Michael Aquino: The US Military's SECRET Satanist

Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie. There was a real satanist working inside the U.S. military side-up warfare program for over 20 years. The army gave him a security clearance, a rank, and eventually a medal for meritorious service. And that was still after he was accused with s--- assaulting a child. This is the story of Michael Aquino. He was a real decorated military intelligence officer who spearheaded theories on how to rewrite human perception. He grew in military ranks while he was climbing the ladder in the Church of Satan, until he left to start an infamous new cult, the Temple of Set. He traveled to a Nazi castle, the black heart of Heinrich Himmler's SS, to perform his own private ritual in their sacred North Tower. And the craziest part, he just went quiet, vanished for the last 20 years of his life, and slipped out of this world so silently that nobody even noticed he was gone for an entire year. Today, we're walking through his whole story. The satanism, the siop, the castle, the daycare, and we're going to try to figure out where the real man ends, and the monster begins. This episode has been long awaited. A lot of people have been commenting for us to cover this, so let's jump into it. Sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gaggan. And thank you so much for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting fascinating controversial stories from all time forever, and always that is what I do here in this tent every single week, twice a week, because I try to figure out everything that's going on, jump into the craziest rabbit holes and wormholes that the internet has to offer. I am massively curious, and I try to figure out all the craziest stuff. I just get hooked on a topic, and I just read every single story I can, and that is what I'm bringing to you today. No, boy, do we have a real barn burner? We've had dozens of comments for people to cover this guy with a weird eyebrows. His name is Michael Aquino. But before I jump into him, I want to say thanks to you, yeah, dude, or girl. Whoever you are, whatever you're doing right now, you're probably driving your car. You're probably going to work. Turn left right now. Now stop. Turn right. Is that illegal? I probably can't even tell people to do that while they're driving. Don't do that. Okay. Stop. Listen to the sound of it. Turn right now, drive the speed limit 10 and 2. Yes. Do that instead. That voice you just heard, that's a soul tree, Greek voice. That's my good pal. Christos Baccabacca, though, sees the friend that sits in the tent with me every single week and turns the lights on, runs the cameras, and makes this whole thing operate. How are you, Christos? What's up? No time, Christos. Because today we're talking about Michael Aquino. Now, this is the kind of story you, it's like almost hard to believe that it's real. It is like the core conspiracy thing where you're like, there's no way this is possible. And this is the kind of stuff I love to jump into. It's like, these are the real conspiracies. That's what I consider the show. This is like the sports center of conspiracy theories, where we take every single theory and we break down what is definitely true, what is definitely false, and then what's in the gray area like, well, maybe. And this episode is fascinating. Michael Aquino, as you can see on the screen here, is a very strange and eccentric and kind of a dork to be honest with you. He is a real guy who was operating in US military up until very recently. His name is officially Michael A. Aquino, Jr. He was born San Francisco on October 16th, 1946, and according to those who knew him, he was a pretty smart kid. He was on a strong academic track and in 1968, when he was 22 years old, he entered the army through ROTC and landed in one of its most unusual specialties, psychological operations. Hey, real quick, most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop, religion camp, history camp, and camp gagnon. Well, let's get back to it. Now, of course, this is like cold wartime, so things were insane. Now, whether this was by his design or what you would call fate, difficult to really say for sure. Now, we're going to get more into what, you know, a siop actually is in a minute, but for now, we're just going to stick with who Aquino was at the very beginning of his life, right? He was a young, buttoned up army officer trained by the US government basically in the art and maybe science of influence and persuasion and manipulation. And essentially, he was getting trained on how to get inside the head of the enemy. How do you get into the brain of the Soviets and anyone else that's going up against the United States and how do we destroy them from the inside? Then by 1969, like so many others, he gets sent to Vietnam. But unlike many other people, fighting the war was not the only thing that he was doing while he was there. So at the same time, this disciplined young officer was also writing something. It was not a military report. It wasn't a personal diary. It was a piece of a cult literature called the diabolicon. So what is it? Exactly. Well, Aquino wrote it shortly after falling in love with John Milton's paradise to loss. Yeah. That is a 17th century epic poem where Satan is basically the main character, like a sympathetic misunderstood villain. So that gave Aquino the idea to write a devil who isn't just cartoonishly evil, but like a proud rebel, a revolutionary with his own point of view. So he wrote a short prose tract, some accounts to scribe it as only like 18 pages, laying out his own mythology of Satan. And the format of this text is honestly really weird. It's written as like a series of first person statements. Each one's supposedly spoken by a different demon. From Satan, Biel's above, Belial, Leviathan, and a bunch of others narrating the creation of the world and their gift of free will and intelligence to mankind. So it's not really a novel. It's not like a poem. Think of it more like almost like it's own dark scripture, like a Satanic manifesto. And Aquino wrote it under combat conditions in Vietnam. And he later claimed part of the manuscript was even destroyed by enemy fire at one point, but that as he wrote it, he felt like he was sensing the words rather than choosing them. Almost as if he was a channel on the words were coming to him and he was just transcribing this sort of, you know, divinely or satanically inspired piece of literature. Now, a lot of people assume that Aquino's occult life came after his time in the army. Like almost like a midlife crisis or something. That's not true. Because we know he wrote the diabolicon in Vietnam, but also on the flip side, we don't have any strong evidence that he was some type of like lifelong occultist before the army. Like