Against the Social Engineers: Muckraker and Charles Upton dive deep into Drugs, UFOs, Magic, Mind Control, and More (Exclusive Interview)

Muckraker recently had the privilege of interviewing author Charles Upton on a number of crucial issues facing the US and the world today. In addition to his extensive career as a poet, a scholar of world religions, and an interfaith peace activist, Mr. Upton is among the most original and intellectual thinkers on the topics of elite globalism and occult conspiracies, and a philosopher in the truest sense of the word. He currently has 23 books in print, the most recent of which is titled The Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering (2021). As a Sufi Muslim and peace activist, Upton has also been a bold proponent of interfaith tolerance between the Muslim and Christian worlds. The Covenants of the Prophet Foundation, which Upton founded in 2013, has been vocal in calling for the cessation of Muslim extremist violence against Christians. Readers can learn more about his work on his official website, and are also encouraged to visit his Youtube channel. Upton's books can be purchased on Amazon.com.

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES UPTON

In Muckraker's article "Psychedelics, Psyops, and Secret Societies," we cited your book chapter "Drug Induced Mysticism Revisited" (Vectors of the Counter Initiation, p207-256), in which you discussed the historical relationship between psychedelic drug research and extraterrestrial cults—a connection dating as far back as the 1950s. Can you provide some background on this? And why, in your estimation, has psychedelic drug research coincided so remarkably with such cults?

Charles Upton: I would simply refer your readers to the research of people like David McGowan and Peter Levenda—Levenda’s Sinister Forces trilogy is a must-read—on the CIA’s MK-Ultra mind-control program, as well as (in the case of Levenda) on the researches into the paranormal involving people like Uri Geller, conducted at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and the Stanford Research Institute, which were attended and monitored by most of the major U.S. intelligence agencies. In my recently completed autobiography, Giving Myself Away: From Beat Protégé to Sufi Philosopher, the following 3 paragraphs appear:

When the 21st Century arrived….this psychedelic worldview [of the hippy counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s] was destined to undergo a major historical revision under the influence of the “conspiracy theory” mindset of the time, when the work of researchers like David McGowan, Peter Levenda and David Livingstone cast a whole new light on the Spiritual Revolution by revealing just how much of the counterculture phenomenon had been a social engineering job by the CIA, who provided the hippies with their precious acid courtesy of the notorious MK-ULTRA mind-control program, first through figures of the counterculture intelligentsia like Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg. Even before the Beats and the Hippies became involved with psychedelics, various CIA types were fanning out through the world, consulting shamans and witch doctors from many primitive tribes, investigating their traditional psychedelic potions to see which of them might be useful for mind control, or else for enhancing the “remote viewing” capabilities of their agents for espionage purposes. The U.S. intelligence community apparently found yage or ayahuasca in the depths of the Amazon jungles even before Ginsberg and Burroughs did (their own explorations are recounted in their book The Yage Letters), and there is every indication that the CIA’s interest in psychedelics expanded beyond the simple creation of mind-controlled zombies, as dramatized in the motion picture The Manchurian Candidate—Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy (though probably not the lone assassin) might have been one of these—until it entered the field of mass social engineering. It’s as if they sponsored the widespread dissemination of LSD throughout American culture so as to break down all the old paradigms of family, church, community and nation, in order to transform society into a shapeless plastic substance capable of being molded into new forms along Luciferian, technocratic and globalist lines.

