There is another highly significant factor in an assessment of the role of Puharich. It appears that he was actively seeking contact or, more precisely, seeking to observe and experiment with other people who made contact. This is important because the ‘prewar’ channellers seemed to fall into the practice spontaneously. They never sought it. Even the great magician Crowley was taken aback by the appearance of the entity called Aiwass.
What did these experiments demonstrate? What did Puharich conclude from them? Were the communications real, or delusions?
Once a phenomenon has been identified, it is then used. The change of direction in the Nine’s communications at the beginning of the 1970s, and the development of more distinct overtones in their message, occurred once they had established themselves and could start to spread their propaganda. But just what are the Council of Nine and their message being used for? Why are so many prominent leaders in so many fields keen to promote them, with greater or lesser degrees of openness, as in the case of Richard Hoagland and his Message of Cydonia?
There is, in our view, an over-riding need for caution here. Alarm bells may be heard clear and strong, for true or false, now the Nine have become the property of the intelligence agencies, it is wise to be vigilant — and perhaps even afraid.
7
Endtimes: The Warning
There is undoubtedly a widespread expectation that these are the ‘endtimes’, that apocalyptic events are on the horizon and that the end of the world may
really
be nigh. High-profile books and films are now implanting the idea that some major — and highly devastating — event will soon ravage the world. And even if mankind does somehow survive the coming cataclysm it will be as traumatised and hopeless refugees, desperate for strong, empowered leadership.
At the forefront of this mood of escalating doom and disaster is the unique, febrile excitement generated by the very idea of the Millennium. It is as if the year 2000 marks the pinnacle of all our hopes and fears, although the negative aspects are constantly emphasised at the expense of more positive and optimistic expectations. The Millennium, as such, only makes sense in a Christian context, supposedly marking 2000 years since the birth of Jesus, but now virtually everyone is caught up in the hysteria. With all eyes on the next few years, what a pity it would be if nothing happened, and what a temptation for certain individuals and cabals to ensure that it does...
For Christians the endtimes fever means the Second Coming of Jesus, as predicted in the New Testament, with the concomitant apocalyptic events described with perhaps excessive zeal in the Book of Revelation. We are led to believe that if Jesus, believed to be the epitome of Divine Love, returns to Earth in glory then he comes to initiate the final conflict between the forces of good and evil — the battle of Armageddon.
The Christian expectation is only part of the story. For example, New Agers have been prepared for this time - the dawning of the Age of Aquarius - for years, largely because of their acceptance of the prophecies of the sixteenth-century French occultist, Michel de Notre-Dame, more familiarly known as Nostradamus. From his psychic interpretation of astrological data, he singled out the year 1999 as a particularly disastrous one for mankind if the usual New Age interpretation of his obscurely worded ‘quatrains’ is accepted. Critics have pointed out that virtually any prophecy can be read into his words, rather like the ‘code’ read recently into the words of the Hebrew Bible.
1
Yet to question Nostradamus to a New Ager is rather like criticising the Bible to a fundamentalist Christian. Even so, if the author of the Book of Revelation - believed to be St John of Patmos - may be one of the two major creators of the Millennium, Nostradamus is very much the other. On to these gnarled roots have since been grafted all the other endtimes expectations drummed up so expertly by the many characters now revealed to be integral parts of the great conspiracy to exploit Millennium fever.
Even materialists, who scorn all religious or quasimystical beliefs, are experiencing pangs of increasing uncertainty about the future. Perhaps a global economic collapse will open the door through which will burst the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. They point to the current economic upheavals in the Far East, in Russia and elsewhere and fret about the future of the worldwide money markets, nervously projecting disaster around the time of the Millennium. If nothing else, the materialists point out that, at best, the Millennium Bug will cause chaos; because of a simple (if disastrous) lack of foresight on the part of many computer-builders, the software will not recognise the year 2000. (Ironically, thanks to the prevailing hysteria, it will be the only thing that doesn’t.) It may well lead to utter financial collapse on an international scale and at worst to rioting in the streets and martial law. And of course it is the Millennium itself that will activate the Bug.
One does not have to be a rabid fundamentalist or even an overanxious businessperson to suffer from Pre-Millennium Tension. We have seen in recent years — even recent months - an acceleration of global warming and its associated disturbances in weather patterns. Earth has been battered by a series of hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes, and there is a sense that even this is just a curtain-raiser to some much larger natural cataclysm. One is left wondering whatever next? Never before has so much tension, so much vulnerability been felt by so many, and never before has such desire for action been so cynically harnessed on such a scale.
Not everyone is dreaming, though. In a world of dreamers those who rarely sleep are kings. Where there is vulnerability, there will always be those who cynically seek to exploit it, and where there are those who seek to exploit, they will cynically create the vulnerability in the first place.
We are undoubtedly approaching the twenty-first century with increasing anxiety, which is the way our puppetmasters want it. The collective mood of heightened expectancy is a breeding ground for precisely the sort of belief system whose emergence we have charted in this book.
What we call the stargate conspiracy is the fostering of a belief that extraterrestrial ‘gods’ created the human race and presided over its civilisation - and that those gods are about to return. This belief is being promoted in different ways to different groups of people, but the underlying themes are always the same. Once these beliefs have entered into the collective consciousness, it will be relatively easy to use them as the foundation for a new religion. The ultimate aim of every organised religion has always been social control, and this one, we fear, will be no exception.
Cosmic countdown
Many groups and individuals are currently exploiting not only Millennium fever but also twenty-first-century anxiety. But of this cynical and often downright pernicious multitude, the activities of one particular type of group present the most thought-provoking and disturbing cautionary tale. These are the relatively new ‘space brother’ or UFO-centred cults. It would be a mistake to underestimate either the sheer numbers involved, or, indeed, the power of their beliefs. For example, the Raelian movement, which believes that all Raelians will be given eternal life by the coming space beings, has 40,000 members, and this is a relatively minor cult.