there are like vague mentions of his early interest in religion and philosophy and like history from when he was a kid, but nothing that points to like a deep involvement in the occult growing up. He wasn't like 12 years old like doing say ounces and stuff or at least, you know, from what we know about his life. That being said, Aquino's two lives, right, like the military officer buttoned up like servant his nation and then like the occult satanist. They seem to have started kind of at the same time. So he enters the army in 68 and then he walked into Anton Le Vays Church of Satan in 69. So those storylines are kind of side by side. Like one year he's in a military office and, you know, signing some papers. The next year he's in the church of Satan. So the soldier and the sorcerer weren't like decades apart totally separate. They were born within a year of each other, potentially even like within the same couple days. So what's interesting about these two institutions, the military and, you know, this occult order that he belonged to at the time, is that they both share some central themes, specifically hierarchy. So like ranks, degrees, you know, secret intel sort of initiations and a very careful management of what people believe and why. So we kind of have the foundations for the rest of the story right here. Aquino wasn't some soldier that dabbled in the dark arts, and he wasn't a, you know, like occultist that happened to enlist in the military. He was a young man who was just starting to learn how to play around with the structure of both worlds, the very tangible, real reality of combat, as well as the esoteric reality of the spiritual world and became extremely immersed in both and ultimately learned how to climb the ladder and access a system of secret knowledge and, you know, all of the attempt to learn the power of controlling people's perceptions. The army would teach him half of that and the man that he was about to meet in San Francisco would teach him the other. Now at this point, the story is going to change scenery from Vietnam to a little suburb in San Francisco from the military to a church. So for backstory, 1966 and San Francisco, you got this guy named Anton Leve. You probably seen a picture of him. He's a pretty bizarre looking guy. He founded the church of Satan and we did an entire tent talk on this guy so you should check it out on this channel. But for this episode, what you need to know is that Anton Leve's church of Satan is a little strange because Anton Leve didn't actually believe in Satan. So Leve and Satanism was and still is essentially atheistic. If you look past like the candles and the theatrics and the showmanship, Satan isn't and actual being prayed to in their mind. He's a symbol, effectively like a middle finger to conventional religion, specifically the Christianity that sort of dominated the culture of America at the time, sort of a stand in for individualism and rebellion and indulgence and self-reliance. So all the rituals they do, well, Levet called them psychodrama, essentially theater for a person's psyche. It's emotionally based rituals and practices designed to focus your willpower. So according to them, nobody was summoning anything. It was a rebellious and satirical philosophy dressed up in a scary costume. Now that's what they call it. Of course, Christians on the outside are like, "Hey, even if you're pretending to worship Satan, you're still worshiping Satan." If you ask Anton Levet, he's like, "No, I'm a showman." And he was absolutely a showman. He would walk around with a leopard. He was drawing attention. He had this giant house painted black. And it seemed like at the time they were trying to push back on the religious authority. So if kids were doing the Ten Commandments in school at a public school, he was like, well, they should also do the Ten Commandments of Satanism. Basically, it's a way to push back against the religious authority and trying to enforce the separation of church and state by creating like a boogeyman. So into this environment is Michael Aquino, around 1969. And as the story goes, Levet handed him a business card at a screening of Rosemary's Baby, which is hilarious. If that's true, it's like almost too perfect. We did a whole episode of Rosemary's Baby and how it's like a secret cult that tricks a woman into birthing Satan. You should watch the episode. But within a couple of years, Aquino climbed to the top of the church. He came all the way up in the ranks and he actually edited its newsletter, The Cloven Huff. And he sat on the governing council and, you know, real religious and sociological scholars. Like serious academics have flat out called him Levet's right hand man. But here's the question, how does a guy doing all of this, how does it fit with his army service? I mean, like, how are you like dabbling in the church of Satan in San Francisco? But then also being a prominent member of the US army. So we can clear up as much as we can, but honestly, the timeline here is kind of murky. The short version is that Aquino stayed in the army the entire time. His most intense years climbing the church of Satan from 71 to 75 happened after he gets back from Vietnam while he's on US soil, obviously. Now during those years, he was building his academic resume. He's stacking up different graduate degrees and he's moving through various officer assignments. And so a lot of his siop career was based right there in the San Francisco Bay area, the same city where Levet's church was headquartered. So the two worlds weren't on like the opposite side of the country. They were basically in the same neighborhood. Now honestly, the exact year by year map of his military postings in this stretch is sort of fuzzy in the public record. Different sources will list it differently. And some of this file is just straight up redacted or not public. But the big picture here isn't in dispute. This is a still functioning respected US army officer and in his civilian life, moon lighting as the number two figure in the most famous Satanic organization in the world. But at this point of crack was forming and it came down to money. A quinoe watched Levet start doing something that he couldn't stomach. Levet began essentially selling the church's priesthood degrees. Like you can kind of buy your way up the ladder. And to a quinoe who was a true believer, it seems like of Satan and of these dark arts, he took the ranks and the initiations extremely seriously. So for him, that was a betrayal. You can't just sell the sacred, like a quinoe had to work his way up. You can't just have random people by their way in. But underneath the money fight was a deeper split. This was a theological one. And this is the fork in the road that actually shifted everything between Levet and a quinoe. Because Levet said that the