The Nonsense Bazaar

64 - The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies

This week we're taking a look at a strange little book detailing the lore surrounding the fae folk of the Scottish Highlands. Written in 1692 by the reverend Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth is one of the earliest works in the same tradition as the work of John Keel and a whole host of other weirdos who put on their Sunday best, go traipsing around the sparsely populated hills and forests, and start asking questions they maybe shouldn't. What's really remarkable about The Secret Commonwealth is just how much of the fairy lore from Scotland in the 600's matches up almost exactly with modern UFO folklore. Not only in the nature of the entities and encounters, but also in how much time Robert Kirk spends talking about psychics or, to use the terminology of the day, those born with "the second sight." Weirder still, Kirk's mysterious death and events that transpired afterwards led to rumors that Kirk did not, in fact, die, but was instead taken away to fairyland as punishment for revealing the secrets of those strange folk that dwell beneath the Earth. 

63 - The Nine

This week we're once again diving into the realm of hyper-paranoia and New Age conspiracy theories as we tackle the strange and disturbing story of The Nine. In 1953 at the Round Table Foundation lab in Glen Cove, Maine, parapsychologist Dr Andrija Puharich, channeler D.G. Vinod, and eight members of America's oldest, wealthiest, and most intelligence-agency-connected families made psychic contact with an entity or group of entities known only as The Nine. These nine principals of God (as they called themselves) told the ultra-rich and ultra-spooky attendees that they were the new ruling class of this world, and that they needed to begin the great work of enacting The Nine's plan. From there, the tendrils of The Nine wrap around 20th century America like Cthulhu strangling the life force out of it. With connections to the JFK assassination, Project Stargate, the intellectual counterculture, the Esalen Institute, and the entirety of the New Age, it is impossible to escape the influence of The Nine even today. But what was this entity? Was it a real phenomenon or a CIA psyop on steroids (or LSD, datura, and amanita muscaria mushrooms all at once)? And why did Andrija Puharich have a tendency to hypnotize people and tell them they were channeling The Nine? And why did Uri Geller run away from Puharich as soon as he had the chance? You might never trust anything ever again, but hey, it's gonna be fun.

62 - Written By Artificial Intelligence

We're doing something weird this week. With all the talk about artificial intelligence these days,(whether or not it's sentient, whether or not it will kill us all, and so on) we decided to explore the most important question we could possibly be asking: can AI write a podcast?
AI Dungeon uses a variety of deep learning models to generate or assist in generating scenarios. So we fed it the scenario of "Willow and Sequoyah have an AI write a podcast episode for them." And, well, things get incredibly strange very quickly.

61 - Interlude: The UFOs Are Driving Us Insane

This week we're doing one of those episodes where we take a deep breath and try to unpack an absurd rabbit hole we fell down. And by deep breath we mean breathless ranting about conspiracy theories and absolutely massacring facts. See, after our psychic spy series we realized there's this whole insane and deeply disturbing web of lore behind the government's involvement with the paranormal. And not the surface level UFO lore either. It turns out that a ton of the people involved in the remote viewing program were involved in quite a lot of other things as well, including but certainly not limited to To The Stars, the Tom DeLonge joint. From there we get led to Air Force intelligence psy-ops surrounding Dulce Base and Paul Bennewitz, then back to mind control experiments, from there ever-onwards to channeled entities who kind of sound suspiciously like some old friends, and then, well, we end up right back at To The Stars. All of which will make for some great episodes in the future, but this week we needed space to just give an overview of what we're looking at and get a lot of things very, very wrong before doing these stories right. 

60 - Bad Habits: Two True Stories of Twelfth Century Nuns

This week we're taking the time machine back to the filthy land of Europe circa 1100 AD to tell a couple stories of that most entertaining class of characters: nuns. Or to put it a cooler way, the stories of two women, Christian mystics and "anchoresses" both, deep in one of the absolute worst times to be alive ever. First we talk about Christina of Markyate, whose mystic visions led her to flee from her abusive family's constant imposition of sin and debauchery on young Christina to join a convent. But first she just lives in some dude's wall for seven years. Then we learn about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, AKA Sibyl of the Rhine, a polymath, natural philosopher, writer, medical practitioner, composer and basically every other really cool thing someone could be. Hildegard's mystical writings and musical compositions made her about as close to a rock star as a 12th century nun could be, and offers evidence that that there were points of light in what was otherwise just a truly stupid place and time to be alive. 

59 - America’s Psychic Spies Part III: Goblin Mode

In the weird conclusion to the story of the remote viewers, we see how once the psychic program is a known quantity in the military and intelligence community, things get a bit silly. And very weird. Under the command of INSCOM's director Major General Albert Newton Stubblebine III, and under the magical tutelage of Ingo Swann, the program makes contact with a weird astral projection training center and sound lab in the blue ridge mountains called the Monroe Institute, which uses acoustics to induce trance states and out-of-body-experiences. It's all a bit much for some folks. We also learn about the twilight years of the (official) program and how it fell from grace. And there's a whole bunch of UFOs.
 