….[T]he infamous MK-ULTRA mind-control program….included experiments practiced upon unsuspecting American citizens that were worthy to stand beside those conducted in the Nazi death-camps (see the researches of David McGowan, Henry Makow and Peter Levenda). Timothy Leary was assigned to feed acid to the intelligentsia, Ken Kesey to everybody else; apparently the idea was to compare how it acted under “controlled conditions” with its effects in a totally free-wheeling, “party” atmosphere. And the hippies actually knew about this! They routinely said, “SURE we were a CIA experiment, man—an experiment that GOT OUT OF CONTROL!” Nor was the Agency simply interested in mind-control on the individual level, so as to produce Manchurian Candidate-like assassins for example. The CIA also likely sponsored the mass dissemination of LSD as part of MK-ULTRA. According to Peter Levenda, in his trilogy Sinister Forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft, William Mellon Hitchcock (scion of the billionaire Mellon family), who was associated with CIA front organizations Castle Bank and Trust and Resorts International, as well as being Timothy Leary’s landlord for his “psychedelic manor house” at Millbrook in upstate New York (see Millbrook by Art Kleps), paid a chemist by the name of Nicholas Sand to produce millions of doses of LSD. If this claim can be substantiated, then it was clearly their intent to drench the unsuspecting American populace with swimming-pools full of acid, in what might have been the largest mass social engineering project in human history.

Nor did the CIA only expose their victims and enemies—among whom we must include the American people—to the psychedelic drugs they had discovered and/or developed; they were also using them on themselves. The idea that the CIA wanted to employ psychedelics to “confuse and terrify” people is true as far as it goes, but they also apparently hoped that these substances could help their own agents gain magic powers: telepathy, remote viewing, etc. And they were also entirely willing to confuse and delight people if that would serve their ends. The hippy myth that the CIA were nothing but a bunch of uptight straight people who “couldn't hold their acid” and saw it only as a crazy-making pill needs to be permanently debunked. The Bohemian/magician/spy is a well-known type; both the Elizabethan occultist John Dee (the original Agent 007) and the Satanist Aleister Crowley worked for British Intelligence. The ultimate goal of the powers-that-be in terms of psychedelic research, which has made a vigorous comeback in the academic world in recent years, may be to create a type of “spirituality” where even mystical experiences that are valid on a certain level will serve to establish their control. They want to own everything—even mysticism, even spiritual aspiration, even God. And the fact is that LSD did initiate a sort of “bardo” or revelatory decay of American society; all the latent tendencies, good and bad, the dominant belief-systems, conscious or otherwise, were called up in a very short time, laid out for all to see—and much of the social, cultural and spiritual potential of America and the Western World rapidly exhausted in the process. The family was largely destroyed (not by LSD alone of course); Christian morality was undermined, including the concept of human dignity that is central to democracy; political responsibility was seriously eroded. And the social engineers simply sat back and took voluminous notes on the whole process. They noted the main trends, the major “cultural archetypes” operating in the “collective unconscious” of society, and devised various ways to appropriate, pervert, control and counterfeit every one of them. In so doing they initiated the sinister Blade Runner world we live in today. The hippies naively equated social control with a simplistic authoritarian repression; they rarely awoke to the fact that real control is based on co-optation, on the covert implantation of engineered beliefs and attitudes in the mass mind. The powers that be do not want heroes who courageously oppose them and die as martyrs; they would much rather find, or create, dupes who will obey their every command in the firm belief that they are following their own desires, their own creative expressions and “spiritual” intuitions, all in perfect freedom.

Interestingly enough, another member of the Mellon family, Christopher Mellon—an Assistant Secretary of Defense under Bill Clinton—is presently one of the major spokesmen for the official government version of the UFO disclosure myth. As for the relationship between psychedelic research and secret societies, it is based on two facts. To begin with, many such societies and cults are involved in occult practices, and those who seek psychic and magical powers have always been attracted to the use of drugs of various kinds. This tendency goes back as far as the ancient shamans, though Mircea Eliade in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy quotes certain contemporary shamans as claiming that the use of psychedelics such as peyote, magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, morning glory seeds, San Pedro cactus etc. only came in when the greater and purer powers of the ancient shamans had begun to fade; the Crow medicine man Thomas Yellowtail, an associate of Frithjof Schuon, said substantially the same thing. Secondly, esoteric brotherhoods, especially those that are international in scope (like the Freemasons), given their semi-clandestine nature, their rule of strict obedience to the Master, and their covert methods of communication and recognition, have always been fertile ground for the operations of intelligence agents. Aleister Crowley is a prime example of this with his religion of Thelema. Two of his students, L. Ron Hubbard, who founded the Church of Scientology, and the notorious rocket scientist Jack Parsons, who conducted Pagan rituals at his launchings, co-founded the Aerojet Corporation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, conducted demonic invocations using a kind of electronic ouija board, and stated that his life’s purpose was to destroy Christianity, were both members of the L.A. Thelema lodge.

