Basement: Peter Levenda | Nazis, UFOs, and the Hidden History Nobody Tells You

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Why Files: Operation Podcast

Episode: Basement #011 — Peter Levenda | Nazis, UFOs, and the Hidden History Nobody Tells You

Date: April 13, 2026
Host: The Why Files
Guest: Peter Levenda

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Episode Overview

This episode features Peter Levenda, renowned author and historian, who explores the shadowy intersections of occultism, intelligence operations, hidden history, Nazi postwar activities, and the UFO phenomenon. Levenda shares firsthand stories from his life—including his audacious infiltration of the clergy to dodge the Vietnam draft, his immersion in underground church networks used as intelligence fronts, his harrowing adventures inside Nazi enclaves in South America, and his deep research into enigmatic topics like the Kennedy assassination, Operation Paperclip, the Council of Nine, and alien contact. The conversation is frank, detail-rich, and often bewildering, weaving together true crime, geopolitics, the paranormal, and unfiltered memoir.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Peter Levenda's Origin Story and Early Conspiratorial Life

• [10:00] Levenda recounts faking his way into the clergy as a teenager to avoid the Vietnam draft—creating "his own church" with a school friend just to get a deferment.
  • Notable Quote:
    "We created a church out of nothing, but we had all the garb, right? So, okay, we're going to be Orthodox now. We are now Eastern Orthodox... We were very astute at 17." (23:24, Levenda)
• His foray led to gate-crashing Bobby Kennedy’s funeral in 1968, disguised as an Orthodox priest, slipping past Secret Service and into St. Patrick’s Cathedral’s inner sanctum.
  • [33:26]
    "There’s Kennedy saying 'onwards to [the next state],' and then suddenly the newscasters are coming on, 'Bobby Kennedy's been shot.' I'm looking at the guy who would have saved the country, in my 17-year-old imagination. And he's in a box in the church and I'm touching the coffin." (33:28, Levenda)
• These experiences led him into the world of anti-communist Orthodox churches, Cold War intrigue, and eventually, the intelligence community.

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2. Churches as CIA Fronts and Intelligence Nexus

• [46:54] Many small “orthodox” churches Levenda encountered were “beautiful fronts” — empty of parishioners, brimming with bishops, and used as covers for anti-communist operations and intelligence traffic.

  • The American Orthodox Catholic Church in the Bronx was deeply entwined with federal contacts, employing both CIA and FBI agents for its legal incorporation.
  • Notable Quote:
    "Every Sunday they did mass with nobody present. That wasn’t the point. Beautiful church though. It was a total front." (46:53, Levenda)

• The church’s leader (Profeta) worked “hand in glove with the Feds,” navigating postwar anti-communist sentiment, operating as a minor powerbroker for both intelligence assets and the old Nazi/White Russian pipeline.

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3. Cold War Exile Communities, The Nazi Ratlines, and “Hidden” History

• [49:19 & onwards] Levenda details how substantial Nazi, SS, and Ukrainian collaborators settled in New Jersey post-WWII, enabled by U.S. intelligence interest in anti-Soviet networks and “paperclip-style” programs (though the Ukrainians came via other channels).
  • *"After the war, there was an entire Ukrainian SS division... They wound up in New Jersey." (49:36, Levenda)
• The Vatican's role in facilitating some of these escapes is flagged.
• Levenda’s interest pivots to the reality of war criminals living in plain sight and the ideological overlap between fiercely anti-communist religious networks and ex-Nazi circles.

