Nick Redfern | Secret Societies, Strange Beings, & Hidden Codes

00:05 Puppet masters almost surely have of this clearly maybe something heavy And until you've thoroughly tested every last course just to think, you know the less you really do That's true Dr. Seuss! Where would we without TNT? Cause we know they're lying to us Just don't look without TNT The higher side chat show All right, Hiresight Chatters. We know that people have been gathering in secret groups for about as long as there's been people for one reason or another Some want to preserve sacred and powerful magical traditions from the destructive campaigns to eradicate them some want to influence and infiltrate the dominant power structures of their time And some want a covertly organized world events enslave humanity and be the last hidden hand that reigns supreme on this island earth

01:07 But unless you intend to spend years climbing the ranks of the countless societies, sects and orders out there... ...to really know their traditions true influence and agenda can seem damn near impossible. But fear not ladies and gentlemen because the legendary author and now seven-time THC guest Nick Redfern has turned his attention to covert organizations in his newest book Secret Societies The Complete Guide To History's Rites And Rituals It's 400 pages cataloging and describing well over 100 groups of the past and present who would rather be left unknown. We've talked to Nick about fatal UFO encounters, the world's weirdest places, Disney in the deep state, cryptids missing government files... And today we're diving deep into his hefty new encyclopedia of alliances agendas and under-the-radar groups I couldn't be more psyched! Nick my man welcome back to The Higher Side

01:55 Thanks for having me on again. There are so many that have died out or been squashed or absorbed. They change their names, stay out of the limelight So it can be a challenging study but before we get into specifics What can you say about this project overall? Has it changed your influence your outlook on secret groups Did you come away thinking differently about the overreaching subject matter in any significant way

02:34 Well, I think more than anything else just the very existence of secret societies suggests that in terms of history and sort of the ongoing world today you know we don't really see the full picture because there are powerful figures pulling the strings behind the scenes. Now other secret societies are sort of more obscure where they don't have widespread power are the ones do and you know there's a wealth of bizarre historical ones as well. And also obscure ones too so in other words what i tried to do with the book was, the format of the book which was published by visible ink press I've done several books with them and the layout is always the same they like A-Z style 200 entries per book

03:23 And so that was sort of the challenge, to come up with 200 secret societies to talk about. Now if you're going to talk about secret societies or semi-secret ones I mean you have to include the obvious ones like the Illuminati and the Masons that everybody's heard of but what i tried to do with a book was also dig out obscure groups, but also ones that were very intriguing and you know fascinating stories surrounding them. And to sort of demonstrate to people the different meanings for what a secret society might actually be it's sort of a political group engaged in occult rituals and rites

04:07 Or is it something, you know that's more of an economic based organization that has influence on the world stage so to speak. So it pretty much covers just about everything I guess conceivably could fall into the category of a secret society. Well if you just laid out your mission for the book I would say mission accomplished because it's really good. No problem! You cast such a wide net and cover so many groups Let me ask you, how often do you find that a secret group at its core has some type of magical tradition? Whether it's rituals to travel the astral plane or alchemy or contacting entities or something along those lines. It seems to be one of the biggest catalysts for forming a secret group with maybe racism coming in second

04:51 No, that's actually a good point because in many ancient groups you have these stories and links to the occult and supernatural activity. I mean even if you look at like the Freemasons one of their big influences is what's known as so-called The Great Architect And also if you go back into Egyptian times where they had their own secret societies, many of those were sort of based around like Egyptian magicians and things like that. You can find that throughout so many of these organizations where they call upon ancient gods

05:27 You have secret societies that are not just a cult based but other connection with sort of devil worship and things like that. And I think the main areas that sacred society seems to gravitate to power influence money, the ability to control and lead so to speak and manipulate I think that probably says as much about not just the group but the people who are drawn to them people who have a sort of lost her power and influence even if it's behind the scenes in a secret way rather than like an over open white. No doubt,

06:07 And like I had mentioned, we've talked for many hours about many things at this point and one slice of the weird pie you've written about and talked about extensively elsewhere is the Collins elite. And they make an appearance in this book too but until recently when i would hear that a group within the government is looking at the ET UFO phenomenon from the perspective of demons, I used to think that was simplistic reasoning from people who just wanted fit this strangeness into their religious paradigm. But maybe, this is a perspective that we shouldn't dismiss right away what can be said about the Collins elite and the way they're looking at the ET issue? Well, yeah. The Collins Elite is a book that I first wrote about seven years ago in 2010 in the book called Final Events and it was a story there I was put onto by a guy named Ray Beauchesne. Ray lives in Lincoln, Nebraska and his background's interesting he's a priest but he was in the 80s he ran the MUFON chapter in Nebraska for Mutual UFO Network and he was approached in the early 90s

07:06 A number of people working on this program in the department of defense which was essentially trying to resolve the ufo issue and even contact these alien entities predominantly by something like remote viewing my mind to mind contact. I'm more than a group got involved in it the more they came to believe that we're dealing with something that wasn't. Extraterrestrial but something that was quite literally demonic that's how they can perceive now, By their own admission, this was their belief system. It wasn't something that was born out of hard provable facts it was their suspicions and their connections and linkages in putting all these different things together

07:49 But what began as a think tank within the government became more of like a secret society where they had not just intelligence-based people on the program. After awhile, they were inviting into the fold priests, demonologists, people who were sort of well versed and learned in ancient manuscripts on demonology and things like this. And they had all sorts of people onboard I need really did become sort of a study of the occult try to understand the nature of the UFO phenomena but also having experts in the field of like the history people like alistair crowley and jack parsons who was one of his more famous disciples so to speak. And so another words you know you have this group which was fluid flexible terms of membership and how it operated,

08:43 But, you know imagine going into this room where you have a demonologist sat next to an intelligence agent. Next to him is an expert in translating 700 year old Middle Eastern texts on demons and then somebody else who was an expert on Ouija boards and how to summon up supernatural entities sometimes which required the need for certain rituals to be undertaken that you can see how it was transformed from something like the equivalent of Project Blue Book, you know a UFO program to where it became a definitive secret society really. Yeah I just think that is such an interesting perspective really and i guess another organization that comes up in this book is STAC which is another group kind of associated with this in this vein right?