devil was a symbol. It represented, you know, individuality and rebellion. And ultimately they were atheists, but they liked the idea of being able to do whatever they wanted. But a quino, as it turns out, believed that Satan was real and extremely powerful. So in 1975, a quino left the church of Satan because it wasn't Satanic enough. And according to a quinoe, he didn't just quit. He performed a working. This is like an occult term for a ritual to ask the underlying force behind Satanism to reveal itself. He wanted to find out what is this? What was really there behind this symbol that Levet had kind of reduced to a prop? And according to a quinoe, he got an answer. He said that some type of sentient intelligence responded. A real independent conscious entity. And it told him that Satan was a corruption, a garbled borrowed name. And the true name, the original name of this force went all the way back to ancient Egypt. The name was set, god of the desert of storms, of chaos and isolation, and the outsider, the one who stands apart. And out of that night came a text that a quinoe called the book of coming forth by night, which he presented not as something that he wrote, but as something that he received, something dictated to him by this entity. Sets own words, name me a quino, as his representative on earth. Now, I want to be really careful about how we're framing this. We're not claiming that an ancient god spoke to a quino in San Francisco. I mean, it's possible, but it's difficult to really verify that. What we can document is that a quino sincerely believes this and built his entire life around it and never wavered for the next 40 plus years. Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I gotta tell you something. If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with finding ways to cheat biology without accidentally ruining my biology. And for a long time, I associated putting a pouch in with being focused and energized and like ready to attack the day, but the thing is nicotine is a vasoconstrictor, which means it literally narrows your blood vessels and restricts oxygen delivery to your muscles. So I'm taking something because I think it's helping me when I'm working out and it's helping me lock in. Meanwhile, my blood vessels are essentially closing the gates while my muscles are begging for supplies. So you're trying to get this awesome pump, but your body's like, eh, I'm just gonna elevate your blood pressure and give you some anxiety. And that's why I switched to ultra pouches. I love ultra ultra ultra is a 100% nicotine free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. It gives me that like pouch ritual that I like and also a really smooth energy and just a really locked in focus and it's so much better when I'm working out. It makes me feel great at the gym. They use neutropics and adaptogens and I usually feel it start within like a few minutes and I throw one in before I go to the gym, before a podcast I have one in right now. And it sharpens me up without making me feel like I'm anxious or like I'm jittery. And when I'm fasting, you're trying to clean up my diet. It really helps quiet just the food noise and the cravings that I have. It's amazing. You get all the focus, you get all the energy, you still get the pouch experience, but again, there's zero nicotine and zero caffeine. So I'm not dealing with the same wired feeling or like the crash that I get from caffeine. My favorite flavor is blue raspberry. I got the watermelon right here 'cause I already finished the blue raspberry. Ultra is the ultimate guilt free pouch, delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine and caffeine. And I've great news. If you are listening to this program right now when you use the code camp, you will get 15% off when you go to takeultra.com. That is takeultra.com, use the code camp for 15% off. And after you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them. Tell 'em to mark increased dose from the campsite. Sencha. - Velas, this episode is sponsored by Blue Choo. Look, life is about preparation. You got to prepare for a camping trip, for your job, for a podcast. And you got to prepare for all of the things happening in your life. And sometimes when the vibe is right, everyone's being an adult, you're on the same page. Sometimes people forget to prepare for the bedroom and that's why you need Blue Choo Gold. Blue Choo Gold is going to take you to the next level in the bedroom. It combines four ingredients into one powerful solution. Two to support you physically. Two to support a rousal and desire in the brain. And it works in just as fast as 15 minutes and will make you feel more confident with bedroom matters. Amongst only married relationships, that's how I promote it. Okay, I think it's only should be within the sanctity of marriage, trying to create children, okay? I'm a Catholic, that's what I believe. Now, Blue Choo is great because if you go to bluechoo.com, not only are you going to get the number one brand for better bedroom experiences, you're also gonna get a little deal. Right now, if you buy two months of Blue Choo Gold, you're gonna get the third month free with the promo code Gagnon, that's G-A-G-N-O-N. You're also gonna get an additional 10% off, plus free overnight shipping on your very first order when you visit bluechoo.com, use the promo code Gagnon, and you can check out more details and important safety information. Thanks so much, Blue Choo. Let's get back to the show. And from that ritual and that revelation, he founded the Temple of Set. The temple is not some loose gathering in a basement somewhere. This was a structured, incorporated religious organization. I mean, it got legal recognition and tax exempt status in California that same year, 1975. It had a written doctrine, a formal hierarchy, governed by a council of nine, and a system of initiation degrees that you had to earn, working your way up through study and demonstrated understanding. Now, that term council of nine, that's really important, 'cause we actually did an entire episode on the council of nine and why people believe that this is some type of governing force for reality. And you should check out the whole episode on that because it goes through all the details. And that's not just like a one-off thing that he invented. It seems like there's some type of, you know, a cult backing for this sort of concept. Now, secondly, does this structure of the temple sound familiar? Notice the vocabulary that Akino is using here. Ranks, governing council degrees initiation, this rigorous advancement based on merit [BLANK_AUDIO] mastery. Keep in mind, this is a man who spent his days inside of one of the most hierarchical institutions on earth, the US military. And in his spiritual life, he built something extremely similar, just with a