In your book Vectors of the Counter Initiation, you discuss a mass mind control technique called "revelation of the method," whereby elite factions of the counter initiation (let's use the broad designation "Illuminati" for those unfamiliar with Guenon's schema) brazenly disclose their plans and methods to the public. (Some readers will be familiar with the term "predictive programming.") For those who are not familiar with your work, can you break down the basic purpose and significance of this technique?

Charles Upton: I got the term “revelation of the method” from revisionist historian Michael Hoffman in his book Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare. There is nothing more effective for taking the wind out of the sails of dedicated researchers and investigative reporters than for their adversaries to suddenly and flippantly reveal the truths that those researchers have spent half their lives trying to ferret out, often at great personal cost. That’s the first effect of the technique. The second is to instill terror in their opponents by giving the impression—which the revealers may or may not actually believe—that they are so powerful and so immune to any form of opposition that they can afford to let everyone know what they’re up to without their timetable for world domination being delayed or interrupted in the slightest. And the third effect is to set up a condition of what, in my book The Alien Disclosure Deception and elsewhere, I’ve termed “unconscious contradiction,” otherwise known as cognitive dissonance. (Aleksandr Dugin, for one, often uses this method, as I made clear in detail in my book Dugin against Dugin: A Traditionalist Critique of the Fourth Political Theory.) Unconscious contradiction is a commonly-used mind-control technique by which two pieces of contradictory information are projected into the mind of the victim, or the society the controllers wish to control, without the contradiction being in any way noted and without the slightest attempt to explain it away.

The first effect of this is to invalidate the concept of objective truth itself by giving free rein and equal validity to all statements and all claims, according to the postmodernist doctrine that all “voices” have the same right to speak, and by presenting this universal equality of the well-established, the tentative, and the frankly absurd as entirely acceptable, given that any unity-of-outlook, according to postmodernist dogma, cannot be based on the actual truth of the matter, seeing that objective truth does not exist, but can only be the product of intellectual imperialism, of the power to enforce such an integrated view; if objective truth is invalidated, then any form of “whistleblowing” or research into the plans and methods of the power elites of course becomes meaningless and without effect. And the second and closely-related result of unconscious contradiction is to stun the critical faculties of the human mind into a state of paralysis, a state that makes the subject—whether individual or collective—highly open to suggestion.

One of the most massive uses of unconscious contradiction in today’s social engineering is the contradiction between denial and affirmation on the part of the government of the reality and significance of the UFO phenomenon. This contradiction has been in use for decades, and has been composed of official denials of the reality of alien incursion coupled with the covert strategic placement of items of data (both true and false), and possibly of deliberately staged “false flag” manifestations, that suggest that it is entirely real. A few years ago the social engineers apparently decided that the cognitive dissonance of the American public had reached the threshold where a sudden “revelation of the method” could be sprung on them by abruptly admitting that the phenomenon is entirely real and of the greatest import. After this watershed moment the unconscious contradiction method largely gave way to the second mind-control method I noted in my book—that of “deferred closure,” where the UFO-interested public is teased to the point of desperation by the announcement that full “disclosure” is imminent, which is then withdrawn at the last minute. The engineers well know that a populace desperate for answers will finally accept any answer they are given, no matter how implausible, no matter how horrendous.

