their  “True God”.

Responding to that exclusivistic attitude some Indian intellectuals – but almost no traditional guru – have sought to define Hinduism in a similarly dogmatic manner, thereby doing a disservice to the universal nature of the Dharma which they attempt to circumscribe in ethno-cultural terms. There is no doubt that Abrahamic monotheistic faiths are rooted in a notion of divine arbitrariness and irrationality which shuns any logical endeavor to explain the Faith as it rests on textual authority and prophetic proclamation. However the free soul’s quest that begins with meditation and soars towards contemplation of the transcendent and immanent essence of all things, often described as mysticism, enables its adepts to break through the glass ceiling of “semitic” creeds by rising above ecclesiastical hierarchies and legalistic interpreters and enforcers.

It is therefore through the medium of mysticism that all those differences are erased and reconciled while inter-religious conversion becomes meaningless and even harmful, as the wise men and women of al religions have concluded.

In the unity of all souls, Kapila, Zarathustra, Patanjali, The Yellow Emperor, Mahavira, the Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao Tzu, Hermes Trimegistus, Jesus, Plotinus,  Dogen, Hildegard von Bingen, Milarepa, Francis of Assisi, Jelal uddin Rumi, Gregory Palamas, Quetzalcoatl, Meister Eckhart, Guru Nanak, Giordano Bruno, John of the Cross, Leonardo da Vinci, Spinoza, the great alchemists converge with Shirdi Sai Baba, Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sri Aurobindo, Thich Nhat Hanh …..and innumerable others, known and obscure in all times and places. No intellectual discourse can object to or deny that true Communion of the Saints but that never did nor should prevent people from adhering faithfully to the spirit and word of their respective religious traditions while many who are essentially culturally uprooted such as many modern Americans and Europeans –and as many contemporary Asians and Africans – can be expected to find comfort in syncretistic formulas of the kind that Richard Cook has gradually achieved for himself.

The Indian author Rajiv Malhotra has called a “U-Turn” the process whereby westerners, after following for years “Indic” precepts or gurus, go back to their Judeo-Christian tradition, selectively adding to it elements retained from their “oriental” experiences, not unlike what Muslim spiritual seekers did when they absorbed Indian yoga and Vedanta concepts and practices to build syncretistic Sufism within the Islamic fold.

Cook may be seen on the surface as falling within that predictive framework as, in this later part of his life he reports following some practices of Catholicism, but in fact he remains faithful to the legacy of his many previous guides without disowning any of them. Yet is the true meaning of “catholic” not universal? He recalls in this context the prediction of Aivanhov that the only religion of the future age would be that of the Sun, which in many esoteric traditions, including the Gnostic “Church of John”, the Christ is held to embody as a metaphysical principle.

In that context, we are far past the outdated, puerile belief that humans are the highest life form in an otherwise desertic mechanically evolving cosmos. The universality of life, taught or at least hinted at by all ancient religious and spiritual literatures, becomes a given and the Aeons, Archons as well as all other “Alien” creatures are acknowledged as a matter of fact. Richard Cook places “ufology” and its allied sciences in the wider exopolitical and noospheric framework, a well overdue transition beyond the endless attempt to prove again and again to those in denial that there are spacecraft from Elsewhere in our skies and “beings from above” who come down among us.

In Love without End, Jesus is channeled as announcing “a new era of science and technology where activity is no longer based on explosive forces, as with the internal combustion engine, but on attraction, as with electromagnetism”, This prophecy, earlier voiced by Nikola Tesla and Walter Russell among other pioneers, is widely echoed by many other soothsayers and clairvoyants from East and West and seems to be finding confirmation from recent breakthroughs in physics, astronomy and biology.

Out of this odyssey through Gnostic and Essene symbolism, yogic meditation, “monetary metaphysics”, Taoist therapeutics, Buddhist psychology, Mayan cosmology, Sufi mysticism, accounts of prophetic messages reported by UFO contactees and New Age philosophies this book abstracts a gospel of confident hope rooted in the faith that the law of Nature dictates our ascension as a species into ever higher spheres of being, with the benevolent support of those, our Guardians, extraterrestrial or interdimensional, who reached them much before us.