09:34 Yeah, and one of the interesting things is that I was never really sure what it stood for STAC. I speculated in doing research that maybe it's something like science and technology and something else you know? And because of what they're involved with it could have been something like Science Technology and Christianity but I don't know if I'm speculating or guessing there! But yeah that's one of the interesting things is that there were at least a couple of groups And certainly the Collins elite still exists, but that you know whether it's under that name or nickname I don't know today. But the Stapp group was similar in the sense of they were also pursuing this sort of demonic angle and there may well have been a third group as well and we know for sure that there was a group in the late 60s created by the CIA called Operation Often and this particular group also is heavily involved in trying to weaponize the occult

10:29 you know, and I think when you start going down that path of doing like Faustian pacts, do you know what i mean? It can never end up well. But nevertheless you had all these different groups and they were all trying to understand the nature of supernatural phenomena crossing over with demonic activity and recklessly thinking, can we harness this and weaponize it? Almost like can we control demons you know and have them do our bidding that sort of thing which whether people believe in demons or they think they're supernatural entities that could be explained by science. You know the different theories but I don't think either way it's a good thing to sort of go down that path but the stat group

11:09 They were one of the groups that was trying to open doors and portals to whatever realms of existence these things came from. And they was more looking at the science aspect of it, whereas the Collins elite were very much steeped in Old Testament religious belief systems so they were covering similar territory but their approaching it from a different angle really Wow, man. So any whispers or updates about the Collins elite if they are still around since you wrote that book seven years ago? Yeah well what happened was that I mean one of the things I pointed out early on in the book is that the people I spoke to from the group and I only spoke about nine ten eleven twelve of the members some of them were retired and I truthfully don't know how many people at any given time were

12:02 We're in the group but from some of the things that people said. Anytime you probably was up to about thirty or forty it wasn't an agency like the size of a cia the nsa or fbi, what is this obscure cult type groups society that was being funded you know in a covert fashion now they told me there The Collins Elite was essentially like a nickname that was given to the group. It was like an in-house joke, which is a long complicated story I won't go into but the Collins elite was basically a nickname now there may well have been an official classified name but if there was i didn't get that and i do think that possibly the term the collins elite from their perspective it was

12:44 A comfortable way of being able to talk about the group without possibly compromising the real classified title. Now, to get your point of the question I do still get snippets of information here and there from people who were clearly approached by the Collins elite, secretly consulted people like demonologists, theologians you know people who had looked into the history of witchcraft and things like that I've got several people who since the book came out said words to the effect of, you know, as approached back in 1981 or wherever by this strange group of people from government and they wanted me to decipher and translate and relate to them this 14th century manuscript they got their hands on. And it's almost certainly the case again i can't prove but it's almost certainly the case that they were talking about

13:35 the Collins elite. So I have a lot of snippets like that, what i don't have you know is the definitive smoking gun but when I hear these stories time and again snippets here and there from different people not just across the country but actually across the world as well it does sound like the Collins elite or at least the Stack Group or one of these others but maybe they're all part and parcel of a bigger Bigger kind of umbrella organization, you know that's something I've occasionally thought of as well. Mm-hmm That is awesome enemy the the Collins elite perspective It also brought back the Montauk project to the forefront on my mind because that seems More in line with a type of magical ritual in certain respects right? Well yeah, I mean one of the things that stands out from everything that Collins really did was that it required some sort of

14:30 Like you said, like a ritualistic aspect of this where... You know when I said they were trying to contact what they first thought were aliens and then they came to believe we're demonic entities. We're not talking about trying to contact them and have them come in land down at Area 51 or outside the White House What it was? It was like a mind-to-mind thing And some of the guys said that The people who could do this really well, kind of similar to the remote viewers of the 1970s and 80's. They had contacted on a mind-to-mind basis these entities and initially they thought they were aliens but then as more got into it

15:08 Pay for the project started to fall sick some of them died there was a weird. Runs of bad luck and like some sort of negative backlash like a dark cloud descended on the program and when it works with these contacts work and even though i went down server negative path. The reason why is because forget back again to your point he said they were performing rituals or getting themselves into altered states of mind, and trying to summon these things and invoke them. So there was that ritualistic, altered state type situation that you find in many secret societies

15:46 If you look at South America, Africa, Central America where you have again these ritualistic activities. Where you have the local shaman in the village get into an altered state of mind and communes with higher entities that's basically what they were doing with the Collins elite in the intelligence agencies they had people who could get into altered states of mind whether through hallucinogenics or chemical stimulation and they would try and use ancient rituals to invoke these things through. Now, apparently they did but not in sort of physical form but like an ethereal almost like an invisible presence like a poltergeist you know in the home that sort of thing where it was clear things were going wrong and there was this dark cloud and you know it's like there is this atmosphere that you could almost cut with a knife people sometimes get disappointed houses as they go into the house