On the topic of potential “false flag” manifestations of UFO phenomena, the spate of UFO disclosures this year has coincided with a huge spike in Google searches for "Project Bluebeam," a conspiracy theory purporting that elite factions plan to stage something akin to an alien invasion, possibly with the aid of emergent holographic technology. Having just finished a massive project on UFO disclosure, has this been on your radar?

Charles Upton: Yes. I would say, however, that a Bluebeam-like scenario won’t require holographic projections and the like, since it will be able to rely on actual UFO sightings and alien contacts, which are either becoming more and more prevalent, or are simply being photographed by more people with smartphones and picked up by more and more sensitive military radar, infrared sensors etc., simply giving it the particular twist that they have been crafting and refining and pumping into our heads for decades.

They seem poised to produce either plausible crashed alien spacecraft or simply the long-rumored alien-produced materials that supposedly could never have been created by human technology—like those “spherules” supposedly dredged up from the deep Pacific Ocean by an expedition headed by Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb at the site of the splash of a meteorite that entered Earth’s atmosphere at such a high velocity that it could have only come from beyond the solar system. This implausible discovery is one more good reason for everybody to distrust Harvard as an institution.

Next in line will probably be the unveiling of credible alien corpses, if not some surgically-altered and/or genetically engineered living being “real” enough to convince almost anyone, as was portrayed in the original Outer Limits TV series in the episode entitled “The Architects of Fear.” Or maybe they will finally let the world’s population see the actual entities they’ve made pact with—those entities that C.S. Lewis in his great dystopian novel That Hideous Strength called the “Macrobes”. These beings fit the general description of what we Muslims call the Jinn, who live in a subtle-material dimension that’s usually invisible to us, though they have the power to temporarily materialize themselves and their technology in our physical world, affect physical reality in various ways etc. Whether they also have the power to permanently materialize physical objects, or die while in our world such that corpses are left behind that don’t immediately de-materialize again, remains uncertain. In any case, if they do possess these abilities, the manifestation of them is undoubtedly quite rare. This is why I still feel that any alien corpses or crashed spacecraft that the social engineers ultimately unveil will most likely be cunningly-designed counterfeits. If they haven’t produced them even yet after decades of rumors as to their existence, this may simply mean that the development of credible mock-ups capable of fooling most engineers and geneticists hasn’t been perfected yet.

The Daily Mail reported this year that an evangelical Christian faction within the intelligence community, dubbed the Collins Elite, have been actively working against the UFO disclosure agenda, citing fears that UFO phenomena are actually the result of demonic activity. What do you make of these reports?

Charles Upton: Interesting! Interesting, but puzzling. The Collins Elite ought to welcome a true disclosure of the UFO phenomenon, the demonic activities related to it and the pact that elements of the military/industrial/intelligence complex have apparently made with the Powers of Darkness—also known as the Powers of the Air—since that would validate much of their worldview. I recently saw a clip of Tucker Carlson on Platform X where he entirely accepted this explanation for the phenomenon, including the pact in question, though he shied away for some reason from openly branding the Aliens as demons, characterizing them only as “spiritual” beings, not extraterrestrial aliens, who might be either angelic or demonic. However, if the intent of the Collins Elite is to oppose the false portrayal of these entities as extraterrestrial astronauts, then I entirely understand their position, and support it. (Carlson and the Collins people really ought to read my book.)

On your Youtube channel, you have expressed criticism of the To the Stars Academy and the recent role of this organization in the UFO disclosure agenda. One of the most unusual aspects of the TTSA, at least to me, is the unlikely alliance between its founder, rockstar Tom Delonge of Blink 182 fame, elements within the military and intelligence communities, and even high level contacts in the 2016 Clinton campaign (John Podesta in particular). I don't know exactly what to make of this partnership between a popular punk rocker and elements in intelligence and the Democrat political establishment, but the alliance seems odd at the very least (especially considering the leaked conversations between Delonge and John Podesta from 2015 onwards). Do you think there is anything suspect about this collaboration between popular entertainers and the military/intelligence communities on the disclosure agenda, and if so, why?

