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

What is rocket science really? In this special episode of American Alchemy, we're going to pull on all of the threads of this hidden history. Sex magic, Nazi scientists, secret societies, launch rituals, rockets launched in time with pagan festivals, Walt Disney's hidden messages. This is the story of how communication with non-human intelligence might just be the real and hidden foundation of our entire journey to the stars. The whole subplot of our modern space perfect. The date is July 16, 1969. 230,000 miles away from home. Sat NASA astronauts, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin. Just two and a half hours before, they had become the first pilots to touch down on another world. As they prepared for their first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin opened a small kit of personal items that he had brought with him. Aldrin then proceeded to carry out the first religious ceremony ever conducted on the moon. Using a small silver chalice, a bit of wine, and a piece of bread that he had brought with him, he quietly administered communion. He recalled the wine curling slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think the very first liquid ever poured on the moon was communion wine. Among his belongings was a small silk flag hand stitched with the symbol of the Scottish rite of free masonry. According to the Masonic Grand Lodge of Ohio, the Apollo 11 mission even established an appendent body of the Masonic Lodge on the moon. That flag is now on full display at the Masonic Temple in Washington D.C. When man reaches new worlds, Masonry will be there. The Scottish rite is a branch of free masonry steeped in esoteric symbols, ritual, and mysticism. Its highest rank, the 33rd degree, is symbolically tied to the 33 vertebrae of the spine, culminating in the crown chakra, said to be the gateway to divine insight. Buzz Aldrin, as it happens, held that rank. Over the years, researchers looking at these kinds of oddities began to ask questions about the meaning of these rituals on the moon. But those answers are not exactly what we're trying to explore in this episode. What I'm interested in is the hidden side of NASA, and the even more secretive National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. Agencies that have quietly launched thousands of rockets and payloads into orbit, behind them lies a stranger history than most people realize. Because after all, Buzz Aldrin was not the first, nor the last, member of NASA, to bring what some might derisively call the woo to the epitome of nuts and bolts aerospace, astrophysics, and rocket fuel. Just take Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, the sixth man to walk on the moon, and one of the most outspoken voices linking space exploration with the paranormal. Mitchell wasn't shy about his belief in extraterrestrial life, or that the US government was probably covering it up, but beyond the UFO question, he was also deeply invested in consciousness and the psychic phenomenon. On his journey to the moon, Mitchell conducted a private ESP or extra-sensory perception experiment, attempting to send mental images back to Earth using a set of cards. The results, scored by colleagues back on Earth, were better than chance. Mitchell wasn't shy about this. In a 1971 New York Times interview, he said, "We're too much uninformed about telepathy, or ESP to project its uses, but I think once we understand the mechanism, then we can start talking about uses." Few at NASA were interested, except one, Werner von Braun. "What is a dirty business? All I can say is that I'm happy that it's all over now." Yes, that von Braun, former Nazi and father of American rocketry. He was, according to Mitchell, deeply supportive, even encouraging Mitchell to find a site within NASA to study consciousness further. After his mission, Mitchell founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences, a think tank dedicated to consciousness, psychic phenomena, and metaphysics. Von Braun attended one of its early fundraising dinners. For Mitchell, the overview effect, seeing Earth from space, was spiritual. It made him wonder if the entire cosmos might be conscious, and he wasn't alone. "There I was, and there you are, there you are, the Earth dynamic, overwhelming, and I felt that the world had just, there's too much purpose, too much logic. It was just too beautiful to have happened by accident. There has to be somebody bigger than you and bigger than me, and I mean this in a spiritual sense, not a religious sense. There has to be a creator of the universe who stands above the religions that we ourselves create to go on our lives." From the early days of rocketry to the height of the Apollo program, there's been a long tradition of visionary scientists who saw no contradiction between physics and mysticism, even today the pattern continues. "They're using the images of Roman gods, and I would ask them, I said, why are you using the images of Roman gods? Why are you putting them on your mission patches and also utilizing Latin phrases from that time period? I mean you're sending it up in the space, is who the space is going to read Latin? And his answer was our sponsors." "Behind rocket technology, the thrust, the telemetry, the hardware, there is something else, something older, there are whispers and subtle acknowledgments to gods, ancient symbols, rituals, and perhaps even the influence of non-human intelligence. And if that is true, or at least if people involved in this science believe it to be true, then we need to ask the fundamental question, what is rocket science really? Is it foundationally entangled in something very strange we've spent millennia trying to understand? Are there strange forces helping us get off this planet?" So buckle up alchemists because this one is going way out there. "When we think about the moonland, the rockets, the computers, the broadcasts, sent across 230,000 miles of empty space, it's easy to forget how recent this kind of knowledge really is." Just over a century ago, astronomers were still debating the basic structure of the universe. Einstein had shaken the foundations of physics in 1915 with his general theory of relativity. But when it came to the