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4. The Indonesia–Hitler Connection & the Ratline Revelation

• [176:35] The biggest surprise: Levenda traces a plausible (if still unproven) escape route for Hitler—not just to South America, but to Indonesia via the ratlines, following the journey of Austrian war criminal Georg Anton Poch and his wife (an anthropologist involved in Nazi science).
  • Levenda found a passport, a diary in Gabelsberger shorthand, and grave in Surabaya which point to an organized ratline and possibly a layer of Nazi gold and power politics manipulating postwar Indonesia.
  • Notable Quote:
    "I saw a photograph of Hitler in the trenches in World War I. I’m thinking, oh my God, these guys could be brothers... this diary is full of stuff that really blew my mind." (191:34, Levenda)
• Indonesian sources, gold flows, and mysterious European visitors to the grave all deepen the intrigue.
• The implication: intelligence agencies ignored or deliberately covered up such alternative escape routes for key Nazis.

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5. The Nazi Occult, the Ahnenerbe, and International Secret Societies

• [77:23, 109:28] Levenda uncovers documentation and film footage of the Nazi SS’s Tibet Expedition, the search for ancient power sources (Spear of Destiny), and Himmler’s attempts to build a cult-like Nazi “ecosystem.”
  • He notes the significant overlap between Nazi leadership and occult beliefs (Himmler, Hess, Thule Gesellschaft), and their ongoing inspiration for conspiracies and neo-Nazi mysticism.
  • *"The Nazi Party was not a political party. It was a cult... Nazi occultism is almost a tautology." (110:53, Levenda)
• Levenda’s work is notable for mining National Archives and sources ignored by mainstream historians.

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6. UFOs, The Council of Nine, and the CIA–Occult–UFO Complex

• [125:00, 144:58] The episode interweaves the origin story of the UFO era with the infamous Maury Island incident (1947), detailing how its principal characters (Fred Crisman, Guy Bannister) reappear in the Kennedy assassination investigation years later.
• [143:44] The “Council of Nine”: In the early 1950s, prominent scientists and elites (including Arthur M. Young, Ruth Forbes Paine Young—a key Oswald family connection—and others) participated in séances channelling entities called “The Nine,” linking the worlds of intelligence, the occult, and UFOlogy.
  • *"These nine individuals are in some kind of UFO. They're in what they term low earth orbit. They're here but can't be seen. They're somehow directing things happening on the planet." (148:23, Levenda)
• The host pulls threads between early UFO incidents, the use of churches as intelligence fronts, connections to Kennedy assassination players, and the emergence of the "cargo cult" framework for the entire phenomenon.

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7. Men in Black, Personal Paranormal Encounters, and the Boundary of Reality

• [155:01] Levenda shares his own “Men in Black” encounters—classic black cars, odd visitors, message-coded incidents—one of which later takes a turn into the bizarre as one “agent” appears ten years later in Singapore, suggesting a phenomenon blending intelligence operations and high-strangeness.

  • *"Something took over that said, 'just brass it out.' Men in Black thing... makes no sense, so it's important." (93:52, 155:08, Levenda)

• He increasingly leans toward a “consciousness” explanation for the UFO and MIB phenomenon, following Jacques Vallée and John Keel, suggesting that human interactions with “the phenomenon” are filtered through expectations and a kind of cosmic trickster dynamic.

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8. The Cargo Cult Hypothesis and The Human Quest for the Stars

• [229:08] Levenda’s culminating thesis: all of human civilization is a cargo cult, a mimetic response to contact with a higher intelligence, going back to Sumerian star mapping, ancient temples, and occult traditions—a response to something that said, “Wake up.”

  • *"We are the cargo cult... Our medicine, our science, everything is based on this idea of achieving immortality and going to the stars, getting off-planet." (233:49, Levenda)

• Modern UFO encounters and high strangeness, for Levenda, are a form of intentional, consciousness-driven “contact” from a non-human intelligence.