16:41 I just get this weird vibe and that's what happened with the college lady was if their territory where they were working with somehow, what's like supernaturally infected by these things and i said it went down a very dark path from there on. Yeah, man. And then the like the Montauk Project has some similar elements in that it seemed to be heavily based on consciousness studies to a degree or consciousness experiments and people talk about things coming through portals and I used to think about that in a very physical way but now I looked at some more Montauk project literature and they talked about creating Bigfoot-like tulpas which you know is like a spiritual entity So I'm thinking wow

17:26 And you mentioned Jack Parsons and Alistair Crowley earlier, the connections between ritual magic of an ancient type and modern science. It seems these people seem to be fairly linked or at least have interlocking interests that aren't quite apparent on the surface Yeah, that's right. I mean if you look at for example both Crowley and Parsons, to a degree they both had... we can make a good argument that they were both linked to UFOs. Crowley for example was sort of notorious for performing rites and rituals some of the very potentially dangerous nature calling forth

18:05 supernatural entities, try to invoke them again for power money sex influence the whole the usual things that you get with secret societies and one of the perfect examples is just before the dawning of the 1920s Crowley invoked this entity that was known as lamb l am i think it was when he was in the altered states of mind to perform a ritual and if you look at crowley's own drawing his piece of artwork I mean, Crowley's picture looks eerily like the figure on the front of Whitley Strieber's Communion. The only difference is you don't have the heavy thick black eyes but everything else like a huge hairless head on top of a small body and these penetrating eyes and pointed chin it looks like a modern-day grey for the most part now On top of that one of Crowleys big disciples was as I said Jack Parsons

19:04 Jack Parsons in the 30s was one of the United States pioneering rocket pioneers to the extent there's actually a crater named after him on the surface of the moon. And he was the leading player in the creation of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena and even to this day, at JPL every Halloween they hold this sort of like ritualistic little party to celebrate Crowley's life and they bring these mannequins out dressed as Parsons and his cohorts, you know in like white lab rats that kind of thing But Parsons had a really interesting background because as well as being a rocket expert, he was heavily into the occult and a major follower of Crowley. Before rocket launches, you know, he would invoke the ancient god Pan as a means to ensure safe flights so you know you had all these military colonels and lieutenants and generals hoping all these rocket

20:00 tests were going to go well, and then you've got the guy who's at the forefront of the program. He's conjuring up supernatural entities for a safe flight! You have to wonder what the military thought about this but they knew he was a brilliant rocket scientist so they sort of turned their heads at his other life. But he got involved with L Ron Hubbard long before Scientology and even Dianetics. This was when when Hubbard was still a sci-fi writer and the two of them engage in a number of ritualistic activities. And before his death in 52, Parsons was convinced that at least part of the 1947 UFO wave when it kicked off he believed that he had somehow opened a door that allowed the phenomenon to come through. In other words, it wasn't as simple as aliens coming from another world and flying through our atmosphere. It was somehow

20:53 involved them and allowed them to come through or made it easier for them. Wow, I don't think...I've known a lot of that stuff but i don't think i ever have heard that Parsons himself thought he might be partially responsible for that kind of thing? Well yeah, I mean he was heavily into the whole flying saucer business. I mean I'll explain how it happened In the summer of 47, you had the Kenneth Arnold sighting. That's what kicked everything off and led to the coin in the term flying saucer now because Arnold story was so fascinating inevitably a book was going to come out on it and Arnold's book The Coming Of The Saucers came out just a few years later is actually written by Ray Palmer. Ray Palmer was the editor of a number of massively selling sci-fi magazines in the 1940s and onwards

21:45 So in other words, you have Kenneth Arnold the guy who kicked off the UFO phenomenon linked to Ray Palmer. Now Ray Palmer as I said was a major sci-fi guy in the magazine world and Ray Palmer knew L Ron Hubbard because at that time Hubbard was a sci-fi writer and the two had crossed paths many times And then from there, you have a connection also between Hubbard and Parsons. And there are rumors—and they are rumored but it wouldn't surprise if they're not true—that at some point all these people met together so you even had Arnold, you had Palmer, you had Hubbard and you had Parsons in the same room chatting about all of this. Now as I said that's still at the rumor mill level but it wouldn't surprise because of the deep links that the four had

22:33 together so again you can understand why a case could be made that there was a direct connection between Parsons, Arnold Hubbard and all the rest of them in the sci-fi world who also Gravitated to the occult as well. Oh yeah those were interesting times for sure and kind of along this line Line of thinking with aliens and demons you read about the Loch Ness dragon cult which I'd never heard of before But if we're gonna look at the possibility of aliens being related to magical workings could this be true for the Loch Ness monster as well?