2
Many similar groups promote essentially the same message.
Against this background we must now set our discoveries about the Egypt — Mars conspiracies and the machinations of various groups. Make no mistake: the Millennium is absolutely central to their secret agenda - although the onset of the year 2000 is likely to mark only the beginning of a process that will reach its climax in the early years of the twenty-first century. James Hurtak, for example, highlights 2003 as a particularly key year.
Throughout this investigation different subjects, which appear at first to be independent of each other, seem to come together quite naturally. Carrying us along with the apparent logic, these links may seem to be reasonable, so that we are not surprised or disturbed when a coherent picture emerges. As we have seen, its main components are:
*
The belief that the ancient Egyptian monuments are the product of a mysterious civilisation of great antiquity, which may have been in contact with, or even created by, extraterrestrials. Through certain lasting ‘records’ — especially the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx — that civilisation left us messages about our future, specifically about some imminent event of global proportions. This is somehow tied in with the Millennium and the Age of Aquarius.
*
The idea that extraterrestrial beings remembered as the ‘gods’ were responsible for the civilising of mankind, as in Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery.
*
The discovery of what appear to be anomalous features on Mars, which, if proven to be artificial, can only be the product of a civilisation that existed on that planet in the distant past. This, too, has a message for us today.
*
The ongoing communications from the Council of Nine, which have been unfolding since 1952. They claim to be the Great Ennead — the Nine gods of Heliopolis. We have seen that the Council of Nine have increasing influence, not only over the New Age, but also politicians and multimillionaires.
Each of these major strands is based on a genuine mystery: the mysterious knowledge of the Dogon concerning Sirius; the evidence that the Sphinx is of far greater antiquity than is officially believed; the Viking images of Cydonia that appear to show genuinely unexplained features; and the apparently ‘miraculous’ phenomena surrounding the Council of Nine. These strands appear to be naturally coalescing: apparent connections have been found between the Cydonian monuments and those of Giza. The major
raison d’être
of Richard Hoagland, this element is now creeping into the works of others, notably Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock.
Into this developing picture come the Nine. They, too, place much emphasis on the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, even claiming to have built them. And, through the work of James Hurtak, the Martian monuments have been introduced into this increasingly complex web of connections. There is no doubt that Hoagland and Hurtak’s work is directly driven by the Nine, but what of Hancock and Bauval’s? Certainly, because it largely endorses Hoagland’s work,
The Mars Mystery
is indirectly promoting the Nine - and to a much wider audience.
The over-riding message is that the gods are back. The Message of Cydonia as promoted by Hoagland is that those monuments were designed to encode information for us today. When this is added to the ideas promoted by Hancock and Bauval that the Egyptian monuments also encode messages for our times, we can see that the two reinforce each other. And communications from the Nine are actually happening now.
The conclusion seems inescapable: the Nine gods who built not only the Pyramids and the Sphinx but also the structures on Mars are back. These are not just the creators of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, but of the entire human race.
However, this conclusion relies on the assumption that these strands began totally independently, that each of the discoveries were made in isolation, with connections between them only becoming apparent as time went on. But this is not the case. The entire picture seems to have been contrived according to a complex, long-term plan. For example, Robert Temple’s
The Sirius Mystery
was inspired by Arthur M. Young, who was present at the initial contact with the Nine in 1953. Young’s own inspiration came from Harry Smith, a high-ranking member of one of Aleister Crowley’s magickal orders in which extraterrestrial intelligences, Sirius, Mars and ancient Egypt were the great pillars of their beliefs. The Nine’s communications, particularly in the initial stages, seem to continue those of Alice A. Bailey, of which James Hurtak’s
The Keys of Enoch
is essentially an update. Hurtak has been the prime mover in the Face on Mars debate and in the New Egyptology, and The Keys of Enoch comes from the Council of Nine.
An alien agenda
Is the picture complete, or are other elements of modern mythology about to be drawn into this complex web? There are already clues: Stuart Holroyd’s ‘biography’ of the Nine, which was commissioned by Lab Nine, gave the subtext of this message away in the title:
Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth.
Another, apparently unconnected book,
The Secret School
by Whitley Strieber, has as its subtitle
Preparation for Contact.
In fact, this is no coincidence: bestselling author Strieber, most widely known for the tales of personal contact with aliens told in Communion,
Transformation, Breakthrough
and
Confirmation,
brings the last major part of the scenario into play.
Only in 1987 did
Communion
first catapult the alien abduction phenomenon into public consciousness. In the few years since we have seen such an explosion — virtually an epidemic — of claimed abductions that the image of the Grey alien is now firmly embedded in our minds as, at the very least, a cultural icon. But to many people the Greys are considerably more than semi-cartoon characters: at least 35 per cent of all Americans now believe that these sinister extraterrestrials are repeatedly abducting humans on a vast scale.
3
This belief has, virtually overnight, begun to take on quasireligious overtones. Strieber, in
The Secret School,
passes on nine lessons given to him by the aliens for all mankind, specifically linking their message to the Face on Mars, which he claims to have been shown by his alien captor/tutors when he was a child, and to the New Egyptology of Hancock, Bauval and West. It is, as we will see, no accident that
The Secret School
enthusiastically, even incongruously, carries an endorsement by none other than Graham Hancock: ‘Everyone concerned with the awesome mystery of what we are and what we may become should read
The Secret School.’
(Perhaps significantly, we have already identified the ‘Secret School’ as an alternative title of the Synarchist ‘Council of Nine’ of the 1930s.)