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9. On Darkness, Synchronicity, Hope, and Why He Keeps Going

• [236:53–240:32] The host asks if years in the “dark corners” of human history and occultism have made Levenda a darker person. He replies, strikingly:
  • *"There are people in this world who make that easier, right? Those are the people that, you find those people, and that makes it all easier." (239:16, Levenda)
• He stresses the importance of synchronicity—and not closing off to the possibility that the universe “responds” to human attention in strange ways.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "I wanted to understand the relationship between religion and politics—how they interact. These things obviously should not be on the same page. They're all over the place." (77:02, Levenda)
• "We are not talking about a political party... It was a cult. Nazi occultism is almost a tautology." (110:53, Levenda)
• On Kennedy’s funeral:
  "My mind is, what the hell am I doing here? I'm in deep shit—if they find out, they're going to drag me out in front of everybody." (38:29, Levenda)
• "Your bias makes you selectively choose things and ignore other things 100%. Here I had basically a major story in front of me, and I didn't know it until somebody went and said... it's the same numbers." (05:52, Levenda)
• "You light that first candle in that first attempt to talk to something else—it's over for you, babe." (217:15, Levenda)
• "The big question is: what's going on? Is this consciousness? Are we all connected? Are we being guided? How many different entities exist? What does it mean?" (220:54, Host)

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• [10:00–44:15] — Levenda's clerical “origin story,” infiltrating Orthodox networks, and crashing Kennedy’s funeral.
• [46:54–73:47] — Nazi/SS ratline operations, churches as intelligence fronts, American and Vatican complicity.
• [77:02–125:05] — Nazi occultism, the Ahnenerbe, Tibet, and the search for hidden history.
• [125:00–139:04] — UFOs, the Maury Island mystery, connections to the Kennedy assassination, the Council of Nine.
• [155:01–170:47] — Levenda’s personal Men in Black encounters, UFOs, and the experience of high-strangeness.
• [176:35–207:12] — Ratline to Indonesia, Hitler escape theories, and documentation of Nazi operations in Asia.
• [229:08–236:00] — The cargo cult theory for all of civilization.
• [236:53–240:32] — On the personal cost of studying darkness and the human need for hope and connection.

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Final Thoughts

Host’s Closing Reflection

The host underscores that almost every wild thread in Levenda’s research—however strange—from CIA-sponsored churches and Nazi colonies to UFOs and consciousness cults, is supported by real documentation and daring first-person investigation. Some connections remain ambiguous, but the depth and audacity of the research is unquestionable.

Peter’s End Note

Levenda remains hopeful rather than pessimistic, arguing that there are "people who make it easier," and that personal relationships and moments of human kindness are what make living with these dark truths bearable.

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For Further Exploration

• Books:
  • Unholy Alliance
  • Sinister Forces Trilogy
  • Ratline
  • Secret Machines (with Tom DeLonge)
• Related Why Files Episodes:
  • Maury Island/UFO
  • CIA Men in Black
  • Operation Eagle Flight (Hitler escape theories)
• Topics for Deep-Dive:
  • Nazi Occultism & the Ahnenerbe
  • CIA use of religious fronts
  • The Council of Nine and American esoterica
  • Cargo Cult as a model for civilization’s spiritual/technological quest

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Listen if you...

• Enjoy mind-bending, well-researched intersections of conspiracy, the occult, history, and the paranormal.
• Want to understand how the seemingly ridiculous can—sometimes—become the truth.
• Appreciate stories with both investigative rigor and humility before mystery.

“You light that first candle in that first attempt to talk to something else—it's over for you, babe.”
(217:15, Peter Levenda)

Transcript

[Peter Lavenda]

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[Podcast Host]

Today I'm talking with Peter Lavenda. He's the author of more than 20 books. Unholy alliance, the Sinister Forces trilogy, the Secret Machine series with Tom DeLonge. The guy's been investigating the dark intersections of occultism, intelligence, operations, hidden history, CIA for over 50 years. He's been investigating the CIA for 50 years and he's still alive. That's either very impressive or very suspicious. And it started when he was 17. He dressed up as a fake Orthodox priest. He talked his way past the Secret Service and snuck into Bobby Kennedy's funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The stunt dropped him into an underground world that he never climbed out of. Yeah, he's lucky he didn't end up in a duffel bag he couldn't climb out of. Peter has some of the most mind blowing stories I have ever heard. CIA fronts disguised as churches, Nazi colonies in Chile, classified documents on SS expeditions to Tibet. A possible escape route for Hitler that nobody was looking at. We cover a lot of ground. The assassination connections, the Council of Nine, Consciousness, a Men in Black encounter that takes a turn that I never expected. And a theory about Hitler that actually shook me. I mean, seriously. I had to stop the show for a minute to process it, but we kept the camera rolling. Let's go to the basement. Peter, welcome to the basement.