Charles Upton: Those social engineers of the military-industrial-intelligence complex who are now promoting the equivalent of a UFO religion to replace the traditional faiths, and who may be in direct contact—at least some of them—with the Powers of Darkness in their “UFO Alien” guise, would obviously want to influence popular culture as well as the scientific and academic communities. And one readily available venue for this influence is the world of popular music, considering that Satanic heavy metal music and similar styles and beliefs are already in place, as well as the fact that the “church” Satanists are now coming out of the woodwork on a popular level, erecting Satanic bronze statues on such sites as the Arkansas state capitol, and starting after-school “Satan Clubs” for grammar school kids in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

Anyone wishing to investigate the more-or-less direct relationship between Satanism and the U.S. military branches and defense industries should investigate the cases of two pivotal figures: 1) rocket scientist Jack Parsons—student of Aleister Crowley (who channeled a “collective entity” called Lam and drew a picture of it, which represents our first image of what later came to be called the “Alien Grey”), colleague of L. Ron Hubbard in the Los Angeles lodge of Crowley’s Thelema religion, co-founder of the Aerojet Corporation and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who conducted Pagan rituals at his rocket launchings, had a crater named after him on the dark side of the Moon, and used a kind of electronic ouija board to invoke a female demon he called Babalon etc. etc., and 2) Michael Aquino, a high-ranking army officer and practicing Satanist associated with the Temple of Set, stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco. One investigator friend of mine told me that he was sent by the military to investigate the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, NM, and a correspondent just informed me that “I was once told by Clifford Stone (a writer on the Roswell incident) that Michael Aquino told the leaders of Roswell, NM that they needed to create a UFO religion after they got worried about the town dying when the Air Force closed the base here.” As for the earlier history of Satanism in popular music, that goes back at least to the Rolling Stones album “Their Satanic Majesty’s Request,” and probably a lot further.

Returning to the topic of predictive programming, America is heading into an election year in 2024, and with that comes a good deal of anxiety about the future—especially with the chaos of 2020 still fresh in our collective memory. Catherine Herridge of CBS News, for instance, recently predicted that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event" such as a foreign cyberattack that could devastate US digital infrastructure. We see these anxieties echoed on the entertainment front, with film offerings like Leave the World Behind (produced by Barack and Michelle Obama) dripping with both occult symbolism and dire predictions of technological apocalypse in the wake of a debilitating cyberattack. (VigilantCitizen.com put together a great breakdown of the film.) What, if anything, do you make of this?

Charles Upton: After reading the review of Leave the World Behind in Vigilant Citizen, I pretty much agree that it is an example of “predictive programming.” Faced with such massive, comprehensive and well-funded assaults on the human form, which include the possible use of psychotronic weapons, my practice is not to let my attention be trapped by the idea that the elites are all-powerful human gods bent on our destruction, in the face of whom—to repeat the words of the Borg girl Seven of Nine—“resistance is futile,” but rather to leave the world behind. That is precisely the first necessary step in dealing with a world that has been transformed into an engineered control system, a revolution-in-perspective or metanoia that lets us contemplate that world objectively, from a detached standpoint, as well as making ourselves directly available to the angelic powers, and their Divine Source and Master, who can and will definitively deconstruct that control system, though not at our bidding and not necessarily according to our preferred timeline.

