Sinister Forces
With Peter Levenda
Part Four
Jay Weidner: and I want to remind you that my new film Infinity:The Ultimate Trip is now out. Please go to www.sacredmysteries.com and look it up as well as my other new films Sophia Returning with John Lash and The Alchemy of Qi Gong with pedram Shojai. Also we have The Alchemical Dream with Terence McKenna and our two 2012 films: 2012: The Odyssey and Timewave 2013. Also go to www.jayweidner.com and read all of my free articles that are up there.
Jay: We're back. I don't want to waste any time here. I don't always have Peter Levenda on the line, so let's get right to it. So, Peter, now where were we? This was very interesting. So, this occult, the CIA is dabbling in the occult, and they are using techniques and things. And they really don't know what they are doing, causing a lot of damage. I don't think people really even understand the amount of damage that was caused. I wonder now about all those people in the late '70s, wandering around the streets of America, speaking to themselves, if they weren't some kind of casualty of some of these experiments, actually.
Peter: Well, that was one of the points I was trying to make in "Sinister Forces" that what we did is we created an army of zombies, really, of people that were prisoners in some cases, violent offenders in prison, that we gave massive doses of LSD to, for instance, that we submitted to all sorts of bizarre experimentations. People took acid in the '60s for spiritual reasons. I mean, they were taking hallucinogens. They were taking like peyote, psilocybin, mescaline. They were trying to obtain altered states of consciousness, and the idea was to open their minds and to become spiritually aware but not everybody was. Sometimes, a lot of people were taking it for recreational purposes, if you can imagine taking LSD for recreational purposes. But anyway, so that was the intent, right?
Turn on, tune in, drop out. This was the intention of it, and yet these same chemicals, or the natural version such as the mushrooms and the peyote, were used in these experimentations on prisoners, on prostitutes without their knowledge, on children in some cases, in mental institutions for children.
So, this is all documented and none of the stuff we're discussing here is speculation. It's all based on primary sources, on real documents, declassified stuff from the Army and from CIA and from the FBI.
So, what you have is a massive government program that used the same tool as Shamans have been using for centuries, if not millennia, to open the doorways of the mind to enable a human being to contact supernatural forces or have spiritual experiences.
These same substances and these same techniques and the same methods are being used to create the perfect assassin??the so?called Manchurian Candidate kind of assassin. We're weaponizing spirituality, and we did this in the years right after the end of World War II. And this to me is what is so astonishing, that no one really picks up on this. [laughs]
The government programs were looked down upon, of course. And they said, "Well, that's just too bad. It was an abuse of power" and all of this. But there was much more to it than that. People who are involved in spiritual quests should realize that the government itself was involved without even knowing it in a spiritual quest, and they bungled it because there were no safeguards in place.
There was no context for the experiences. So this to me is frightening. So what did we create? Who's out there? [laughs] I sometimes wonder if some of the far more famous serial killers were products of this process.
Charles Manson. Not really a serial killer, but Charles Manson does come to mind as one of these characters. Maybe Henry Lee Lucas and a few others??people who had spent time in the military or at the prisons where these experiments were taking place. And they then came out and started committing horrible crimes. I'm wondering what the connections might be.
Jay: Oh, I think it makes good sense to wonder about those connections. May Russell used to say back in the late seventies that the Son of Sam murders was a final test for an assassin school. Could you calmly kill two people in the front seat of their car police?style firing six times from your 44 magnum? And we thought, "Oh, you're crazy, May. That's the craziest thing we ever heard." But then you started looking at her evidence. One guy was blond, and another guy had black hair and another assassin had red hair. And it's like hmm. You know? Maybe.
Peter: Well, I devoted a whole chapter in "Sinister Forces, " or actually a number of chapters spread out, on the Son of Sam case because I lived at New York during the time. I was connected to some of the events peripherally. And we all knew back in the late '70s in New York that this was not the work of one person. We knew it was the work of a group. And then later, of course, Berkowitz confessed to this. Even after he confessed to all of the crimes, et cetera, et cetera, he's in jail for life. He's never getting out. He knows that. So now he's coming clean. And he has talked about the people he was involved with. He has identified the murders he did commit because he did commit some of the murders, and he identified the murders he did not commit.
And as we were going through it??the Son of Sam killings in New York??I was painstakingly trying to figure out the calendar they were using. And I noticed, as I mentioned in "Sinister Forces," there was a kind of an occult calendar in effect. Murders being committed during certain periods of waning and waxing moons, et cetera, near pagan holidays, so on and so forth.