[Peter Lavenda]

Thank you very much. I'm very happy to be here.

[Podcast Host]

My typical process with a guest is do a little reading, do some prep, get to know the material and Then just chat. Rarely do I refer to notes. I keep them around, but rarely do I use them. Today, this is the only way I can keep up with you.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sorry about that.

[Podcast Host]

No, no, it's, it's, I love it. But if you catch me just, just fumbling through pages that's been. Just trying to. Because there's so many names, so many connections.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. It was bewildering to me. I mean, when I started this, I thought I'd have a handle on it. It got out of control real fast. Too many names cross referenced with too many other events, too many other people. So it made it, I had to do it. And people argue with me sometimes. How come you don't give us, you know, an analysis, Tell us what you're really, you know, what's really going on. Give us your, you know, your analysis. I said I can't do that in the first place. It would be wrong. Right. What I want to do in Sinister Forces was to give you this data and say, you tell me, you know, what do you think this is? I'm not going to tell you. The Kennedy assassination is a perfect example. You know, I hesitated to write about that because everybody writes about the Kennedy assassination. But for me it's not just what we think it is, it's something deeper. And I wanted to say, look at all of this stuff. Look at all these weird coincidences, these synchronicities that multiply like crazy around the assassination. I'm not going to go and tell you Oswald acted alone or Oswald was part of a conspiracy. I'm going to say there's another thing happening here. There's something else going on. Take a look at this. You tell me what this means. And if you're so literal minded that you think it means it's a conspiracy of a bunch of guys in the back room smoking cigars and saying, let's kill Kennedy. There could be that, but there's something a lot deeper going on because it happened and it happened in a certain way, in a certain time, in a certain place. All of these things meant something deeper than what we're looking at. So what I wanted to present was the data. And say, look, open your eyes and look. There's a UFO connection. What?

[Podcast Host]

What?

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. Look at, look at it. I mean, Jacques Vallee pointed it out back in 1963.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Valet said, wait a minute, you know, Kennedy just got shot. There's something weird going on. There's some, some violent eruption, a volcanic eruption underneath our society, under our daily lives that we don't Even suspect it exists until it erupts. And he says, kind of like the UFO phenomenon as well. Right. These things are somehow talking to each other.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they are.

[Peter Lavenda]

And that was inspirational, too. I saw that and I said, okay, that's where we're headed.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. One or two connections you can dismiss, but when they. Hundreds, hundreds. You connect. And I think I've heard you say that you've had readers reach out and actually make additional connections for you. Like, hey, Peter, in this book 10 years ago, you said this. But this. This matches here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes, it does. And things that I will miss because, you know, I'm too focused on telling one story.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

And that's what happens when you're focused on telling a story. You're ignoring evidence. That happens all the time with sinister forces. I try to pull back and say, I'm not going to tell you a story. Not that way. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you a lot of evidence. I'm going to. I'm going to challenge you, come up with a reason why this is happening. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Your books are so fun because you. The reader becomes part of the detective story.