cosmos itself, even the experts weren't sure what they were actually looking at through their telescopes. Then, in 1923, Edwin Hubble peered through the 100-inch hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory and saw something staggering. This new telescope was powerful enough to resolve individual stars inside what most had assumed was just a cloud of gas in our own galaxy. Guess what? It wasn't. That cloud, in drama-da, was another galaxy entirely, millions of light years away. This discovery shattered the old view. Our Milky Way wasn't the whole universe. It was just one among many. It changed the cosmic perspective of the 20th century in the same way Copernicus had centuries earlier when he removed the Earth from the center of the solar system. In the man who built this observatory that made this discovery possible, was one of the most important and strangest figures in the history of modern astronomy. I bring you George Ellery Hale. Hale wasn't just a brilliant physicist. He was a visionary, and in some ways, a mystic. While still at MIT, he invented the spectroheliograph, a device that could capture solar flares erupting from the Sun's surface. But Hale's fascination with the Sun went far beyond science. He saw astronomy as a kind of philosophy, a link back to ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Babylon. He founded multiple observatories, including Mount Wilson and the United States. Pasadena. The lodges where astronomers stayed were reportedly decorated with Egyptian hieroglyphs and symbols, a reminder that they weren't just studying the stars. They were joining a tradition as old as human civilization. Then, there's the stranger part. Hale claimed he received creative inspiration from a being, an elf or a spirit as he described it. Some biographers wrote this off as stress, eccentricity or mistranslation. But what if it wasn't? Hale certainly wasn't the first or the last brilliant scientist to feel like he was receiving messages from somewhere else. His reverence for the sun wasn't just theoretical. When he designed the Hale Solar Laboratory in Pasadena, he included a tribute to Uncle Otten in the arch above the entrance. The ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who tried to replace the entire Egyptian pantheon with a single god, Otten, the Sun disc. When Hale died, his obituaries called him a priest of the Sun, a modern Zoroaster. You might think Hale's beliefs were just personal quirks unrelated to his science, but this fits a much larger pattern. Throughout history, the people we celebrate for pure science, the mathematicians, the engineers, the astronomers, were often described as tapping in to something else, something they themselves called mystical, spiritual or supernatural. Today, we like to separate the discovery from the discoverer. We want breakthroughs to feel rational, mechanical, explainable, but that doesn't erase the fact that many of those breakthroughs were made by people who believed they were channeling something deeper. Back in the early 20th century, Hale's work helped lay the foundations for modern astronomy, but his influence didn't stop with telescopes. He also transformed a small technical school, through polytechnic, into what would become a powerhouse of science and engineering. Caltech. By the 1930s, Caltech was more than just a hub for equations and experiments. It became a magnet for the greatest minds on earth, Hubble, Bore, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, even Einstein passed through its halls, but Caltech also attracted outsiders. One of them wasn't even a student, but he would end up reshaping the future of American rocketry and possibly opening a door to something far stranger. Jack Parsons. Hey everyone, Jesse here. Let's talk about something a lot of us quietly deal with. Hair loss. This is something that messes with your confidence more than you'd expect. Okay, you might be wondering, Jesse, you clearly don't suffer from this. It's true. The biggest issue I face is hat hair. I actually have very thick hair, but one of my good friends deals with hair loss. So when I restore sent me their I restore elite, I gifted it to him, and I've been amazed at the results it gave him. The first thing that stood out to him is it's comfortable and easy to use. 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So give yourself the gift of hair confidence this spring. For a limited time only, our listeners get a huge discount on iristory elite when you use code Jesse, J-E-S-S-E, at iristory.com. Head over to iristory.com and use code Jesse, J-E-S-S-E, for our show's exclusive discounts on the iristory elite. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Hair loss is frustrating. You don't have to fight it alone thanks to iristory. John Whiteside Parsons, Jack, to his friends, was born in Pasadena in 1914. From an early age, he was hooked on science fiction. He struggled in school and never earned a formal degree, but that didn't matter. Parsons had an intuitive genius for chemistry and propulsion. As a teenager, he and his friend Ed Foreman built homemade rockets, scavenging parts from Foreman's father's workshop. One classmate later described them as a couple of powder monkeys, going out into the desert, blowing things up. Jack's mother, worried about his obsession with explosives, sent him to military school. He was expelled after he blew up a toilet block. Nothing deterred him. Parsons had one dream, to build a machine that could reach the moon. By the early 1930s, he and Foreman were sneaking onto the Caltech campus to meet like-minded students who believed in rocketry. Just a few years earlier, a Caltech student named Thomas Towns and Brown had formulated a less crude version of space travel. But that fell upon deaf ears with top physics professors at Caltech like Robert Milliken. Parsons was able to gain much more traction. He found an ally in Frank Millina, an engineering student working under Theodore von Karman, one of the sharpest minds in aerodynamics. Together, they formed an informal rocketry group and began testing experimental engines in the Eroio Secca, a dry gulch just outside Pasadena. That site would later become Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL. Now here's something a lot