The End

 

From India to Infinity

by Come Carpentier de Gourdon

The meeting attended by a large number of scholars, journalists and intellectuals (at India International Centre, New Delhi on April 18th, 2012),was opened by the chairman of Har-Anand Publlishers, Mr. Narendra Kumar Goel who asked the author of the book to make some introductory comments.

Mr Come Carpentier proceeded to outline four important themes discussed in the book:

1-India’s legacy as an eminent member of a Pan-Eurasian civilization whose origins go back at least ten thousand years and which used to be called “Indo-European” or “Aryan” but is now more accurately identified as “Eurasian” (J. Greenberg), “Paleolithic continuity” (Allinei), “Nostratic” (Holger Pedersen) or even “Anatolian” (Colin Renfrew). Sanskrit is the most complete and elaborate surviving language from that advanced very widespread and culturally rich continental civilization which gathered many different ethnic populations.

There is a great deal of evidence that such a civilization was pluralistic, inclusive and open. As its main heir enjoying uninterrupted continuity with it India has always displayed the same features and as such it provides both a platform for inter-religious and inter-national unity but also reconciles many apparently contradictory antonyms such as monotheism and polytheism, order and chaos, finite and infinity etc…

2-The scientific knowledge acquired and preserved from ancient times in India has acquired new relevance with the rise of the “new sciences” such as quantum physics, epigenetic biology, astrophysics and cybernetics which are testing and confirming some of its precepts and conclusions.

3-Politically India is seen as a potential ally but also as a challenge by the still hegemonic western, mostly Anglo-Saxon empire whose ideological basis is Judeo-Christian and which fears India’s intellectual and spiritual otherness that keep it outside the dominant materialistic-consumerist-reductionist paradigm. India’s traditional approach to scientific inquiry is similar to the method practiced by Leonardo da Vinci and escapes the institutional dogmatism that characterizes the contemporary scientific establishment.

4-India’s ancient cosmology is also finding increasingly solid support in the new vision of the universe which is emerging out of “ufological” observation and research as presented in the science of Exopolitics. Instead of being a closed system surrounded by a dead and inanimate universe, the Earth is found to be an open living planet in constant interaction with the living, biologically thriving surrounding cosmos, inhabited by many species, some of which must necessarily be far more advanced than ours. We are compelled to review our notions about mankind’s place and the structure of the world in the light of the evidence gathered in this field.

Three scholars had been invited to comment.  The first one, Dr Oscar Pujol, an eminent Sanskrit and Indological scholar from Spain who is the director of the Cervantes Institute in New Delhi (Spanish National Cultural Centre) gave a fairly detailed account of the book which he described as “mind boggling” and “refreshing” at the same time. He dwelt on the new scientific vision proposed by the book and in particular, on the notion that “Super-Human”, possibly extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional forms of intelligence are interacting with mankind in a more or less covert or surreptitious way to help us gain and take advantage of technologies which have the potential of saving both mankind and the planet from the grave crises that are engulfing them and threatening their survival. He hailed the optimism of that vision and commended the author’s willingness to brave official and academic rejection by openly discussing the theme of “aliens”. Dr Pujol concluded by saying that the western enlightenment anthropocentric approach, as opposed to the Indian traditional “biocentric” vision was technically “asuric” (demonic) because it subordinated the whole to a part. He applauded the author’s proposal for a synthesis between insight and experimentation, between knowledge and wisdom and between tradition and innovation, defined as “Cosmosophy” and meant to provide solutions to global issues.

The second discussant, Prof. Bharat Gupt, retired from Delhi University, Founder Trustee of the International Forum for India’s Heritage  expatiated further on the theme and pointed out that as an Indian scholar he was fully at home with the concept of various inhabited worlds and of many types of semi-divine and divine beings and also with the notion of cyclical time space. He acknowledged the growing evidence of Secret Government and military related R&D programs in certain countries presented in the book, about UFO-related matters and called for another Armand Assange to find and release secret documents on the matter. He also emphasized the need for scholars both in India and abroad to undertake research into those neglected aspects of traditional scholarship instead of only arguing the same tired old ethnological, linguistic or social controversies.