23:09 Well, I actually wrote a book last year called Nessie which was about all the paranormal aspects of the Loch Ness Monster Mystery. There's really no doubt in my mind that there is sort of like an overwhelming paranormal aspect to a lot of late monster stories you know it's not just a colony of plesiosaurs and that's the end of the story now One of the interesting things about Loch Ness is its history of phenomena that goes far beyond just the Nesses, so to speak. I mean our old friend Alistair Crowley actually owned a house pretty much on the shore of Loch Ness called Boleskine House which burned down at the end of 2015 and...I mean the story itself of Crowleys isn't you know intriguing enough

23:52 the fact that he had this house there, again performing all sorts of rituals. This was in the early part of the 20th century and again he was trying to summon up supernatural entities from within The Lock and people who visited Boleskine House said it had this weird atmosphere and people just got a horrible vibe and just felt creeped out by it. And certainly two following owners of the Boleskine House actually committed suicide one inside the house In the early 1960s and the other one who is a famous british actor named george sanders he committed suicide in the early seventies both of them having owned a burlesque house so you know there was it we had five. So we also have a lot of your phone signing that lock now some paranormal activity,

24:41 But as far as this particular dragon cult's concerned, again it's a very weird story and it relates to events that began in the late 1960s and may well have gone on for potentially years after that. What happened was that in the summer of 1969 a trio of american tourists were up at lock next actually work better look for nasty although you know you're not gonna go to lock message not trying, why are you now but that might interest was actually alistair crowley they wanted to say boleskine house. Now, right next to where Bleskin House used to stand there's an old cemetery which goes back years or centuries actually and it has a history attached to it of witchcraft and witch covens and rumors of sacrifice and all sorts of things going on there.

25:31 The three tourists were walking around the cemetery and they found what looked like some sort of carefully folded piece of cloth. And when they opened it up, it was actually like a tapestry about four feet by about five feet and it was wrapped around a large sea shell and the writing on it, they didn't know it at the time but it was soon deciphered. It turned out to be Turkish and one of the words translated as serpent now so happens that stories of lake monsters in Turkey are quite prevalent most famous one relates to a place called Lake Van where like Nessie you know that Lake Van has a tradition of a lake monster and there were lot of other ritualistic imagery

26:16 Embedded on this tapestry now this particular piece of tapestry was shown to a well-known Loch Ness monster seeker of that particular time in the late 60's named Ted holiday. Ted Holiday started going to Loch Ness in the early sixties and he began by thinking that he was dealing with like a colony of unknown animals just creatures that science hadn't found yet or even classified but the more that he dug into it the more began to experience what we think it is and call it a college like just strange stuff would overtake him. I'm there's like this unsettling atmosphere and he was shown this tapestry i began to dig into this story even further, add whispers of rumors locally that they straddle called should actually been bad

27:05 for years, possibly decades maybe even longer and that it had catastrophic mistake. One of the members had mistakenly left that tapestry where it was after performing rituals the previous night because the following morning when the tapestry was found so Ted Holiday began looking into this more and more and came to hear a lot of disturbing stories like sacrifices not of animals but people And he started looking into stories of, you know how many people in Scotland go missing every year that kind of thing. So it's really digging deep into this issue and the more you dug into it the more that Ted Holliday came to believe the Loch Ness monsters were something supernatural not flesh-and-blood animals that zoology hadn't found or whatever and he started to have weird experiences then and it culminated in 1973 when

27:59 when he had an encounter right on the shores of Loch Ness with nothing less than like a full-blown man in black. And the following year, the exact same spot, he had a serious heart attack which he perceived as like a warning you know to stay away and he actually didn't. He died young at 59 from another heart attack so some people suggest that all of this came back on him really but he didn't walk away from it. So the rituals, his secret dragon cult the atmosphere that was already created by Crowley, you know. Some people think it was ripe for basically for holiday to sort of be on a doomsday trip almost. Damn! That is provocative stuff I love it

28:43 I also remember we talked about Mac Tonys and his idea of crypto terrestrials that these physical aliens could be more closely tied to the earth than just some convoy passing through from another galaxy. Perhaps an ancient race living inside the earth, and when you add the magical or spirit realm element to that i think the case that these things sit closer to home gets pretty strong It does really, I mean you know you can look at a lot of these things where... it's like me when i first got into all this stuff as a kid everything is black and white. As most things are when you're a kid you know? You don't think too much about the feasibility of this or that. It was like Santa Claus he doesn't question well course he exists! He comes down the chimney every Christmas Eve and for any little kids who might be listening yes he really does but

29:32 Yeah i mean it's one of the situations where when you look into these kind of things and any black and white to start with but then the more you looking to it, define well hang on this doesn't seem really logical in this seems for more feasible that we are dealing with like a home grown thing. My view is that a lot of the phenomenon is not extraterrestrial in the sense it's coming from multiple star systems, multiple light years away. But perhaps something that more coexists with us you know like multi-dimensional It's still alien in one sense but not extraterrestrial alien and its sort of coexisting alien Now Max stuff was interesting and still is interesting The idea there could be surviving pockets

30:21 Not us, the human race but something very similar to homo sapiens and that when we started to infest the planet even more. They decided to move underground and they only surface from time to time and perhaps they created the alien UFO myth as a means if i was saying Nobody would ever guess what they really were because we were so swamped with the UFO meme and the alien name. So in other words, there was like a stealthy hidden society deep below the planet that only services from time to time but who were very skillful and adept at camouflage and subterfuge and making sure that's we never really got on the trail of who or what they really are

31:09 And so they put out these conflicting stories, we come from Mars, we come from Venus, we come from Zeta Reticuli. you know and keep us guessing only because they knew it, they weren't supermen. You know they knew they were going to be seen from time to time so the idea of a secret society of semi-humans might explain something else I talk about in the book and that's The Men In Black Mystery which also has like a secret society atmosphere too. It is you know the idea these creepy looking guys silencing people who've seen UFOs but again the witnesses described them as not looking entirely human. They're sort of very pale, their eyes are often described as larger and starry they don't really seem to understand our mannerisms and customs but you know they look enough like humans where you would pass them in the street perhaps would not look but if you looked really close you would see a lot of odd angles that make them not look like us so in that sense perhaps