different leader at the top of it. The central idea of the whole thing was a single Egyptian word, this word Kefar. It's usually described or translated to be to come into being or to become. And it's essentially the idea that a human being can consciously and deliberately transform themselves into something greater. Self-creation is the highest goal, which honestly isn't that far from what an ambitious young officer is trained to believe, to become more, to advance, to try to master yourself while you are on earth. So that's a keynote by the late 1970s. Think about it. Founder of a real religion, he's the high priest of set. And still, still, during this whole thing is serving as an officer in the United States Army. And that combination was about to produce the single most infamous document of his entire life, a document that finally revealed the tactical overlap between Syop and Satanism. So before we can go any further, we need to talk about what a Syop actually is, because it has a whole mysterious and like, I would say borderline sci-fi, cultural thing around it. But it is a very real part of the story. So let's get down to the truth of what's actually documented. Syop is, you know, an abbreviation of psychological operation. Historically, they are not mind control, which I know is probably let down. You were like, nah, dude, tell me about how they used telepathy to make people do crazy things. It's possible, but that's not generally what we're talking about. And the truth behind Syop's is almost scarier. The classic Syop isn't necessarily control, but more like infiltration and conversion, like from the inside. So instead of making somebody do something by, you know, like MK Ultra of Mind Control to their brain, you convince them that it is what they want to do. Maybe more similar to brainwashing. So stuff like dropping leaflets over enemy territory or loudspeaker broadcasts or radio messages. So, I mean Vietnam, for example, it was one of the big programs that they had. They called it chewhoy. They call it open arms is a translation. And the whole idea was to convince enemy fighters to just quit. Like be like, hey, guys, stop fighting. Come to the other side, come home. Like just, you don't need to fight for the Vietcong. You're one of the boys, become American, fight for us. And that's sort of the toolkit. It's persuasion at moments of vulnerability. And it can absolutely be manipulative. And it raises like real ethical questions, but it is a communicate. Meet new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours with flexible all-day comfy grip. Just clump, dewey hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new grippy setting mist from Mavily New York. Maybe it's Maybelline Asian strategy. So it often flies under the radar. And historically, it has not been seen as a war crime like how torture or guerrilla warfare can be interpreted that way. And it's not outwardly violent. So it sort of gets dismissed. Now, that might be generally true, but that distinction gets tested a lot. So in 1980, Akino's commanding officer, this guy, Colonel Paul Valely, asked him to write this forward thinking paper. The army was still kind of reeling from Vietnam and, you know, the perceived failure of that whole operation. And Valely wanted fresh ideas about the future of Syops. And what Akino produced was titled from Syop to mind war, the psychology of victory. And the language that he uses in it is really striking. So the paper defined mind war as, and I'm quoting the core phrase here, the deliberate aggressive convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war. The argument was that the highest form of victory might be winning before any type of violence or shooting every even starts by reconditioning how entire populations perceive reality fundamentally. Now, when you read that with who's writing it in mind, it takes on a different layer of meaning. And it sounds a lot more nefarious. I mean, we see how the mind and inner workings of someone who started his own church, like, you know, he sees himself as a cult leader and a prophet and above all a satanist, and you see how it's manifesting in his techniques as a military officer. And there's a crucial part here. Mind war was never officially a doctrine, like it was never adopted as official army policy. Akino himself later described it as a talking paper, which is just a term they use as like a discussion document meant to provoke debate around people within like the intelligence and Syop community. Filately mailed copies around to like stir up conversation and oh boy, it did. And then it basically sat in a drawer until the internet resurrected it many years later. It's framed as something that was just written to stir the pot a little bit, but there's one more inconvenient detail. Akino also wrote a paper called psychological operations, the ethical dimension. And this was basically an entire piece specifically about the moral limits of this kind of brainwashing work. So when you're cherry picking like all the craziest, scariest lines out of his peace mind war, the context of like his moral work sort of gets left out. So it kind of leaves us with a question like, well, which is it was this a terrifying blueprint for mass mind control or was this like a innocuous overwritten think piece by a guy who liked dramatic language and happened to also be a satanist and a cold leader. Well, it's kind of both it can be a provocative document and necessarily a secret government weapon. And I think that's largely kind of the truth about Akino's work. It almost it sits right in the middle and maybe that's on purpose, right? Like it seems legit enough to get passed through, but when you take a second look, you find another more insidious level now this next level happens to be maybe the weirdest one. The secret Nazi castle dungeon. Now, before we get into the darkest chapter about Michael, Akino, there's one more thread that I want to walk you through because it's a thread that Akino's story, you know, you can't really ignore it. And it turned them from just being like a weird guy with some funny eyebrows that's into Satanism into like a real villain in the public eye and definitely historically. Akino was deeply genuinely fascinated by the occult dimension of Nazi Germany. So the SS mythology, the ruins, the symbols, figures like Heinrich Himmler and his personal mystic Carl Maria Vilgut. And one place in particular, this place, Veeville'sburg castle. Now to be careful here because pop culture definitely talks about Nazi occultism and it turns into like sci-fi and like hidden supernatural power and all that kind of stuff. But what we're dealing with here isn't historical fiction. It is real. And we did an entire episode with Dr. Eric Curlander about the Nazi obsession with the occult and sort of all the threads