A note on names: the source mostly relied upon for this series is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. Written in 1997, Remote Viewers makes liberal use of pseudonyms for people who did not want to, or could not be identified. We have tried to use the characters’ real names as much as possible. In some cases, such as Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green (referred to as Dr. Richard Kennett in Remote Viewers), we were successful. In others, not so much. And in a few cases we were completely and utterly wrong. Because we’re dumb sometimes. The channeller in part III is Angela Dellafiora, a name erroneously assumed to be a pseudonym. Don't know why. We refer to her as Courtney Brown, who is an entirely different and very real person. Whoops. That’s our bad.

58 - America’s Psychic Spies Part II: Galactic Barbeque

It's part two of the bizarre story of American psychic spying. This week we learn about some of the actual operational remote viewing conducted by the second group of psychic spies at the Fort Meade army base in Maryland. From 1975 until the mid 1980s, the psychics at SRI and Fort Meade used the GRILL FLAME remote viewers when there was actual stakes on on the line. Or steaks on the grill, if you prefer. We learn about Joe McMoneagle, who would take up Pat Price's mantle as the super-psychic in the program and was awarded the Legion of Merit for correctly viewing the Soviet mega-submarine as it was being constructed, months before anyone outside the Soviet bloc ever set eyes on it or believed it existed. We also learn about psychic interrogation against a KGB agent in South Africa using implanted intrusive thoughts and guilt trips, and we see how Ingo Swann become the disco-writing Jedi master he was born to be.  All this and much more as the actually true story of the remote viewing program continues.
 
A note on names: the source mostly relied upon for this series is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. Written in 1997, Remote Viewers makes liberal use of pseudonyms for people who did not want to, or could not be identified. We have tried to use the characters’ real names as much as possible. In some cases, such as Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green (referred to as Dr. Richard Kennett in Remote Viewers), we were successful. In others, not so much. And in a few cases we were completely and utterly wrong. Because we’re dumb sometimes. The channeller in part III is Angela Dellafiora, a name erroneously assumed to be a pseudonym. Don't know why. We refer to her as Courtney Brown, who is an entirely different and very real person. Whoops. That’s our bad.
 

57 - America’s Psychic Spies Part I: CIA Man

This week we're starting our series on the strange, absurd, and true story of Project Star Gate, the C.I.A. and D.I.A. program utilizing "remote viewers" AKA psychic spies which , lasted from 1972 until 1993 under various names and with varying levels of usefulness. Often written off as "that time the C.I.A tried to use psychics", in reality the remote viewing programs had many years of incredible successes and produced some of the weirdest tales of high strangeness we've ever heard. In part one we focus on the genesis of the program at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) with scientists Hal Puthof and Russel Targ, psychic Ingo Swann, and superhuman Christmas tree farmer Pat Price. We also meet head of the C.I.A.'s "weird desk" Kit Green and Israeli psychic/trickster/intelligence agent Uri Geller. From accidentally finding every secret there was to find about the NSA's most secret listening post, to high strangeness involving small monochrome UFOs and a floating phantom arm, it's a weird start to a weird saga.  
 
A note on names: the source mostly relied upon for this series is Jim Schnabel’s Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. Written in 1997, Remote Viewers makes liberal use of pseudonyms for people who did not want to, or could not be identified. We have tried to use the characters’ real names as much as possible. In some cases, such as Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green (referred to as Dr. Richard Kennett in Remote Viewers), we were successful. In others, not so much. And in a few cases we were completely and utterly wrong. Because we’re dumb sometimes. The channeller in part III is Angela Dellafiora, a name erroneously assumed to be a pseudonym. Don't know why. We refer to her as Courtney Brown, who is an entirely different and very real person. Whoops. That’s our bad.

56 - Project Monarch Part II: Uncle Sam’s Snuff Factory

On part II of Project Monarch we learn about the man from whose dumb noggin this whole CIA sex slave nonsense sprang: Fritz Springmeir, a wannabe Christian terrorist and all around piece-of-work. Fritz is anouther one who claims to be an ex-intelligence agent now deprogramming Monarch slaves, and even published a helpful manual outlining just how the mind control programming works. We also see how another real winner named David Icke helped perpetuate the Project Monarch meme. So if you were wondering if the lizard people have anything to do with this, they certainly do. We then check in on how the Project Monarch conspiracy theory is doing in the modern age.  This episode has lots of Nazis, bad fathers, babies boiled in urine, the royal family all sorts of stuff. It's weird and gross and still deeply uncomfortable. So to help the medicine go down, we play Project Monarch Bingo. And you can too! You can find your very own Project Monarch bingo cards on our website and the link is below. It's fun for the whole family!
 
Project Monarch bingo cards

55 - Project Monarch Part I: Uncle Ronnie’s Bedtime Stories

This one's a doozy, folks. We begin our look at the alleged mind controlled sex slaves of "Project Monarch" by digging in to Cathy O'Brien's book Trance Formation in America, co-authored with her husband Mark Phillips. Cathy alleges that, with the hypnotic help of her husband Mark, she recovered memories of her time in an MK ULTRA subproject in which she was turned in a mind controlled sex slave and victimized by lots and lots of presidents and forced to put American flags in all sorts of places. It's a bit ridiculous. Ok it's extremely ridiculous. But maybe this ridiculous story does have an actual, no-fooling monster in it. Who are Mark Phillips and Cathy O'Brien? And why did they convince other women that they too were mind-controlled sex slaves for the CIA and that they needed to go live with Mark and Cathy in Alaska so Mark could "recover their memories"? All this and much, much more. We're sorry and you're welcome.