of people don't realize. In the early 20th century, even some of the most respected physicists believe rockets wouldn't work in space. One of them, Caltech's own Fritz Swicki, the man who coined the term "supernova" and theorized dark matter, dismissed the idea as nonsense. They misunderstood Newton. They thought rockets needed something to push against, and in the vacuum of space there would be nothing to push on. Even the New York Times mocked the idea in a 1920 editorial. So when people like Jack Parsons pursued this, they weren't solving a hard problem. They were chasing what many thought was a delusion. That makes what they achieved all the more remarkable. They believed in the impossible than figured out how to build it. And Parsons, as we'll see, believed in more than just exotic propulsion. At Caltech, his raw intuition led to breakthroughs in both solid and liquid fuels, more powerful and reliable than anything that had come before. The tests were chaotic and dangerous, but soon the military took notice. Parsons developed a solid fuel booster, or what would later become the first stage of a rocket to help heavily loaded aircraft take off. They called it "jet-assisted takeoff" or "jado." They avoided using the word rocket because it still sounded too much like science fiction. The first successful jado flight was in 1941. By 1942, the US military was ordering 20,000 units per month. But just as JPL was taking off, the FBI came knocking because Jack Parsons wasn't just a rocket scientist. He was also a practicing occultist. He was a devoted member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, an esoteric order led at the time by the infamous Alistair Crowley. Philema, their belief system, combined ceremonial magic, eastern mysticism, and tantric techniques into what Crowley called "sex magic." That's magic with a "k" to distinguish it from stage tricks. Parsons wasn't just a casual participant. He led the local chapter from a Pasadena mansion where he lived with a rotating cast of artists, intellectuals, and magicians. The rituals were elaborate, invoking gods, spirits, and forces said to reside in higher dimensions. The most infamous of these was the Babylon working, an attempt to summon the divine feminine archetypes known as Babylon. Inspired by Crowley's novel Moonchild, the ritual aimed to recreate a magical child through spiritual and sexual practices, not literal birth, but transformation of the self. Kind of a weird extracurricular for a guy who became known as the father of the American space program. These weren't acts of fantasy to Parsons. He believed the rituals had real power that they get. could raise consciousness, open doorways, and make contact with non-human intelligences. He wasn't alone in thinking this way. Nostic Christian sects, early mystics like Clement of Alexandria, Antantric traditions in India and China all described sects as a vehicle for divine communion, not lust, but willful transformation. Parsons believed he was continuing that lineage. But it gets weirder. His ritual partner for the Babylon workin was a man named El Ron Hubbard. Yes, that El Ron Hubbard. Before founding Scientology, Hubbard helped Parsons conduct the ritual series. But soon after, he ran off with Parsons girlfriend and a chunk of his money. Parsons, furious, attempted a magical counterattack, invoking the spirit of Mars, Bartsebel, in a Miami hotel room, magic or not, Parsons got his compensation. Hubbard's yacht would promptly encounter a storm, and a court later forced him to pay Parsons back. After that, some began to wonder if the Babylon working had actually succeeded if it had opened something up in 1946, because in the years that followed, reports of unidentified aerial phenomena began to skyrocket. Parsons himself believed he had made contact. He said he was being guided by non-human intelligence. That idea surfaces in Diana Pusolka's work as well, the notion that visionary scientists may have been receiving messages, insights or downloads from something beyond. It also is a prominent theme, and Professor Humanic Analysis book, Bedevil, about the history of demons and science. Parsons wasn't alone in this belief. Pythagoras, Newton, and even Edison spoke of mystical inspiration or communion with unseen forces. Edison, near the end of his life, actually tried to build a device to communicate with the dead, so even if we keep our skeptic hats on, we're left with this strange pattern. Many of the people responsible for scientific breakthroughs, people we call geniuses, didn't see themselves as inventors. They saw themselves as receivers. In Parsons case, he believed he was building technology to carry humanity into space, with the help of something else. He would sometimes recite Crowley's hymn to pan during rocket tests. According to legendary French UFO researcher Jacques Vallet, there were rumors of a ritual in the Mojave, where a blonde woman appeared and claimed to be from Venus. If true, this would have been the first recorded encounter with a quote-unquote Nordic, or tall white, non-human entity, predating similar contactee stories by years. Eventually Parsons occult lifestyle, strange houseguests, and growing paranoia led to trouble. He was pushed out of JPL. In 1952, he died in an explosion in his home laboratory. Officially, it was ruled an accident involving volatile chemicals. But some found the circumstances suspicious. Parsons left a crater on Earth, but also one on the moon. Literally, a lunar crater now bears his name, and at JPL, some insiders still call it Jack Parsons Laboratory. Others just say, "Jack Parsons lives." Now you might be thinking, "Sure, there was one eccentric rocket guy with a thing for ritual magic. Maybe he laid the groundwork for ICBMs in Apollo." But that doesn't mean that the whole field was weird, maybe. Long time viewers of this show will know we've covered evidence linking the 3rd Reich to UFO technology before. From reports that Hitler knew about the 1933 magenta crash, to rumors of Nazi saucer tests in modern-day Czechoslovakia, to the post-war absorption of German rocket scientists experimenting with exotic propulsion. But what often surprises people isn't just the tech. It's the fact that the highest level of Hitler's regime were obsessed with the