It is highly interesting to me that the producers of the movie took as their title the very step that could potentially free us from their power, as if in an attempt to co-opt and neutralize it. Leave the world behind is ambiguous in any case since it can mean a number of different things. The properly spiritual and contemplative meaning denotes the dis-identification with “the World” defined as the system of collective egotism that always seeks power because it is motivated by fear, as well as the deconstruction of the individual ego that binds us to that system. It could also refer to something like the “rapture” of the Evangelical Christians, or the goal of the heretical Gnostics of late antiquity which was essentially to accept the world as an engineered control system, a cosmic prison created not by the true God but by an evil Demiurge (the ego) ruling a cartel of deluding and deluded false gods, and concentrate entirely on escape to the pleroma of the totally transcendent Alien God. These two different but related responses to the spectre of total oppression and total disaster work to deny the presence of the Absolute Principle here and now, and thus work against their own stated goal of spiritual freedom, since both of them necessarily renounce any attempt to cultivate and express human love, compassion and solidarity. And disappearance into the world of media-based fantasy that the film posits is another way of perverting the call to leave the world behind, and hiding its true meaning of loving detachment and contemplative apatheia. No wonder the Sufis sometimes claim that “Shaytan has been intensively studying metaphysics for 6000 years,” since it obviously takes a metaphysically well-informed Counter-Initiation to come up with such an imposture as “Leave the World Behind.”

As for “Black Swan Events,” among which I include the mass legitimation of transgenderism, transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and the attempt of the powers that be to officially inaugurate a religion of UFO-worship (whether or not in goes by that name), such events are pretty much what we will have to expect until the consummation of the age—though the very willingness to expect them begins to wash out some of the blackness. Once we accept that we are now literally in the middle of the apocalypse destined to conclude this manvantara and inaugurate a new one, and that the word apocalypse, meaning “revelation”, denotes the full unveiling of Absolute Truth, which will shatter “This World” because it is a world based in every sense on lies, and lies have no reality and no substance. Since lies have nothing that can stand against total revelation, we will potentially (insha ‘Allah) be able to accept and be spiritually nourished and guided by the very shocks and disasters that will usher in the final transition to the next age. This certainly will not guarantee our survival, but—God willing—it will guarantee the ultimate salvation of our souls, which, seeing that death comes to all in whatever place and time, is the goal we need to set our sights on. The essential quality of apocalypse is to unmask all the idols, whether individual or collective, and force us to live out the final consequences of whatever idols we are still holding on to. Consequently apocalyptic times like these can, like nothing else, root such idols out of the unconscious depths of our souls, and give us the unique opportunity of intentionally releasing them, since all the formidable energies operating at the end of the age are specifically designed to wrench them from our grasp. Why not? Why resist Justice? Why reject Mercy?

On a separate note, given your work with the Covenants Initiative, I am curious what you make of reports that the October 7 attacks in Israel were preceded by incursions of radical Zionists seeking to perform Talmudic rituals on the Temple Mount (reportedly involving the blowing of shofars and the sprinkling of blood from a red heifer on the site of Al Aqsa Mosque). The public at large, and perhaps some of our readers, may not be familiar with the religious significance of these developments. As a scholar of comparative eschatology, can you shed any light on the gravity of these events?

Charles Upton: The significance of these events (if they in fact occurred) is related to the plans of various ultra-Orthodox Jews to restore and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, thus inaugurating the Third Temple and, in effect, drawing on various eschatological prophesies to force God’s hand as it were and thereby coerce the Messiah to reveal himself and establish Israel as a global power, possibly THE global power—though we should remember at this point that soon after October 7, the U.S. capitol building was occupied for a second time, not by Trump-inspired “insurrectionists,” but by those American Orthodox Jews who have always believed that the establishment of the State of Israel was an affront to God and who consequently oppose Israel’s war effort and have made common cause with the Palestinians. (No one seems to remember this striking event however; it has been effectively suppressed.)

At the very least the Talmudic rituals conducted on the Temple Mount—or the claim that they occurred—are a clear signal to the Christian Zionists to throw their total support behind Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people. If the Muslim world came to believe that such events happened, whether or not they actually did—especially if they were followed by a truly shocking event such as the destruction of the Dome of the Rock—this would be a signal to the entire Muslim world that the Hour of Judgment had likely arrived and that total war against Israel was consequently called for, which the Third Temple Jews would undoubtedly see as the Battle of Armageddon.