[Peter Lavenda]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

They're super fun.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's what I want them to do. I want them to contribute just the way they have. In that particular instance you mentioned, for instance, I was writing about Indonesia, and I was writing about a Nazi war criminal who had escaped to Indonesia after the war and wound up at a remote island. And people thought he was Hitler, that Hitler had actually escaped, and he had a wife who looked a little bit like, you know, Eva Braun. So this whole thing was, like, very strange, very mysterious, but it was real. There were photographs, there were documents. And I said, I got it. I've got to look at this. And I really. I went nuts, you know, compiling the information. And because I was telling the story, because I was trying to make a case, I didn't catch all the evidence that I had in front of me. And that happens all the time to any kind of researcher. Right. Your bias makes you selectively choose things and ignore other things 100%. And here I had basically a major story in front of me, and I didn't know it until somebody went and said, excuse me, but in the first book you wrote about this guy, you mentioned these two particular weird numbers and this address. And then in the second book that you're writing about this guy, you don't put it together right. You're right about everything but that around it. But I got news for you. It's the same numbers. That means that your famous Nazi war criminal opened an account in Jakarta that was used to funnel Nazi gold into the country.

[Podcast Host]

This is true.

[Peter Lavenda]

And it's true. It's there, right?

[Podcast Host]

So face palm moment. Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

Exactly right. How did I not see this? It was the same numbers, just repeated. And I didn't put it together. And the address was the same. And they said, take a look again. Right? And that opened up another entire, entire front in the war, you know, so here was all this Nazi gold. Tons of Nazi gold came out of Portugal at the end of the war, wound up in Macau, which was Portuguese territory at the time. 20 tons of it went, disappeared somewhere into China, maybe to support the Kuomintang, maybe Chiang Kai Shek's people, I don't know. But the other 20 tons went into Jakarta, went into Indonesia. For Sukarno, he was trying to create an international monetary fund of his own that would be for non aligned nations. He was trying to oppose the new imf. A new imf? Yes, right. It was called the Revolutionary Fund. It was called. And then it kind of disappeared. We don't know what happened. But then I found out that there was, you know, the 1965 Year of Living dangerously. All of this stuff that happened, this revolt that took place, the civil war that erupted, Sukarno being deposed, the army taking over all of the embassies. The West German embassy and the West German consulates in Indonesia were staffed by former ss, okay, Former Nazis were in position there, which I found out only much later. And gold was being used to finance this operation against the. Against Sukarno and that government by painting him as a communist. Right, by saying he was 100% communist, which was not true. But even OSS at the time and CIA said, no, it's not true. The people who said that at CIA were fired. Right. So anyway, this is a long story. It's long aside, but what I'm trying to say is if you try to tell a story, it can be very believable and very convincing, but you're going to miss some evidence that tells another story. So I pulled back with sinister forces and said, I'm going to give you a lot of evidence. Unfortunately. Look at the size of that thing. It's. Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I needed help carrying it in here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, it's. I'm sorry, guys, but had to be done. So it's all there. You can take it. You can just start anywhere. Open it up any place and start. Look at names that you. That are familiar. And then, you know Google away, guys. You're going to find all kinds of amazing material.

[Podcast Host]

Well, today. And it's on my list to get to Nazis escaping different Hitler theories. I covered it myself. I ended up in Argentina, where everyone else does. I was. Indonesia took me by surprise. So I'd love to dig into that, but I think we need to set the stage. 1968. Dodging the draft.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And you, you become a priest. Can you tell the story?

[Peter Lavenda]

It was cool. This is the thing. Okay. It was 1960. Well, actually, in 67 is when it started for me. I'm in high school, Columbus High School, as you pointed out. And I'm going to high school. And I'm, you know, I'm turning 18 in 1968. And there's the draft. It's an actual draft. So, you know, no way out. And my politics at the time, my, My parents were sort of right wing. My father was kind of right wing. He was a segregationist, actually, while he was in high school. So that we were sort of worlds apart on that. So he. He was sort of right wingish on these things. And my mother was similarly right wing. But I could not get my head around why we were bombing Vietnam. I could not. I could not understand it. I understood World War II. I understood the Nazis going after them. My uncles fought the Nazis. I understood Japan, you know, fighting Japan, fighting in the Pacific. My uncle similarly fought in the Pacific theater. So all of this I kind of understood. I understood these were bad people doing bad things, enslaving populations, murdering populations. Yeah, you got to stop that.