There was a cult?like connection to what was taking place. Now the Son of Sam case was reopened. It was reopened some years ago because all the new evidence came out and suggested very strongly that more than one person was involved.
So yeah. [laughs] The connection between serial murder, our intelligence, our bungled attempts at creating assassins, spiritual initiations, this abuse of shaman technology, if you will. All of this is all together in one very messy cauldron??one very messy witch's brew here??of evil things, evil intentions, and unforeseen consequences, which turned out to be just as evil.
Jay: And it's like it's almost contagious. It's now gone beyond the seed, and it's a contagion. And it's spreading into the bowels of culture. It's astonishing to see kids today really think vampires are cool. I find it stunning because when I was young, I loved vampire movies but I never thought they were cool.
Peter: [laughs] Exactly.
Jay: They scared the living daylights out of me. [laughs] Go ahead.
Peter: No, I was going to say exactly. As I mentioned, you were deconstructing "The Shining." We should start deconstructing all the movies that have come out in the last 30 years or so on the occult and how it's been re?engineered in a sense??re?imagined??in so many different ways. We pooh?pooh the occult from a scientific point of view, many people, but at the same time they're embracing it on the other hand. They're seeing it as cool. They're seeing it as sophisticated in some cases. Or they're...
Jay: They have no idea what they're messing with.
Peter: Right.
Jay: They really don't, and this is what worries me. And you're right. I actually do deconstruct movies. It's like my hobby. I don't usually write it down. But I can pretty much tell you who's made the film, what their agenda was, what they're into. You know what I mean? It's getting to that point now where I can pretty much tell. And I'll tell you something. Kubrick is onto the same thing that you're onto. I haven't figured how to break this one yet, but Kubrick has films within films. And in "The Shining," the film within the film that no one has ever seen is about these sinister forces. And he literally builds them into the set and into the scenery, and it's quite astonishing actually.
He's basically saying that these forces have taken over this family??these unknown forces that are all around us. And if you allow them in, then they'll take you over and it's incredible. I don't know how to get it down on paper yet, but I'm working on it. Anyway.
Peter: Well, the point I make in the last volume of "Sinister Forces" is that America itself is a kind of haunted house.
Jay: It is.
Peter: We're living with ghosts.
Jay: Yes.
Peter: We don't know it, but we're surrounded by them. We're just as ancient a civilization here as you would find in Egypt or anywhere in Europe or in Asia. There were people living here for thousands of years before. We don't know who they were or what they were doing. We built our cities on top of them, and that's just the beginning. Then there's the other ghosts we've created along the way. So, there are sinister forces. We are surrounded by them. We've been blind to them because of our materialism and our materialist approach to things, which we're now paying for, [laughs] you know?
Jay: I agree. I'm obsessed with that subject. I was just talking to my wife today about where we live. Only 170 years have white people lived here in Southern Oregon, and we have no idea what was going on here before or what was sacred and what isn't sacred. And this is all over the country, too.
Peter: Absolutely. [Indistinct]
Jay: We have no idea. There's no connection to the land. There's no soil?to?soul relationship in America.
Peter: No, we don't as Americans. We don't have that. We're probably unique among countries with that total disconnection from [laughs] our physical environment.
Jay: And if you're spiritually literate, you know how important it is to have these places that were imbued with centuries of worship and sacred activity. I think you pointed out we might be building our prisons on sacred ground and building our churches on places that maybe where the evil was. We don't know what we're doing. We're just floundering around in the dark here.
Peter: Well, exactly. And we have built our prisons on sacred ground. Moundsville, West Virginia comes to mind right away. We built a prison there where we famously kept Squeaky Fromme, one of the Manson followers??the one who tried to kill Gerald Ford. So we built a prison there. We build prisons in Ohio on top of Indian burial mounds. I find it interesting that in "The Shining" the hotel was supposedly built on an Indian burial site.
Jay: Yup.
Peter: That was part of the Stephen King story. So you have this idea there was an Indian burial ground there underneath the Overlook Hotel. In the film "Poltergeist" they built their home??their suburban tracts??on Indian burial ground. I mean there's this idea that's there. It's in the back of our minds, where we know there's something wrong. We know it. We just don't know how to deal with it. [Music begins]
Jay: That's right, and we're haunted by the ghosts of an ancient civilization. We're standing on their bones. Quite incredible. Hey, Peter! I'd like to really have you back. We've really just scratched the surface of this. And I'd also want to talk to you next time about your book, "Stairway to Heaven." I'm really a big fan of Chinese alchemy and Daoism and just love that stuff.