This response might even work to break the de facto alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel against their common enemies, Iran and its proxies, which would be a rather unfortunate and ironic outcome for those who had hoped to coerce Divine aid in Israel’s favor. The idea that the apocalypse needs to be deliberately invoked and that God would somehow look favorably on those who had attempted to force His hand in this manner, coupled with the demented notion that the end of the world might be to the geopolitical and spiritual advantage of the religious collective who invokes it—a truly insane, blasphemous and suicidal idea that is held not only by certain Jews but also by various Muslims and Christians—seems to be abroad in the world today. Even Aleksandr Dugin thinks that way, and he certainly has the ear of Vladimir Putin, while the U.S. Neo-Cons and even the Neo-Liberals under Joe Biden appear, at least de facto, to hold similar views and to be affected by similar impulses, though in a less overtly religious form.

Maybe the bottom line is that the human race is simply tired of life in this broken world, and unconsciously longs to get it all over with. In any case, most of the ideological and political positions available in today’s world seem to have been defined by the Devil, so that damage will be done and darkness spread no matter which side you take—and no situation more clearly illustrates this fact than the Israel/Palestine war. (If I had to choose I would choose for the Palestinians—but not by calling for a mass genocide of all the Jews!)

It is truly amazing to me that something like the Covenants Initiative was possible at so late an hour in the present cycle. Until the Covenants came into my life I saw no cultural or sociopolitical cause or position that would justify my returning to the activist life, since every one of them seemed to be headed for Hell. It was undoubtedly the fact that the Covenants represented the will of Allah’s last prophet, which had been partly suppressed by his enemies—his Muslim enemies—and then largely forgotten by history, but which God had providentially willed to appear again to counter the mad dogs of ISIS, that made them so unexpectedly relevant to present conditions, as well as so morally clean.

No other ideological position in today’s world comes close to the fundamental goodness of the Covenants, those amazing documents whose undeniable power seems based on goodness alone. So many of today’s causes and conflicts are better described by the eschatological hadith that reads: “A time of tribulations will come such that those who look upon them will become fascinated by them and entrapped by them. In those days the one walking will be better than the one running, the one standing better than the one walking, the one sitting down better than the one standing, the one lying down better than the one sitting.”

The Catholics have a similar prophesy in the Three Days of Darkness mentioned by certain Catholic saints and visionaries. During those days of destruction the faithful are supposed to stay inside their houses, never look out their windows, and pray without ceasing.

Could you share which journalists, analysts, and outlets you follow to keep informed of current events?

Charles Upton: Nobody in particular, actually, though my wife often listens to Jeffrey Nyquist and various Traditional Catholic commentators, and I surf YouTube a lot. Many of my clues come to me from email correspondents, and from my Sufi brothers, as well as the email circle of Jack Sarfatti for the UFO angle. I’m trying to mostly concentrate on my spiritual practices now—which means that the interruptions that beset me tend to get more and more interesting!

Do you have any forthcoming projects or ongoing areas of research you would like to discuss? And is there anything else about you and your writing that you would like readers to know, especially if they are not familiar with your body of work?

Charles Upton: In terms of my investigations of what Rene Guenon called “the Counter-Initiation,” the organized and “esoteric” manifestation of the Powers of Darkness, my main books are The System of Antichrist: Truth and Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age (2001), Vectors of the Counter-Initiation: The Course and Destiny of Inverted Spirituality (2012), and The Alien Disclosure Deception: The Metaphysics of Social Engineering (2021). Altogether I have 23 books in print, which you can find on Amazon. Beyond that, I am now looking to see if I can find a bigger publisher than I’ve usually used for my just-completed autobiography, Giving Myself Away: From Beat Protégé to Sufi Philosopher, which is a basically a cultural history of America, as seen through the eyes of a spiritual seeker, poet and spiritually-based peace activist, through 50 years of Art, Religion and Politics.