32:10 the men in black could be crypto terrestrials again sort of trying to prevent people from getting too close to the truth of who and what they saw who are what this secret society actually is you know yeah great points and i do love tales of underground cities and civilizations and you have a great one in this new book Apparently, according to Howard Mill in 1931 this guy he had met Dr. F Bruce Russell and his friend fell into an underground city in Death Valley? Yeah, there's actually a number of stories coming out of Death Valley. I mean, I could have made that section way longer but I was limited to 150 thousand words and 200 entries and the publisher would've gone crazy if I'd turned it into like a 200 thousand word book! But yeah, the stories coming out of Death Valley collectively go back to the early 1920s through to the latter part of the 30s and slightly into the early 40s

33:09 And they're all very similar, where you have people like explorers, Indiana Jones types, prospectors things like that. People looking for gold and precious items claim to have found ways into underground facilities – that sounds quite sophisticated – but who've either fell into or discovered old tunnels, caverns some that may have been carved out. Some might be natural caverns that over time have been sort of carefully hidden they've just got small entrances and exits and you wouldn't really know where they were if they were sort of carefully concealed but the stories typically relate how these various prospectors archaeologists and adventurers and explorers

33:54 made their way, way deep down under the ground. You know we could be talking like a mile or half a mile more than that maybe and coming across what looked like the remnants of ancient societies now of course if that's true the idea that there could be deeper into the California deserts the equivalent to some of them described almost as Greek architecture Roman architecture temples you know pillars and statues and massive ancient rooms. If that's true, then it would massively alter the history of the United States—the idea that there was some sort of super race that existed way before us. But there are a number of rumors that some of the people who made their way into these caverns and caves in a very really weird and eerie and creepy way they found themselves being followed or watched very often late at night

34:50 by these people that with hindsight again kind of sound like the men in black where they would wear these pulled-down hats and come out at night, and you'll be able to see him too well. But these people were being followed and occasionally they would cross paths with these people who would then glare at them as if to say we know what you're doing and stop don't come back to our realm. And in some cases it was a literal threat whatever you know just stop right now, nothing else will happen to you. So there's a lot of weird stories about these people looking into these underground areas and then finding themselves looking out the window late at night and three shadowy figures or whatever looking up at the windows if just trying to intimidate them kind of saying we know what you saw leave it alone that kinda thing. That's great love it

35:44 Of course, Antarctica has been the topic of much speculation kind of in this realm. And I'm not sure if you've been seeing this crazy list of people who are going down there for some reason but just in the past few months John Kerry went down there as Secretary of State as well as this Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow, this Carol III and also Buzz Aldrin and it really does seem like The possibility is they might have found something that a privileged few are being invited to see, religious political and space elite. Well yeah I mean it's interesting because a lot of those things

36:21 science, technology, religion history secret places, secret groups all of those are sort of staple parts of secret society you know whether they were an official secret group or not. But yeah I mean there are a lot of weird stories coming out to Antarctica and there has been for decades long being these rumors that deep below the ice before that part of the planet was covered in ice there may well have been just regular land masses And so if that was the case, then even if there were massive ice flows came over and just overwhelmed the landscape as it would now if there was like an Ice Age. But you might find that 10,000 years after the Ice Age and the ice is still there 300 feet down, you've still got the remnants of the rubble of what was once New York or LA or wherever but it's such a

37:13 impenetrable kind of landscape that no one would ever know. So I do sometimes wonder if that might be the case with things like Antarctica, I'm not really a big fan of the idea you know there are these gigantic alien bases deep below Antarctica but what i do think is possible it's like I said before we've had these successive ice ages maybe that area was regular territory just normal environment and it was overwhelmed by ice, and maybe that might explain if something had been found. That would make sense if there are remnants of that earlier civilization still in that particular area."

37:54 Mm-hmm. I mean human history is a lot longer and stranger than we've been told it seems, I mean the evidence seems to suggest that And Antarctica's the fifth largest continent you'd expect there to be something interesting worth digging up? I've heard some people suggest that maybe even Atlantis was a city on Antarctica and that this whole continent...I mean it is technically underwater so maybe there is something to that Yeah, I mean it wouldn't surprise me because if you imagine that people talked about another ice age and how some of the early ones seem to happen almost inexplicably quickly. If there was a sudden alteration in the atmosphere or the environment but yeah I come back to that issue if you imagine something like let's just take New York overwhelmed by ice sheets hundreds and hundreds of feet deep

38:43 pommeled all the buildings, flattened them. People died in the buildings over time just became so degraded you know turned to rubble and we're talking of a period of thousands of years so there really wouldn't be much left beyond what you would find at an archaeological dig but Stonehenge or somewhere like that. So I could see how something could would be undertaken secretly probably to dig further into Antarctica, to dig down and actually see if there's any way to penetrate what we perceive as Antarctica today and try and figure out if we keep going down and keep going down are we gonna find evidence of a race whether Atlanteans or whoever that once lived there

39:30 Maybe kind of like Mac Tony's crypto terrestrials perhaps they fled the area when I knew what was happening started over somewhere else and have seen the ice flows maybe that dictated why they decide to go underground for fear that. What happened was gonna happen to the entire planet yeah If we ever were on that landmass, it would be a good place to try and unearth things from the ancient world which also does seem to be a subtext of the constant battling in the Middle East. To bring it back to a topic from your latest book you talk about an immortality group based in Utah that might have sprung up around some ancient things found in Baghdad after the Iraq invasion? Yeah this is like a really weird story because when the invasion of Iraq occurred