[Podcast Host]

Did you understand Korea?

[Peter Lavenda]

Were you Korea? That was. My parents were kind of always. They were on the fence about Korea. They were saying, well, it's not really a war, it's a police action.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I'm saying, I mean, people are getting killed. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

They're shooting at us, we're shooting at them. So Korea was a problem, but Korea was where we got brainwashing and all this other stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

How cool was that? Right. So. So we had that issue. So Korea. But at least we weren't fighting in Korea at that time. When I was in high school, Korea was like, you could get sent to Korea and sit there.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. You know, but likelihood, knowing me and my luck, I would be in the tall grass before you know it. And it wasn't a question of my safety that I was concerned about. This is the thing. I didn't want to be responsible for what might be a series of war crimes. I mean, I was. I grew up on the Nazis. Right. I grew up on Casablanca.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

How can you grow up on Casablanca and say let me go to Vietnam and bomb a bunch of villagers?

[Podcast Host]

You had that sense back in 60s. I mean, because it's all war crimes as far as I'm concerned. Which I. I don't think it's debatable at this point. Gulf talking, so. And all of that. But you. But back then you had that instinct very early.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yep, I did. I. Because I was a strange child. I bet I was, yeah. I was a sort of. I was a loner. I was very. I'm very introverted by nature. I'm the kind of introvert that doesn't answer his phone, if you know what I mean.

[Podcast Host]

So my wife is nodding her head right now.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's the kind of person I am. So I'm very introverted where that's concerned, but at the same time fascinated by foreign cultures. I mean, the pivotal moment of my youth was watching Lawrence of Arabia when it came out. Okay, so in 1962, the best I was sent, we were part of a class that had to go and see the movie. If you can imagine a class of like seventh graders going to see Lawrence of Arabia. Strange choice, but okay. So we went and we sat there and it blew me away. And I said to myself, okay, I never had a childhood hero or anything growing up. I said, I want to be that. I want to be that guy who goes out in the middle of nowhere to all these people who he's not related to, doesn't even speak their language, but gets right into it with them, you know, and in the end winds up leading the revolt. Right. Later I found out he was not that great of a guy. Drew the lines for what we're constantly dealing with in the Middle east right now. Drew the boundaries. He and Gertrude Bell sat there and created Iraq out of whole cloth and on and on, but that's another story. But at the time that was my sensitivity and growing up on war films. Passage to Marseilles, Casablanca, all these, you know, Bogart and, you know, and Claude Rains and all the rest of this stuff. And who do I see in Lawrence of Arabia? Claude Rains again. So it's like there's a continuum in my mind, if you can understand how I'm thinking and how I'm understanding this. And to go to Vietnam, I would have welcomed going as a kid with my kids sensibilities. I would have welcomed going to war against the Nazis. I would have joined up anything like that. I mean, there was a mission, there was a real Mission. I didn't see the mission.

[Podcast Host]

You can't see John Wayne in Vietnam. You can't see him there.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, no, no, no, you can't. And I'm now with a bunch of people my age in high school, and they're thinking to themselves, why are we doing this, too? And I've got sds, Students of a Democratic Society. They were in Columbus High School, and eventually they became the Weathermen, where one branch did. And so they're trying to.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think dad liked them. I don't think dad liked those guys.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, not his cup of tea. So we had this happening. So all of this was there. My consciousness was being bombarded and raised, basically. I mean, I was surrounded by people saying, the hell are we doing? Going over there, you know, and then seeing the footage on television every night. The body counts and all the rest of this stuff. I said, body counts? That's what we're reduced to now. We don't win battles. We just have body counts. What the hell is that? So a lot of that just didn't make sense to me. So I said, no, I'm not going to do this, you know, and there were options. You could go to Canada, you could go to Sweden, you know. But I was a strange child, as I said. And in the. The late. In the mid-60s, I was doing a lot of research into occultism and, you know, seances and things of that nature. And I would get Fate magazine.