that are tied into that specifically Heinrich Himmler. And Veeville'sburg castle is a very important dimension to all of this. If you've never heard of it, it is a real castle that Heinrich Himmler himself had tried to turn into this kind of spiritual occult headquarters for the SS. It has this distinctive triangular fortress that was built back in the 1600s. And then in 1934 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, signed a lease on it and started pouring resources into building up the infrastructure of this castle. And here's the weirdest part. He had it renovated using slave labor from a concentration camp that he set up nearby, where over a thousand prisoners died. But what was this castle for? Well, this is where we need the context because Himmler didn't just see the SS as an army or a police force, which it was. But he wanted to become something like almost like a religious order, like a brotherhood of these racially pure nights modeled on his fantasy of, of course, the medieval to tonic nights. So his long term vision was to erase Christianity from Germany entirely and replace it with this new invented pagan religion built around a Germanic myth and ancestor worship and, of course, Aryan bloodline sort of purity and mysticism. And the SS would be the high priest sort of like these warrior monks around this mythology, and I know it sounds crazy, but it's actually pretty well documented. And Veeblesburg Castle was meant to be the heart of this new religious ideology. Himmler's Vatican, basically, and Himmler's kind of like the Pope of this whole thing. There's a North Tower with a crypt where he imagined ceremonies for the SS elite and a great hall whose, you know, this giant marble floors. Where they have this dark sunwheel design that would later become infamous as the black sun, a symbol that you probably seen because, you know, neo-Nazis adopted it after the war. But back then, it had an actual use. Before major campaigns, top SS commanders were supposedly summoned there to be spiritually prepared to be purified. Like I said, I already did an entire episode on Nazism and the occult, as well as the episode with the guy that literally wrote the book about it, Dr. Eric Curlander, so check that out. But to be clear, we aren't calling it. Aquino Anazzi, his interest in their occultist material does not inherently make him anazzi, but here's what he actually did do, and this is undisputed, by the way, because he wrote about it himself. In 1982, on a NATO-related trip to Europe, Aquino visited Veeville's bird castle. All right, it's a historical site, maybe he was interested in it, I get it. And then he went down into the North Tower, the very chamber that Himmler's SS considered to be the symbolic center of this new occult religion. And there, Aquino performed a ritual of his own. Now of course, this is all very strange. Of all places on Earth that a person could conduct a private occult working, he chose one of the most morally hazardous sites in all of modern history, a room literally soaked in the symbolism of the SS with weird Nazi occult ties and renovated by a slave labor. But best, it's just like a bad look, at worst he's literally performing like these weird satanic rituals using Nazi occult energy to make it all happen. Now, his defenders will make an argument. They say Aquino just treated these as powerful, dangerous symbols, raw esoteric material, not political statements that he aligned with. They say that he was just an occultist who was drawn to charged imagery and this place is a very occult, significant place, so that was all it was. But even if you grant him that concession, and a lot of people don't, I mean, I don't. It definitely did something to his image, and it affected his reputation. I mean, he performed a magic ritual in Heinrich Himmler's inner sanctum, where the SS all gathered. He effectively welded his name to Nazi imagery in sort of the public imagination forever, which I mean, he performed a magic ritual in Heinrich Himmler's inner sanctum. He effectively welded his name into Nazi imagery in sort of the public imagination and Aquino of all people, a psychological operations expert. This is literally the dude who wrote about controlling perception. He either didn't grasp that doing an occult ritual in an SS castle would affect his reputation or he just didn't care. Or maybe he wanted people to perceive him that way, right? Let's take stock of who Michael Aquino is by this point, okay? Just a recap. He's a career military intelligence officer, the founder of a satanic church, the Temple of Set, and now a man who has performed his own private right in the beating heart of the SS's would be religion. Every one of those details is verifiable. Every one of those on its own has, you know, some type of document at explanation. But when looked at together, it paints this weird picture that seems like almost cartoonish. Like, it's difficult to believe that someone would actually do this in the modern era. And then in 1987, he was about to look more like an actual villain than ever before. So everything up until now has a kind of almost theatrical quality, right? Like you could kind of brush it off and be like, ah, he's just a weird guy, you know, the satanism and the castles and the secret papers. So the next part is not mystical or fantastical at all. I mean, real people were actually hurt. So I want to try to be as, you know, deliberate and respectful in this section as possible. And I'm just going to stick to what is documented. So a lot of what we know about this next section comes out of the federal court opinion in Aquino, the stone. So here's the story. In November 1986, the San Francisco police, the FBI and Army Criminal Investigators opened an investigation into allegations of abuse at the Presidio Child Development Center. This is a daycare on the Army base in San Francisco. The initial suspect was an employee that worked there, a man named Gary Hambright. And over the following months, dozens of children would eventually be identified as potential victims. Some cases included physical medical findings, something was undoubtedly happening to the children at this daycare. Now here's where Aquino enters into the record. One of the children, a three year old, the daughter of an army chaplain named Captain Adams Thompson, had described being abused by Mr. Gary and by two other people she knew only as Mikey and Shamby. On August 12th, 1987, that family was at the base exchange, what they call the PX. Basically, it's like a store that's on base where you can buy stuff. And according to the court records, the little girl saw a man and a woman became very frightened and identified them as Mikey and Shamby. The man was Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino. And the woman was his wife, Lilith. Now, I haven't