occult. This wasn't just Hollywood fantasy. Sure, Indiana Jones gave us Nazis hunting for the Ark of the Covenant. But the truth is stranger. In 1945, near the end of the war, American forces uncovered a hidden stash of Nazi documents in a cave in southern Germany. Among them were records, revealing real-state-sponsored occult projects. Expeditions to Tibet to trace Aryan origins, searches for ancient runestones, pagan sites, and even a government-backed quest to find the Holy Grail. A lot of this stemmed from Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and one of the architects of the Holocaust. He was obsessed with Germanic mythology, paganism, and mystical power. He turned Webelsburg Castle into a ritual center, complete with a black sun chamber beneath it, and a round table for his SS nights. He also created the Anna Nürbe, a pseudo-scientific institute devoted to proving that the so-called Aryan race descended from Atlantis. And yes, they actually believed that. The Nazi party itself was born out of the Thule Society, a volcish secret group that mixed Germanic paganism, Atlantis myths, and Aryan esotericism. The Thule Society held seances in rituals meant to contact non-human intelligences they believed were their ancient progenitors, star beings from the far north, beneath the pole star. They performed these rights at symbolic locations, like the Hartz Mountains, on nights like Walperguss Nott, a festival tied to witches, spirits, and old pagan ceremonies. There are also claims about the Vril Society, a group said to have channeled anti-gravity technology and psychic powers from an ancient subterranean race. Now we don't have to believe any of these occult theories themselves, but what matters is the Nazis did, and it didn't just stop at mysticism. The Nazis were also pioneers of actual rocket science. One of the key figures was Hermann Oberth, born in Transylvania, inspired by sci-fi writer Jules Verne, Oberth began theorizing about spaceflight as a teenager. In 1923, he published the rocket into planetary space, a landmark book that laid out how a multi-stage rocket could escape Earth's gravity. He was decades ahead of his time. He envisioned orbiting telescopes, spacesuits, why they're controlling satellites, even missions to other planets. His ideas sparked a movement, and when World War II began, Oberth was pulled into military work, building rockets for Germany and later for Italy. After the war, Oberth became one of the few major scientists to publicly support the reality of UFOs. After so many witnesses have seen the so-called flying saucers, their existence cannot longer be denied, I believe that these flying objects come from another solar system. In a 1954 lecture, he argued that these UFOs had been observed since at least the 1400s. Oberth believed they were piloted by extraterrestrial visitors, monitoring Earth's nuclear sites and military tech. In interviews, he even said, "We cannot take all of the credit for our record advancements in certain scientific fields. We have been helped." When asked by whom, he replied, "The people of the other worlds." Later in life, Oberth was invited to watch the launch of Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle Challenger, but he wasn't part of the official Operation Paperclip Transfer of Nazi Scientists. That honor fell to his most famous student, Werner von Braun. Before we jump in and want to thank today's sponsor, Hexclad Cookware, aka the pans I didn't know I needed until I ditched the warped, flaked mess I've been cooking with since college. But here's what sold me. Hexclad pans are like if stainless steel and nonstick had a love child. And then Gordon Ramsay adopted it. No joke, he actually uses them at home and in his restaurants. And as we all know, that guy doesn't suffer fools gladly, so he probably has equally high standards for his cookware. First meal I made, a seared steak and some scrambled eggs. No sticking, no smoke alarm, no soaking it overnight like it's some artifact from an archeological dig. 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Van Braun wasn't just a German rocket scientist, he was the architect of the V-2 missile program, a major in the SS, and one of the top mines in Hitler's war machine. Like Parsons, Van Braun had dreamed of space since he was a boy. But where Parsons was invoking goddesses and desert rituals, Van Braun was swearing loyalty to Himmler and building rockets with slave labor from concentration camps. After the war, the US swept Van Braun up in Operation Paperclip, a covert mission to extract Nazi scientists. He was captured in Bavaria, where a young Henry Kissinger was actually helping Ron counterintelligence for the United States. Van Braun's record was scrubbed and he was given a new job, build America's space program, and that he did. Van Braun became the public face of NASA, a media darling, the man behind the Saturn V rocket that took us to the moon. "The overall size and weight of the rocket is mainly determined by the 11 tons weight of this top section. This weight dictates the amount of fuel and the numbers of motors needed to produce enough power to equalize a gravitational pull of the Earth." But behind the scenes, many of the ideas, the scientists and even the weirdness of the Nazi space program had been brought into the American one. As we'll see, the weirdness didn't vanish. It just changed uniforms. But before we get to NASA's more esoteric side, we need to check in with the other major player in the Space Race. Before Parsons, NASA or the Nazis, another conception of human purpose, one tied to our place in the universe, was emerging in late 19th century Russia, something we now call Russian Cosmism. It began with a librarian and philosopher named Nikolai Fiodorov, who believed the true task of humanity and Christianity was not to await resurrection, but to cause it. He believed that one day, technology would allow us to resurrect every human who had ever lived. And that once death was defeated, humanity's next task would be to colonize the cosmos. Among those most influenced by Fiodorov and his ideas, was a deaf, self-taught young man named Constantine Tsilkovsky. He would become known as the father of Russian spaceflight. Tsilkovsky didn't just believe space travel was