40:18 Rumors started to fly around that although, you know the primary reason was to oust Saddam Hussein. The theory is that he also acted as a cover for a great deal of other things now one of the key events that happened when the invasion of Baghdad occurred was the looting of the Baghdad Museum and the museum, thankfully it's sort of been rectified etc now but But the museum was home to, I mean literally thousands and thousands of priceless artifacts. But when the military went in they realized in conjunction with these staff who they were working with that it didn't look like that these were sort of random

41:02 i keep driven writing and pillaging and looting it seems that the paper done this i don't have best to make you look like that but actually specifically targeted certain areas of the museum where some intriguing artifacts was supposedly kept now what are the rumors while that's all of this material evidence with ancient extraterrestrial technology there were somehow linked to the legends of, for example King Gilgamesh whose kingdom was in what is today Iraq. It's a place called Uruk and If you read the Epic of Gilgamesh, he talks about how he didn't really sound completely human. He was like a classic one of the ancient giants of the Bible and things like that. And Gilgamesh supposedly reigned for 130 years which if true clearly wasn't entirely human but he apparently had an obsessive quest to understand and capture the secrets of immortality. That's at the basics of the story of The Epic of Gilgamesh

42:06 And the theory is somebody, some elite group went in to try and find these ancient alien artifacts with a means to try and provide sort of global elites with immortality by finding this ancient technology. This then follows over into this story that when I wrote the book, I actually only had one source that related to me predominantly put the story out to see if anybody else could sort of confirm it. You know, when you hit a brick wall sometimes that's what you have to do. You have to just pull it out And since the book came out, I've actually had three people who provided other snippets and all of them interestingly enough said well yeah the group did exist. It looked into it but they didn't really get very far with it now if they're all lying granted again this is speculation but if they were lying I think that probably would have said oh yeah or work great you know and there's this elite have got it because he would amp up the excitement

43:04 But they basically said, well yeah they did have these artifacts. They did have these ancient texts and material evidence but nobody got anywhere with it and apparently they're still working on it but its not achieved anything. And to me that sounds more believable than spinning a wild story you know what I mean? So ironically the fact that the program didn't work, to me at least adds weight what the informants told me. But yeah, it was I was never told specifically where in Utah this was going on but it was described as like a classified fortified place underground which kind of provokes imagery at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah which does a lot of secret research into viruses and chemical warfare so for them to have an underground facility there which Dugway does he wouldn't surprise me if it operated out of Dugway

43:57 But also it sounds a little bit not unlike the Collins elite, because apparently this group out in Utah was also rereading things like The Epic of Gilgamesh and a lot of other ancient texts to try and figure out the truth of immortality. So I think there's more to this story but whether or not anything has been achieved you know that that's an entirely different aspect but but we need far more evidence for that. Yeah, for a second there I thought they had something figured out when you look at the ages of a lot of the elite class but then David Rockefeller kicked the can apparently on The Solstice there so maybe they got some more work to do? Well yeah i mean it's one of these things where if we're going to be immortal

44:40 You don't want to be living to 800 but you stop aging when your 75, then you've got to live 700 years at the age of 75. I think most people would say well just fix it so that i'm going to 30 for the next 2000 years and that'll do! So I think, you know, immortality we actually know why we age. You know just basically due to the division of cells and when they stop dividing properly the body starts to degrade and get old etc., etc.. But we understand why that happens, but if we could find a way to halt it or reverse it then in theory immortality isn't just the pipe dream or fantasy. It could actually be achieved but we just don't have the technology yet so far as we know to do it. Right. But you know it's not impossible that it could happen because then the big question is well would he be made available to everybody?

45:34 Or would some sort of global elite be the only ones that would know? And perhaps when they got to a certain age, the story put out that they died. But they just didn't actually die you know, they just live in sort of a clandestine place or location where no one would know they're still living and living and living! Yeah, well I mean that is some of the conspiratorial speculation around David Rockefeller's death because it was announced on that solstice which is a kind of ritualistic date but you know you're right about that. You want a young vessel? I don't think he's doing cartwheels down there or anything. No

46:14 Oh man. So another thing I want to ask you about is Uncracked Codes, this Cicada 3301 saga in particular pretty interesting story. Uh...I've talked about it a little bit before but what can you tell us about that? This is one of these situations where we find a secret society, or is it a secret society? Where we're sort of so baffled by the existence of it. But he does exist now. It's called CACADA 3301 and basically what happened is that between 2012 and 2016 these strange puzzles have been placed online and people have been encouraged to essentially try and crack these codes

46:55 And all sorts of theories have been put forward as to who this group, this clandestine group is and how and why they're doing this. Now one of the interesting theories is that it's actually some kind of intelligence agency whether at the US or the UK or who knows? They're looking for highly skilled people who are brilliant at cracking code despite deciphering codes and so they put a challenge out which seems kind of like an exciting fun thing to do but at its heart might be you know something that relates to national security, government secrecy in that kind of thing. For example when this first surfaced again one of the reasons why I included it in the book is because Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper actually speculated

47:47 It was either the Illuminati or the Freemasons that were doing this. So in other words, you have a lot of different theories and a lot of sort of high-profile magazines and newspapers have covered this like for example Rolling Stone magazine they gave it major coverage now one of the things that Rolling Stone Magazine found out as they dug into it was that a 2013 version of one of these codes that came out was actually a cipher based on one of Alistair Crowley's writings. So again, you know we have this going back to Crowley and you also had Britain's GCHQ which is the British equivalent of the NSA and there were rumors that they might have been involved in it again trying to find people to recruit and people who were perhaps a little bit alternative and who thought outside the box