told you yet about Michael Aquino's wife and we're going to get to her in just a second. The child then led investigators to a house on Leavenworth Street. That is Aquino's home. And she described the inside, she said it was a room with black walls. And then on August 14th, 1987, investigators executed a search warrant on the house. They seized videotapes, photographs, negatives, and even cassette tapes. Now if you stop the story right there, it's like a pretty open and shut case, right? Like, there's a young little girl, a child, three years old, barely even a toddler. And she's describing this guy and his wife as the perpetrators and then describes his house. I mean, what else is there to know? Now, if we're going to hold Aquino to a fair standard, we have to keep going because the rest of the record complicates every single detail that we just heard. So Michael Aquino was never charged criminally in the procedure case. In 1988, the San Francisco Police Department discontinued its investigation of the Aquino's. The reason on the record was, quote, insufficient evidence. No charges were filed. There was no trial and, of course, no conviction. But despite what actually happened, two stories started to circulate. On the one hand, people said the court proved he did it. And technically, that's false. No court ever found Aquino guilty of anything in this case. But the other camp says the court completely cleared him, then they completely exonerated him and he had nothing to do with it. That's also false. But the whole truth is the case didn't stop there. The Army's criminal investigator, CID, kept Aquino's name in the title block of the report of investigation. Basically, this just means that the Army administratively named him as a subject and left him named even after the police walked away. Aquino spent years fighting to get his name cleared from that report and that fight became the lawsuit known as Aquino V Stone. And that lawsuit, to be clear, was not a retrial of the abuse allegations. Nobody in that courtroom was deciding whether Aquino was guilty or innocent of the crimes committed against this child. The legal question that they were dealing with was this was the Army's refusal to erase his name from its own report, arbitrary or capricious. And the court said no. The Army was allowed to keep his name in that file. The identification from the child, the partial match of his home, the judges ruled that that was enough of a basis that the Army's decision wasn't unreasonable. So notice really what happened here through all the legal talk. A federal court looked at the evidence and said it was substantial enough that the Army didn't have to pretend that it never happened. That's not the same thing as saying he was definitely convicted in a court of law guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. And it's very much not, oh, he was completely exonerated, he did nothing and that everything was BS. It's kind of a weird middle ground, this murky administrative and like deeply unsatisfying conclusion. So the Aquino case refused to give the public a straight answer, refused to make a real villain officially and also refused to say like, nah, this guy is weird, but he's not a predator. Like you just kind of did nothing. I didn't help that society at the time that he was living in was looking for him all along. And what I mean by that is that Aquino's court cases and allegations were in 1988. Well, something else was also happening in the late 80s as well and that was satanic panic. Now you probably heard of this term, it was a real nationwide hysteria. It was basically the widespread belief that secret networks of Satanists were richly abusing children and daycares all across America and then walks in Michael Aquino who was an actual self described high priest of a literal satanic church that he founded with a proper US military security clearance who had done a real occultist ritual in a secret Nazi castle who was then accused by a child of child abuse and was from a daycare. So this becomes a little bit of a cultural problem, right? He was the culture's nightmare come true. Now it's important to note here that Aquino's case did not incite this satanic panic. That was already a huge cultural movement going on and we could do a whole deep dive on that another time, which I think there's some weird side up stuff happening with that. But regardless, Aquino happened to perfectly fit the mold of exactly the kind of villain that the whole country was terrified of but also looking for. And remember, even though he was never convicted of a crime, he was also never technically acquitted either. So the world's picture of him had effectively been soiled by that point. I mean, obviously exacerbated by the satanic panic and then it all started to fall apart. And then there was a senator, Jesse Helms, whose office got involved, objecting to Aquino's continued presence in the military specifically because of his satanic beliefs. And eventually, Aquino was pushed out of the army reserve through an administrative board process. Not because of a convicted crime, but because of his associations and the rumors that surrounded him. His occult identity had become finally a career death sentence. So for the rest of his life, Akino insisted that he was innocent, and he even took it a step further. He insisted that the entire procedure case was a hoax that, you know, satanic panic had gone crazy. This was a witch hunt, and that Gary Hambright, he had done nothing at all. Now, I haven't really told you who Gary Hambright was, so let me just back up for a second. Before I was the daycare worker at the procedure, like literally at the daycare center, he was the guy who was actually the first suspect in this entire case before Akino's name ever came up. He was a civilian employee at the center and strangely enough, a former Southern Baptist minister. In late 1987, he got indicted on around a dozen counts of molesting children at that daycare. But here's what happened to his case. It just collapsed, and it collapsed for the same reason so much of the procedure investigation also collapsed. The alleged victims were so young that a judge ruled that they couldn't testify and that the indictments were just thrown out as being too vague. So charged by charge, it all fell apart. So as a result, Hambright never stood trial, and then a couple of years later, in 1990, he died of AIDS-related illness. So the man at the very center of the original case took whatever he knew about the truth to the grave. And yet, this is the guy that Akino went to bat for. I mean, he wrote an entire book arguing that Hambright was innocent too, that none of it happened, that the entire thing was built on lies. It was just a modern witch hunt built on a moral panic against him and of people of his religion. So