possible. He believed it was necessary. He saw humanity as part of a cosmic process, destined to leave Earth and populate the stars. In 1903, he developed what we now call the Tsilkovsky rocket equation. The fundamental formula describing how a rocket accelerates based on its mass and exhaust velocity. Like Oberth, he anticipated breakthroughs in rocketry and space exploration well before they were technologically feasible, and here is where things get especially strange. As Diana Pasolka points out in American cosmic, Tsilkovsky believed that non-human intelligences, what he called ethereal beings, were communicating with us through celestial symbols. He wrote, "We are made as the ethereal beings existing beyond our dimensions of recognized reality. These higher beings are in communication with us, reading our thoughts and sending us messages through celestial symbols, which most of us do not even perceive much less understand." A genius is one who comprehends and channels these messages from higher beings into technologies, products, and even art. Tsilkovsky seemed to believe that his rocket science, the very math that would take humans off Earth, was received through this kind of cosmic transmission. He may have seen himself not only as an engineer, but as a medium for an intelligence beyond human understanding, another example of someone who saw the spiritual dimension of science as fundamental to the work itself. Even as the Soviet Union officially rejected religion, it opened the door to a different kind of cosmic mythology, one in which ancient contact with extraterrestrials was treated not as fantasy, but as a legitimate scientific possibility. These ideas were often framed in speculative or scientific language, a political workaround that allowed Soviet thinkers to explore humanity's possible contact with advanced extraterrestrial civilizations without invoking the supernatural. Figures like Alexander Kazansov and Felix Ziegel proposed that alien visitors may have influenced early human development, seeding myths and technologies that were later taken on by ancient cultures. Unlike in the West where such theories were typically fringe, in the USSR they were sometimes discussed in academic circles, covered in state-run media, and even investigated by military and intelligence services. This made paleo-contact, as they called it, not just a conspiracy theory, but a semi-legitimate line of inquiry into humanity's cosmic origins, but it was the Americans who won the space race when they made it to the moon. And maybe, just maybe, that mission carried within it a hidden reverence for the esoteric dimensions of spaceflight that men like Tsilkovsky and Fiodorov had long envisioned. Maybe the space race wasn't just a Cold War pissing contest, but a transcendental mission, which brings us to NASA, where the weird gets even weirder. NASA was officially established on July 29, 1958 by the National Aeronautics and Space Act. On paper, this document laid out that NASA was supposed to be a civilian agency for space exploration, devoted to quote unquote "peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind." But that idealism is tempered in the very next paragraph. The act makes clear that the general welfare and security of the United States requires such an organization, and that any activities peculiar to or primarily associated with weapon systems, military operations, for the defense of the United States, fall outside the civilian mandate. In practice, that meant if NASA found anything deemed strategically sensitive, at all, a breakthrough in propulsion, a powerful new sensor, or even contact with non-human intelligence, it could be withheld indefinitely. It's a reminder of something we've talked about before, the echoes of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act. If you read the definition of "special nuclear material" in the Public Atomic Energy Act in 1954, it basically states any material that releases any kind of atomic energy. That would be retrieved trash material. So it's kind of a sneaky way. No, it is. If you actually read the Atomic Energy Act, if something is not a nuke, but it has radiological energy coming off it, you know, alpha, beta decay, whatever. So how did the Nazi rocket scientists get in? After Operation Paperclip, Werner von Braun and his team were brought into the US to work on ballistic missiles. Many of them ended up in places like Fort Bliss in White Sands, where they were housed in military camps and worked under tight control. Swastika's and Nazi memorabilia were reportedly on open display in some of these facilities. FBI documents even show that at one point von Braun was caught sending classified documents to his Nazi counterparts in the USSR, but it seemed like no disciplinary action was ever taken. During this period, von Braun caught the attention of Walt Disney. The two collaborated on a series of educational films about space exploration. Von Braun features a lot in them, explaining the future of space exploration and the capabilities of imagined rockets and space stations. In one extended scene, a team of astronauts try travel to the far side of the moon for the first time. That's when a radar engineer yells out that some kind of radiation is being picked up on their sensors at 33 degrees. Something that turns out to be a very constructed looking feature on the terrain of the moon. The film moves on without too much attention being paid to the set of ruins on the moon, almost like it was just included for those that would notice it. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, an imaginative nod to the unknowns of space. The coordinates 33 degrees are hard to ignore, especially given the prominence of that number in the Scottish right of free masonry. There are a few Scottish right masons you might have heard of, and those that were awarded the highest honor of becoming a 33rd degree. This includes the first American to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, as well as the President Harry Truman. And another astronaut we've already discussed, Buzz Aldrin. James Webb, NASA Administrator, Scottish right mason, Kenneth Kleinecht, Director of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, also a Scottish right mason. We've also got Leroy Gordon Cooper Jr., who flew on the Mercury and Gemini programs, and then you have Walter Shura Jr., and Don Eisell, who flew on Apollo 7, as well as Virgil Grisim, who flew on the Mercury program but sadly passed away in the training capsule fire for the first Apollo mission. Thomas Patton Stafford flew Apollo 10, all three masons. Later, on Apollo 15, the eighth person to walk on the moon was also a mason, James Erwin. And another man we've already mentioned earlier, Edgar Mitchell, who spent more than 9 hours walking on the moon's surface on Apollo 14, free mason. So by the mid-1960s, the structure of NASA, and I mean the actual power structure, was a strange cocktail of former SS officers, free masons, and occultists. And then there's the Teos Cave story. You know where I do want to go, though. You know, there are all the conspiracies that the moon landing was faked, and then there's the UFO conspiracy that Neil Armstrong saw, like, UFOs on the moon or whatever. I'm not proposing that. I don't necessarily think that that's true. But the one possibly kind of funny piece of additional evidence would be that the second expedition Neil Armstrong did was in 1975, and it was to a cave and Ecuador at the edge of the Amazon, and it was called the Teos Cave, and it was supposed to contain ancient alien metallic artifacts. And so clearly, Neil Armstrong believed enough in the possibility of that thing to, like, go into the Amazon and risk his life and try to look for it, and a BBC documentary crew followed him in there. What we've seen throughout this video is that there's something more than a sterile materialist view of reality behind the engineering and physics of space exploration. There seems to be a kind of ritual element to it. And one of the clearest signs that NASA wasn't just about nuts and bolts science is something hiding in plain sight. The mission patches. Take the official Apollo program patch. At first glance, it's simple, the earth, the moon, a path connecting them, and a large letter A. But look again, behind the A is the constellation Orion, and the crossbar of the A is deliberately aligned with Orion's belt. The three stars, Mintaka, Anilah, and Anitok. In Greek myth, Orion is the hunter, but to the ancient Egyptians, those three stars were Osiris, God of the afterlife, death, and resurrection. And in the patch, they're outlined in blue, given special emphasis, strange, right? Especially for a mission named after Apollo, the Greek God of the Sun. Why name the mission after one deity, but center its symbolism around an entirely different Pantheon? And which Pantheon are we talking about here? As the big A for Apollo, or for Assar, the Egyptian name for Osiris. In Egyptian myth, Osiris is murdered by his brother Set, and resurrected by his wife Isis in their son Horus, who then defeats Set and restores cosmic order. A myth of death re-birth in celestial destiny, written into the sky. NASA's primary launch pad at White Sands, where Von Braun ran early tests, was launchpad 33, same thing at Kennedy Space Center, there's only one runway, and it isn't runway 1 or A, it's runway 33. Even key mission planners had surprising backgrounds, Farouk El-Baz, who oversaw lunar science planning and helped select Apollo landing sites, was nicknamed the King by the astronauts. His father was a scholar of Egyptian religion, and of course, NASA was never shy about a little criticism. They would mix and mash and pay homage to all sorts of ancient traditions. Juneau, the Roman queen of the gods, lent her name to one of the earliest launch vehicles. Mercury, the Roman messenger god, was chosen for the first human spaceflight program. Then came Gemini, the zodiac twins, and finally Apollo, the Greek sun god of light, knowledge, and rebirth. One of the most intriguing aspects of the whole story is how the symbolism doesn't stop at names or patches. It carries into the actual timing of the launches themselves. Back in 1936, while Jack Parsons was still testing rockets in the Eroio Seco, his team managed their first successful liquid fuel test on Halloween night. That date, October 31, was originally sawn, a pagan festival marking the midpoint between the autumn equinox and winter solstice. Over 20 years later, Explorer 1, the first US satellite built by JPL, was launched on January 31, 1958. That day is known in the Christian calendar as Candlemas, but in the pagan tradition as Imbulk. The odds of the US space program being bookended by sawn and Candlemas, two cross-quarter days with deep ritual significance in European pagan tradition, are striking. Even if not consciously planned by the engineers, the timing seems to follow an occult template, sawn as a symbolic gateway in Candlemas as a moment of rebirth. Together, they framed the dawn of American spaceflight. But we're just getting started. This alignment with sacred dates was not a one-off. During the Apollo era, launch planners sometimes chose dates that aligned with celestial or symbolic turning points. One of the clearest examples was Apollo 8, the first crude orbit of the moon. It launched on December 21, 1968, the Winter Solstice. The day the sun is symbolically reborn after the longest night of the year. Apollo 8 marked the first time humans left Earth's gravitational field. And from lunar orbit, the crew delivered the famous Genesis reading on Christmas Eve. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was about formed and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the water. And God said, "Let there be light." And there was light. And God saw the light. But was it just convenient scheduling or was some deeper archetypal pattern playing out? A subconscious script of death and resurrection. I'm going to give a little warning here. What I'm going to lay out next is highly speculative. I'm not saying I definitely believe it. And it might sound a little bit out there. Let's take Apollo 11 as an example. Launched on July 16, 1969, it coincided with the 24th anniversary of the Trinity Atomic Test, the dawn of the nuclear age. But the moon landing itself on July 20 happened under the astrological sign of Aquarius, symbol of the water bear and bringer of knowledge. Aquarius is often linked with enlightenment and radical change. And it's tempting to think that the moon landing, timed as it was, might have been more than a technological milestone. It could have been seen as a ritual passage into a new cosmic age, the so-called age of Aquarius. Remember, Aldrin poured wine into a silver chalice during his private communion ceremony on the moon. Humanity in a sense poured itself into another world. What's especially fascinating is that these symbolic alignments haven't gone away. They've continued into the 21st century. In a presentation, former CIA officer John Ramirez described one particular case, the 2005 launch of NROL 16. The mission patch was strange. It showed a pelican, a sun, several pentagrams, a silhouette of bigfoot and palm trees. Ramirez said that the pelican caught his attention because it matched the aviary codename of CIA scientist Ron Pandolfi. Pindolfi has been a mysterious figure long tied to the UFO topic. He has worked on exotic physics, was connected to the Jason's and Miter Corporation, and was part of the CIA's Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. A lot of people say that Pindolfi works the CIA's weird desk. According to Ramirez, Pindolfi was directly involved in this NROL 16 launch. The launch itself happened on 1250 AM on April 30, 2005. This happens to be the same day of Walper Giznacht, the traditional pagan holiday tied to the idea of gates opening between worlds. The vehicle carried a payload named Prometheus, launched on a Titan 4 rocket, and headed northeast towards the constellation of the Big Dipper. This alignment has uncanny parallels to a ritual described in the 1977 Grimwar, known as the Necronomicon. According to the text, the best time to perform the ceremony of walking, a kind of spiritual journey to the stars, is when the great bear hangs by its tail in the sky. The ritual is said to work best around midnight, facing north, with specific emphasis on the northeast, the direction the Big Dipper rises. The number 5 is the sacred, and the launch occurred at 050, five years into the millennium, on a patch covered in five pentagrams. Some researchers like Peter LeVenda have suggested that figures close to these launches encouraged people like Tom DeLong to study Greek mythology, especially the story of Prometheus to better understand the UFO phenomena. That name, of course, matched the payload on the NRL-16. After the launch, the remaining Titan 4 rockets were retired, one went to the National Museum of the US Air Force at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. The other went to McMindville, Oregon, the site of one of the most famous UFO photographs ever taken in 1950. All slightly schizo coincidences, maybe, but LeVenda has said that he's personally received letters from inside the US military praising the Necronomicon for being "spot on", including some from officers in strategic air command. For years, his book was even a bestseller at Fort Bennett. Then there's the symbolism of the Big Dipper itself. In Spielberg's close encounters of the Third Kind, the first UFOs to appear above Devil's Tower, formed the shape of the Dipper in the sky. Jacques Vallet noted that Betty Hills' abduction story also began with her seeing one too many stars in the Dipper. Even Navy pilot Ryan Graves, who's very humble in his claims, has said that pilots reported UAPs emerging from the Dipper, and even dogfighting near it in orbit. Ancient Egyptian rituals used Dipper-shaped tools to send pharaohs into the afterlife. Taoist sages would trace its stars in ascension rituals. Ptolemy, one of the fathers of modern astronomy, in 2nd century AD Alexandria, would also say that souls would ascend through Orion's belt. Even the Thule Society saw the circumpolar stars as a point of origin for non-human intelligences, and then look at modern super-experiences, like Chris Bledso. Bledso believes that the non-human intelligence he is in contact with, which he has termed "the lady" is linked to the Dipper, and that her companions call themselves "the guardians." Coincidentally, guardians is the term now used by the US Space Force, and the emblem of Space Delta 7, the Space Force's intelligence wing, shows a bear holding a key in front of the Big Dipper. So we return to the central question, are these patterns just coincidence? Are we connecting the dots in a crazy way, parodolia, finding patterns where they don't exist, or does the pattern these disparate dots create suggest something deeper? We return to Diana Pousalca in her discussions with the enigmatic Tyler D. Timothy Taylor, the NASA mission controller. One of the most curious aspects of Taylor's story is his claim that he receives downloads from an intelligence he believes is non-human. These downloads appear as sudden flashes of insight, full mental blueprints, or instructions. He says they come to him through specific protocols, and they've led to real patents in technologies. They have also shaped how he approaches his ongoing work within the US Space Program. Even if we take the most skeptical approach, assuming Taylor is simply a high-ranking engineer with strange personal beliefs, it still leaves us with a wild but undeniable fact. Someone overseeing major NASA launches, believes they are influenced by a non-human intelligence. I'm fairly sure Tim Taylor is a known entity at Kennedy Space Center. I personally tried to meet up with him once, but he had to go to Florida for a launch. And finally, I found this bizarre connection between Tim Taylor and mid-century anti-gravity inventor Thomas Towns and Brown. Brown's daughter Linda reviewed Tim Taylor's book on Amazon before anybody knew who Tim Taylor was, while before he was written about even pseudonymously in Diana Pousalca's American Cosmic. And then Tim Taylor apparently told Christopher Bloodsoes Sun Ryan that he was part of a secret time travel program in NASA in the Bahamas, and that Thomas Towns and Brown was the president of that group. I know a ton about Thomas Towns and Brown, and I can tell you definitively, he was obsessed with time travel. He also spent an inordinate amount of time in the Bahamas, with the inspiration for James Bond and Winston Churchill's Super Spy, William Stevenson. And then there's Tim Taylor telling Pousalca that he was part of the "adjustment" team, and homage to Philip K. Dick's great