48:39 But to this day, we don't really know. So at one end of the spectrum you've got people like the NSA or GCHQ and at the other end You've got Aleister Crowley and Freemasons and The Illuminati And other people have somewhere balanced between the two so it's a very intriguing mystery that still going on Well, any good mystery is going to touch on all those buzzwords and groups for sure. But this part of it was new to me. This is from your book you say in November 2013 a message left anonymously on the website Pastebin came from someone who claimed to have been brought in from a superior in the military

49:17 and said that the Cicada Group was a left-hand path religion disguised as a progressive scientific organization comprised of military officers, diplomats and academics who are dissatisfied with the direction of the world. Well we've heard that before haven't we? Well, you know that it's interesting because again to some degree that sounds a little bit like the Collins elite and they were sort of getting bigger and bigger. You know as you said its left hand path religion described at this scientific organization comprised of military people diplomats academics which in a lot of academics are brought into the Collins elites not as members but as consultants

49:59 So in other words we can find a lot of parallels and linkages between these groups. Suggested that they're all part of parcel some bigger umbrella and way sort of looking at them thinking or assuming that what we dealing with is multiple completely independent organizations but then reality, have you know like a central hub when you find these connections with Crowley and demonology and secret societies and powerful people in governments of the military. You know this even sort of ties in like I said with the Iraqi issue so put all those together, I think it's good case can be made that many of these secret societies are part of

50:46 much larger single sacred society. Right, yeah some like kind of they spider web out? Yeah exactly! And there's a lot of people that think just this past presidential election is the result of some kind of powerful underground network making a move from within the deep state and I've even heard some say that they think the cicada puzzles were a recruitment tool to find just the sorts of people with the technical skills to facilitate such a thing Yeah, I've got to be honest. I haven't heard that one but...I mean there's no doubt that sort of cocaine is a major talking point there's no doubt about that and certainly agencies have picked up on it you know perhaps an agency that knows nothing about it but wants to know about it and I think that's one of the things that certainly politics demonstrates to us

51:36 the left and the right hand don't always know what each other are doing, and there are secret little cliques within political parties. And somebody's working for somebody else...and it gets really complicated you know? I mean you only have to look at the Russia thing right now to see that's not necessarily anything to do with secret societies obviously but you can just see how it becomes so complicated and just filled with intrigue because people just don't really know what's going on. And related to these things we're talking about, I don't know if you've heard this story going around of the missing guy from Brazil but it's pretty interesting. It involves some type of high-level code apparently. This guy after keeping his room locked for a month

52:19 Bruno Borgs had disappeared and left it in it a fully encrypted language and symbols all over the walls along with 14 handwritten books that were also encrypted, and a statue of Giordano Bruno Italian philosopher worth about $2500. The books apparently were impeccable in symmetry and alignment And his family knew nothing about the statue he was alone when it was delivered It stands on a symbol that apparently resembles an alchemist transmutation circle. He was constantly asking people to invest in a project that he had without telling them what it was all about, he just told his mother he was writing 14 books that would change humanity in a good way and he got a $6500 loan from his cousin and he said he was able to finish this project but he disappeared on March 27th and he left these fourteen

53:13 encrypted books arranged in a strange way around this center circle. Very odd! Yeah, actually I did see that. And you've got a couple of stories like that almost identical one that springs to mind was a guy named Wilbur Wilkinson in 1953. Wilbur Wilkinson and a friend of his name Carl Hunra they rented an aircraft from a small air strip in Southern California took to the skies because they were supposedly going to meet some very human looking aliens in the California desert And this is very much like the whole contact a movement of the fifty you know going out to desert locations and making these long hair space brothers that i would not. I'm reportedly home rather will consider being contacting, these aliens kinda like the collins elite in silver mines of my infraction supposedly channel down but we want to make it well

54:08 They hired this aircraft, took to the skies and were never seen again. The plane was never found. Hunrath and Wilkinson were never found. And the police and FBI there was a quite extensive investigation and nothing ever turned up at all for all intents and purposes. They'd vanished. The plane had vanished. There was no telltale fires in the surrounding hills or in the trees or whatever And they were just gone. Now, what happened was that the police and the press descended on Wilkinson's house and in the basement even his wife didn't realize this but all across the walls Wilkinson had sort of scrawled what he believed was like some sort of ancient alien language and it was described in the local newspapers, the LA Press at the time

54:57 who invited down or made their way in. And they saw all these sort of images, these strange hieroglyphics etc., and it was perceived as being this alien language that Wilkinson, Wilbur Wilkinson had been scrupulously writing it all across the walls in his basement and his den. And he was never seen again and apparently photographs were taken of this odd writing, actually drawings of them were reproduced in the local newspapers. But I haven't seen the photographs but apparently some were taken so his story in some respects is quite close to this breaking one as well

55:36 Amen. Well, Nick that about does it for us another great book written another great podcast recorded again I really appreciate it man let the people know what you got going on and where they can get more red fern in their diet alrighty Well, I'll be speaking at a conference in Kent Ohio called the Kent Ohio Paranormal Weekend on the last weekend of April. And I'll be speaking about all my research into The Men In Black and that one and people can reach me at my blog which is titled Nick Redfern's World Of Whatever so if you just type that in to search engine then you will find it will come up as your first entry