he gave interviews and he continued to run his temple and he kept the faith of set until the very end. In 1994, he officially retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel with, and this detail is crazy in light of everything, what they call a "meritorious service metal." He handed off leadership of the temple of set eventually, and the religion continued on without him. A small, private, kind of deliberately low profile religious organization that still marginally exists to this day. And then Akino did the last thing that you would expect. He just disappeared. He eventually died on September 1st, 2019. He was 72 years old, and the weird thing with this is that almost nobody noticed. Like there was no announcement. The news didn't even really begin circulating until 2020, like a year after he allegedly died. A man who had been one of the most photographed, disgust, and like mythologized figures in all of, you know, American occultism managed to just kind of exit the world in silence. And you should know, there are corners of the internet that insist that he didn't die naturally. They believed that, you know, it was some type of, you know, self-harm or that he, you know, took his own life or that he was silenced. Now, to be clear, we don't have any tangible evidence to indicate any of that. But at the same time, his court case back in the 80s was dismissed because of insufficient evidence. The victims were so young that their testimony couldn't really hold up. So despite the child recognizing him, leading officers to his house and then describing the inside of his house, it got thrown out. So I guess the real question is, does evidence or lack of evidence mean anything? Well, this was, to be honest, one of the wildest deep dives we've gone on. How in the world is there a real dude who was in the US military who worked in Syops, who was the right-hand man in the Church of Satan, then left because the Church of Satan wasn't satanic enough, started his own religion, the temple of set, performed his own occult rituals in a Nazi castle and then had very legitimate allegations made against him regarding sexual child abuse. I mean, I can't believe this is like an actual person that was in our military. Now, the truth is, this is just the stuff we know. This is the stuff that's like publicly available that's been written about and that we can look up. And remember, Akino went silent for the last 20 years of his life. No one really knows what was going on with him then. And there are probably a lot of other weird things between the lines throughout his story that will never be brought to the surface. His legacy lives in Syop documentation in the US court records and of course in the temple of set. But beyond that, Akino's still a mystery. And here's the pattern that I want to point out, like, you know, four true facts about Akino that you can't really dispute. And he did Syop, he did psychological operations like military mind game stuff to he founded and led an actual satanic church three. He was fascinated by Nazi occultism and did a legitimate ritual in a Nazi occult castle. And for he legitimately got investigated on a child abuse case. And like we've covered every single one of those Israel and verifiable now without adding any further evidence. You can kind of draw lines connecting these facts and turn Akino into one of the most savage monsters of the 20th century. A government trained of mind control, sadness, running a Nazi style child abuse ring under official protection with security clearance. I mean, it sounds crazy. And yet every individual part of that statement is true. Now the whole, the holistic view of him, that's what we can't really know for sure. And it's precisely that lack of knowledge it's that gap that, you know, keeps Akino's name glued onto basically every conspiracy theory that you can think of. I mean, MK Ultra, the real documented CIA mind control experiment from the Cold War, the Franklin scandal. Of course, we did a whole episode in Nick Bryant on this exact scandal. This child trafficking ring tied to a bunch of powerful people in the 1980s. I mean, everything from Bohemian Grove, Pizzagate, Epstein, you name it Akino's name frequently gets tossed into all of these circles. And it's not because anyone ever found, you know, proof linking him to these other conspiracies, but because he is just the perfect villain that fits all of them. Michael Akino's case is bizarre. And anytime people tell me like, oh, dude, this is, you know, the Satanism thing is just blowing out of control. You know, satanic panic. What are you talking about? I was like, hey, look at Michael Akino. And next time someone says that to you, send him this episode because it's all pretty weird. And that ladies and gentlemen is just a brief history of Lieutenant Colonel and Satanist and alleged abuser, Michael Akino. Now on the, the Satanic panic stuff for context, it's one of these weird times where like everyone was terrified about Satanism. So it got so big and there were so many trials around it that people kind of like brushed it off. Like people were like, oh, Satanism is being overblown. You know, this is just the Christian right that's like getting all fired up. And so cases like these kind of got like tossed out because people were like, ah, whatever. But in that almost undoubtedly, real Satanists and like real occult abusers probably got away scot free because this whole thing in the, you know, in the media kind of got blown out of proportion and people said that it was all BS. So if that happened, is it possible that that's what happened, Michael Akino? So this one child that, you know, was in this store and actually looks and goes like, hey, Mikey and Shamby, those are the people that abused me and it happens to be Akino. The people that defend him would say, hey, Satanic panic was going crazy. They were looking to just like go after people that were Satanist and some occultists say that like, hey, Satanism is like a legitimate religion. These are not evil people in that they were just targeted for their religious affiliation. You know, like you could imagine in a time after 2001, if everyone's terrified of Muslims, that people would be like, oh, that Muslim guy, you know, abused me and then people would just target them for their religion. People are trying to make the connection like a cultist specifically that Satanism is a legitimate religion that it's fine. It should be protected and that these people were targeted for that reason. That's one way to look at it. And if you technically look at the record, he was never convicted of anything. So in the court of, you know, US federal law, you can't say that he's convicted of anything improper or any type of sexual misconduct. So that part is, you know, technically true and that's one side. The other side