book about a team of time travelers. And if we're going to entertain this speculation for a second, then how would a secret time travel program actually work? We know in general relativity that gravity and time are highly related, so maybe you do an experiment like Thomas Towns and Brown's. You might create a high-voltage environment that bends space-time itself. Or you might launch a very oddly timed rocket that happens to coincide with ancient traditional rituals. Who knows? I doubt we'll ever know. But even if you dismiss all of those crazy theories, it is clear that the modern space program is not just a technical story. It's a story about consciousness, belief, and the role of the human mind in space exploration. This same theme shows up in other unexpected places. Dick James Ryder, former vice president of Lockheed Martin, and a director at Skunkworks. In 2018, he gave a talk called The Garment of God. In it he emphasized the relationship between mysticism, consciousness, and technological progress. In a separate lecture focused entirely on UAPs, Ryder spoke openly about ritual, altered states, and the overlap between ancient spiritual entities and modern contact experiences. Dr. James Lekatsky, the DIA physicist, involved in the OSAP program made a similar point. Within the US government covert UFO program, Lekatsky writes that the team gained access to a non-human craft and entered it. The United States government has in its possession a craft of unknown origin and you are able to access the inside, is that correct? Yes. But elsewhere he's taken things further, saying that if full human capabilities were known to us right now, it is not something that we need to fear. Our capabilities never have been fully revealed, and we're still learning. We've got a long way to evolve still. Then there's Dr. Jeffrey Criple, chair of philosophy and religious studies at Rice University. On the Danny Jones podcast, he revealed that Charles Chase, director of Lockheed's Revolutionary Projects organization, once invited him to give a private talk to top engineers on one topic. It was a great invitation. Criple spoke about shaman, saints, and monks from around the world who claimed to float during intense spiritual or meditative states. Apparently, Chase felt these accounts were worth studying. He wanted the engineers at Skunk Works to hear about it, and Chase wasn't alone. Other senior Skunk Works figures, Robert Weiss, Steve Justice, and Eric Schrock, along with Air Force Research Lab Commander Neil McCaslin, all advised Tom DeLong and Peter LeVenda's Secret Machines Project. These men weren't UFO YouTubers. They were among the most technologically capable individuals in the defense sector. It should come as no surprise then that the core thesis of the book Secret Machines is that UAP are mystical machines. According to both DeLong and LeVenda, these elite scientists frequently circled back to one concept in their conversations, human consciousness. So when experiencers say they fly the craft with their minds, it might not be as far fetched as it sounds. It seems like people in the most elite circles of aerospace seem to entertain the same possibility. When Diana Pasalca asked Taylor why he was interested in her work on religious studies, his answer was simple. next available. equipment in my field, rocket science, will come from yours, religion. As the 20th Century philosopher on Rebirth's own put it, the mystical summons up the mechanical. The origins of the process of mechanization are more mystical than we might imagine. He also said, "The eyes can only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend." It seems like an inescapable conclusion that the history of rocket science and physics is intimately connected to mystical traditions, the occult and ancient mythology. Whether it was Einstein dosing off as a patent clerk in Zurich, or Derock staring at the fire in Cambridge and downloading the Derock equation, or Wolfgang Pally receiving the architecture of the hydrogen atom in a dream, or Heisenberg receiving the mathematical underpinnings of quantum leaps at Helgelland. Throughout history, genius and inspiration have been described not as invention, but reception. It may be something that extraterrestrial or non-human intelligence is sharing with us, or it may be the truth that is being protected by secrets, as referenced by the first man to ever walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong. We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. It was Neil Armstrong who asked to sit with my father and family, and turns out that he did talk with my father, and they talked seriously about creating a new UFO research group. Wow. Which was. Well, I think it became Kufo's because Neil was fairly reclusive, not like Buzz Alder. He didn't really enjoy the spotlight, and especially in the early 70s, there was so much more stigma attached to the phenomenon that he decided it's just not for me, but for me, some of the most telling evidence are these things. The fact that Neil Armstrong publicly sat with my father, who had good, yeah, had good astronomical bonafides, but was known for UFOs in that time. He sat with him, and I know he talked with my dad about pursuing this, so I don't know what he saw or really think he may have seen, but he was a, you know, jet pilot, a test pilot, and he decided that there's something going on, and he wanted to work with my father to figure out what it was. Wow. Alchemist, did you enjoy that? Well, here's the thing. That episode was just the tip of the iceberg. So much research went into the script, and a ton of wild stuff had to get cut. I'm talking Nazi occult expeditions during World War II, debates about whether the moon is inhabited or hollow, and a lot more. If you want the full picture, head over to the American Alchemy magazine we just launched on Substact. That's where we deep dive into all sorts of crazy topics that we don't have time to fit into every video, with weekly articles exploring all of the strange, forgotten, and conspiratorial corners of space, history, and high weirdness. So join up today at our free or paid tears on Substact. I am including the full link in the description of this video, and the first subscribers all get free American Alchemy hats.