56:13 people can reach me at Twitter, NickRedfernUFO or also Facebook. There's a bunch of Nick Redferns if you scroll down you'll see me and I'm always happy to chat with people if they've got any questions want to share stories or want advice on anything just let me know and uh... yeah if I can answer it I will. Awesome well you are the man Nick until next time keep doing what you do! Alright thanks a lot Greg You got it And boom goes that dynamite people. Nick Redfern doing what he does best, bringing the weird. He is such a beast when it comes to cranking out books I always enjoy them and like I mentioned Nick has been doing shows with me since the beginning so i really gotta thank him It's been quite a ride If you are in the Midwest

57:00 It's not often there is a badass event to go to, believe me. I know! So if you are free this weekend, go see Nick at the Kent Ohio Paranormal Weekend. Tell him I said what's up? But I thought this was a good one. I'm glad we got to talk about the Collins Elite Saga something that i am looking at with new eyes Cicada 3301 Glad that got back in the mix Of course I gotta give a shout out as well to my main man Kyle who actually brought up that cicada recording recruitment theory on the last Q&A that I did for PLUS members. That is why I kind of laughed when Nick said he hadn't heard of it because, I was not surprised! It's just something a buddy of mine came up with but i thought it was really interesting and that story about the guy in Brazil is super weird too right? What the hell?! It's like the guy opened a dimensional doorway and never made it back

57:51 I'm also really getting into this explanation of magic for everything. I do realize this, aliens are magic the Montauk project was magic Roswell was magic the Loch Ness monster was magic I would understand if that's getting annoying to some of you, but that's kind of where i lean these days and we've talked about the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot being some kind of paranormal interdimensional thing. So it's not really that different but I guess I suppose we're just considering the roles of human consciousness or ritual involvement in these things now I definitely don't want to obsess over a single narrative, but this is the one that I find offered up the least in conspiracy media and it also has the most merit. If you're really going into stories like The Nine or the channelings with John Dee and these things people have seen during intense ritual well the doors are wide open to what's possible

58:46 Well, we are a show of multiple perspectives and I do leave space aliens on the table in an age where...I gotta say. A lot of people aren't even leaving space on the table! Yes, I think NASA tells a lotta lies and uses a lotta CGI but I don't know if that means space itself is fake? I just cannot go full Eric Dubé. I am sorry but you never go full Dubé. Isn't that what Robert Downey Jr said in Tropic Thunder? Something like that I still like the earthly beings living inside the earth from a previous age explanation too. Let's not write that off either of course It's funny because i forget sometimes how deep i am in this stuff and i might be drunk and wander into my special ladies girl night And start asking her friends if they think aliens are really from space or more inside the earth Or are they more spirits? And they just look at me like, I have never thought about that once ever

59:43 So I just go fuck off and ascend the stairs to my isolation tower. And it's just true! So many people don't believe that UFO sightings or abductions, ritual conjurings are ever real... That its never happened. I actually forget that sometimes. I look at different explanations for a phenomenon that I've already fully accepted and some people think all those stories and sightings and documents amount to nothing Which to me is actually harder to believe at this point. What I do find silly though, is the disclosure narrative that the government is going to tell us everything eventually or if we just ask right it's like were Oliver Twist style orphans shuffling up to Congress please sir can I have a little disclosure? Begging congress who probably doesn't know shit anyway about disclosure is futile if you ask me. I think in lot of its deep state and deep corporate now and they're not telling anybody anything

1:00:40 Never look to authority for answers. Never look to them for help, so I'm rambling at this point but if you like the first hour of this show please sign up and become a member of THC+. You get an extra hour of this in every episode lifetime access to the forums the occasional extra stuff like that Q&A I mentioned earlier five bucks a month, five shows a month. Nice and simple in today's plus show if you're wondering what you missed or what you got extra we got into alchemy and the men in black of the old world apparently they had visitations have a similar nature We talked about shamanic shape-shifting cultures and those traditions around the globe there is way more out there than I thought

1:01:22 We also got into the story of the Hexum heads which was new to me, cannibalism and groups that practice it. Groups and sects that have formed around UFO sightings like Heaven's Gate. The curious connections between fascism and the occult slash UFOs I mean you don't have to dig too deep to see some threads there that connect and maybe you're asking yourself why like i was We got into the case that the cattle mutilation saga could be more related to ritual than ray guns. Again with this shit for me, right? And we got Nick's thoughts on the state of the Secret Space program. All classic Hireside Chat stuff, go to thehiresidechatsplus.com to sign up for the full ride if you haven't already thanks to those who do this was a good one I think i've done what I can your move Underground Organization secret societies fraternal orders and ritual workers Your fucking move

1:02:18 Lucid dreams are so vivid, cause you go to bed at seven And your brain comes alive because you hate your nine-to-five You wake up with a dread and make sure your cats are fed Did your brain talk to a ghost who moved your coffee and toast As you listen to the higher side chats You get to your desk and your boss says it's a mess And your soul slowly goes To a place where nothing grows When you think he's not around, you insert a SETI sound The OM says turn it down and you say It's just the higher side chats Oh do you think you'd be invited? To Bohemia Grove. To a Bilderberg club Do you think you'd be invited

1:03:08 by a Rothschild to a party on a submarine. Diving down, to the center of the earth through the Marianas Trench your teeth begin to clench from the sulphur-y estenche The mask you're given doesn't fit cause you're not one of them Starting today, you'll make plans to get away There's no one to hold you down And the what-ifs start to drown Then you wake To the glare Of a cofluorescent stare and The light winks at you Cause it's life is almost through But it's holding on to quit time just like You It's time for the High Side Chats!

1:03:58 you