is like, hey, Satanism is not good. Being a Satanist is bad. It's found in your own temple of set to talk with, you know, demonic entities is a moral hazard. And then the fact that there's weird connections from this child's accusation of him and his wife and describing his house and describing the room, it just makes you go, what's happening here? But that's the, that's the, you know, prosecuting side of him in the court of public opinion that he's connected to some type of darkness and that that darkness led him to a very dark place that actually hurt people. Now, it's difficult to really make a solid judgment on this because in the, you know, court system, he was never convicted or acquitted, right? Like technically the cases were dismissed because the victims are too young, yada yada, which just seems like a terrible standard. You know, I mean, like, I don't want to make the show too dark here, but it's like, because someone is so young, you can't uphold their, their, you know, their testimony. It's like, ugh, it just makes a carve out for the worst people on our society to do the thing. And they're like, oh, if I do it, we know, if I commit this crime with people of this age that I'm, you know, I can't be convicted, it's like, dude, what are we doing? But at the same time, you know, imagine there is like some kid that's like goth like this is a, you know, a case that has happened There's been a few of these but it's like there's a goth kid and then there's like a murderer that happens in the town and people are like It's the goth kid. He's weird and then they target him and if one of those is untrue and some goth kid gets targeted for a crime He had nothing to do with that's also bad So it's difficult to make like a solid judgment for me personally just on my personal basis I'm not like the biggest fan of Satanism. I don't think you should be invoking Satan Personally, I don't I try not to I don't evoke Satan. That's kind of my that's my rule. All right Crazy take I know but I don't like to do that. I don't evoke Satan and People that do it makes me go like all right It's it's all right careful easy there easy and then when there's other accusations connected to the people that invoke Satan I'm like all right, okay Something we got to look into I don't know. That's just my personal take on a keynote I don't claim to be some type of expert and In the event a keynote is innocent then so be it but I'm gonna hold a reservation until there's more information on this Creasos. What do you think of this guy Michael Akinah? eyebrows are crazy. First of all eyebrows are very crazy. Yeah, there's also I don't know if you've seen this photo, but that's kind of crazy That's Michael Akinah dressing up as Satan What are we doing? Yeah, right? Like this stuff makes me uncomfortable. I don't like this I'm not if I don't I don't like them Also, how does the US Army not know that this guy's doing this? Well, you got to think of it from the cult perspective. They're like, okay, you can be Hindu you can be Muslim You can be Christian you can be Jehovah's Witness you can be Muslim you can be Scientologist and be in the army But you can't be Satanist in the middle of Satanic panic Probably be like, hey, keep this on lock, but that would be like saying like you're gonna be Muslim after 2001 in the army That's crazy and we know like yeah, you can't discriminate against someone for being Muslim just because a terrorist attack happened And so a cultist would say oh you can't discriminate against the Satanist, but that's where as a culture We kind of decide like are we down with Satanism? If we believe in freedom of religion are we down with this religion? That's a tricky one Right, if you don't believe in any religion if you believe it's all BS then you're like yeah, who cares if you believe that like Hey, this is a an evil religion that contributes to bad things Then you're kind of drawn to be like we got to stop this But most of the people that are like you know if you're like a like a libertarian and you love the Lord hypothetically And you also love freedom of religion You got to kind of you got to contend with these things. I don't know what do you guys think? Is Satanism a legit religion should it be protected? Is this something that should be persecuted should we try to you know get it out of our military? Michael Akino stands as a You know a very fascinating kind of morbid figure in American military history and forces us to confront this question like where? How do we feel about the cult in the military? Makes me feel a little weird But maybe I'm being prejudicial and I'm open to I'm open to push back if you're in a cultist You're there's a part of your you know your faith or your worldview. Please let me know. What is your perspective? What is there? What am I missing on this in my you know if I overlooked any of the details or if I you know Maybe miss frame things in a way that's unfair. Please drop a comment. Let me know I would love to know your thoughts If you've never heard of this guy before this is the first time you've ever heard of him What was your impression? What's your takeaway? What can we say about his life and his legacy? Please drop a comment YouTuber Spotify. I read all of them now We talked a lot about satanism today great news. We have an entire channel dedicated to religion We talk about satanism and Islam satanism and Judaism Satan of Satan and Christianity Every different type of religious topic. You can imagine at religion camp if you like historical content crazy deep dives on You know different operations and military leaders. Well great news. We have history camp for you And if you like deep diving on crazy a cult and mysterious mystical conspiracies will great news You're in the right place here at camp can you also we have a secret society? That's true. Our very own secret society. We're gonna get every episode of this show completely ad free You're gonna get merged discounts. You're gonna get monthly zooms with me and the rest of the squad and Episodes that never go out to the public all for five dollars a month at patreon.com slash camp cagnon also come see me on the road I'm doing a bunch of dates at the end of the year you can go to mark cagnon live by tickets come see a show I would love to shake your hand tell you some jokes and have a great time Anyway, god bless you all. Thanks for tuning into another episode of camp. This has been the tent talk on Michael Aquino And I'll see y'all in the future. Peace Hey guys, if you love conspiracies and hypothetical history Well, I want to invite you to check out signal 33. This is a companion pod to our podcast here at camp It's made and edited by the same team that runs all of our shows and I choose the topics every single week So check it out subscribe and start the dialogue in the comment section