The third commentator, Prof. Lokesh Chandra, one of the world’s foremost authorities on Buddhist literature, art and philosophy and the Director of the International Academy of Indian Culture, continued in the same vein by pointing out that the concept of many dimensions and many universes is an inherent part of Indian cosmological and physical models and that the Hindu-Buddhist worldview is always open, indefinite, evolving and expanding. He pointed out that one of the universe’s names in Sanskrit which means “brahmanda” or “the expanding egg”. That notion of constant movement and evolution is quite different from the “Semitic” definitive and closed description of the world from beginning to end, as the book FROM INDIA TO INFINITY argues and Lokesh Chandra suggested that the authoritative faith-based profession of monotheism had opened a rift between religion and empirical reality from which Hinduism and Buddhism are both immune, at least at the metaphysical level. He ended by saying that he wished “All Indians would read this book” to understand the importance of their won heritage and the role they should play in the modern age.

Among the audience, one of the world’s most famed scientists and scientific policy-makers Prof. MGK Menon, ex-Chairman of the India International Centre who was minister of Science and Technology in India., President of the National Academy of Sciences, Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Indian Institute of Technology and played many roles in global organizations, (he is currently a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society (UK) was highly appreciative of this discussion and expressed the wish that more such intellectual debates could be held. His positive general response to the exopolitical theme is to be noted. He also happens to be an uncle of the powerful National Security Adviser (NSA) of India, Dr. SS Menon.

In the question and answer session that concluded the evening no one questioned or doubted the exopolitical thesis and the underlying evidence for it. All in all, it was a very successful and well received introduction of the exopolitical theme to a sophisticated but generally uninformed audience.

Retired US Navy Commander briefs Indian parliamentarians & academics on the implications of ET issue

Dr Scott Jones (Commander, US Navy, Rtd.)

Dr. Scott Jones (Commander, US Navy, Rtd.) visited New Delhi, India from April 19th to April 23rd, 2011 after spending three days in Pune, Maharashtra where he made a presentation to the Maharashtra Institute of Technology (MIT) and met with various representatives of the academic community.

In Delhi, Dr. Jones gave a talk on April 20th at 6.30 pm at the prestigious India International Centre, the premier public cultural and intellectual forum in India’s capital. The talk was moderated by Come Carpentier de Gourdon, Convener of the International Board of World Affairs, the Journal of International Issues, and was well received by the audience, which asked many questions and engaged in a lively discussion with the speaker.

In the morning of the 20th, Dr. Jones met with Dr. Manmohan Sharma, the Secretary General of the Indian Association of Parliamentarians for Population and Development (IAPPD) and its Chairman, Prof. P J Kurien, an eminent physicist and member of the National Parliament (Lok Sabha) who sits on the Parliamentary Defense Commission. Dr. Kurien who held several portfolios as a Cabinet Minister in the Government and who was chairman of the Indian Institutes of Technology Central Board is a close friend of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and the Defense Minister, Mr. Antony. Dr. Kurien was accompanied by another Member of Parliament, Mr. Khanna and by a University Professor who is one of his advisers.

During more than one hour, Dr. Jones briefed the Indian visitors on the ET/UFO related issue and its global, strategic, cultural and spiritual implications. Dr. Kurien said that he was broadly aware of the matter and showed strong interest as well as an intention to bring it up with the relevant members of the Government. He paid special attention to the draft “Space Peace Treaty” that was presented to him by Dr. Scott Jones and he highlighted the passage referring to the incidents of “ICBM shutdowns” caused by UFOs in the US on various occasions.

On the following day, April 21st, Dr. Jones sent by courier three briefing documents, including the text of the aforesaid Treaty to the respective Ambassadors to India of the Russian Federation, the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The courier package sent to each included a seal-shaped symbol of P.E.A.C.E, the not-for-profit organization founded and run by Dr. Scott Jones and Mr. Neil Freer. That symbol featured one of the oldest icons of Indian civilization, an exquisite engraving of the great Indian humped bull or Zebu (bos Indicus), from the 7000 year old Indus-Saraswati civilization, that is also the animal totem of the great God Shiva, the lord of Nature, yoga, generation and destruction.

A similar briefing package has been delivered, to the care of Dr. Manmohan Sharma for the Indian Minister of External Affairs, Dr. Krishna.

Dr. Scott Jones left New Delhi to return to the United States on April 23rd, 2011.

 

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