[Podcast Host]

What, as a 10th grader?

[Peter Lavenda]

As a. In 1963. 64. So I was 13, 14 years old. Yeah, something like that.

[Podcast Host]

Reading occult magazines.

[Peter Lavenda]

Fate magazine was like my Bible.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Fate magazine was great, you know, but not just so much the articles. It was the ads in the back. The ads were great. All kinds of weird stuff were in the ads. And you could send away for free for a lot of stuff. So I'm sending away for whatever is there for free because we were pretty broke as a family. So I'm just sending away whatever you have that's. That's, you know, free. I'll. I'm on board. And so I would get these. These things for the Universal Life Church. Right.

[Podcast Host]

And that's going to come up a lot today.

[Peter Lavenda]

Is it?

[Podcast Host]

Sorry, Universal Life Church.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sure. Yeah. Well, there's reasons. So there's Universal Life Church. I'm looking at this thing and I'm saying, wait a minute, I can send in $5 and I'm a priest of the Universal Life Church. Yes. Okay. So I did that. I scrounged together $5 and I really mean scrounged. That was difficult in those days. And I got my certificate that I'm now a priest. And I'm thinking, does this get me out of Vietnam? No, no, as it turns out, not exactly. So I'm starting to do some research, which in those days, there's no Internet, boys and girls. There's no cell phones, there's no laptops, there's no computers, there's nothing. You do research. You go to a library and look at paper. And I'm doing this and I'm researching it, and I'm researching the. The deferments. How do you get deferred from going into the army? The fours. Right. So 4F means you're physically unable. So you got to be missing, you know, an arm or a lung or something. I said, that's a little drastic. But there was a 4F deferment, and that said clergyman. And that's when the light bulb came on. I said, wait a minute. If universal life can do this, we could do it, but we could do it better. We, meaning me. The editorial. We said, let's see what I can do. So I'm in high school in Columbus with a schoolmate whose background is similar to mine. My father's parents were from Slovakia. They were immigrants from Slovakia. And his grandparents were immigrants from Czech and Slovakia, both sides, Czechia and Slovakia. So we kind of got along on that basis. We had a common Slavic sort of heritage. And he was totally into religious stuff, kind of alarmingly so, as I later found out. But he had, you know, he was third order Franciscan, which is a kind of monastic thing for lay people. He had a closet full of vestments, Catholic vestments, chasubles, cassocks, the Roman collars.

[Podcast Host]

Again, as a teenager.

[Peter Lavenda]

As a teenager, okay. See, his parents were divorced. And what happened was one parent would play against the other parent. So he was getting money from both sides. So he would go and get this stuff from places. Right. Sometimes it was secondhand, whatever. But he had a chalice, he had a ciborium. You could say mass in his bedroom. It was all there. Everything you needed was there. And his father worked for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in Manhattan. So he was a welder. Right. So he's welding suits of armor, he's welding shields, he's building swords, lances. He had a mace.

[Podcast Host]

Wow, he sounds awesome.

[Peter Lavenda]

But he was like a no nonsense kind of guy. He was salt of the earth kind of guy. Very strong human being, Right. But very salt of the earth. And his son was this Very wispy, as I learned later. Very gay guy. And I was, like, innocent as hell. I knew nothing about gay, straight, you know, everybody else seemed to know he was gay. I didn't. If they had told me, I would have known what they meant. So he had all this stuff. He just loved all of this. And he. He smoked. He. He. He had a mustache. You know, he was. He's a junior in high school, and he has a mustache. He would wear suits, right?

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

The whole thing. So he was. And he took snuff.

[Podcast Host]

And he took snuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

He had a little snuff and he took snuff, Right.

[Podcast Host]

I see him with a pipe or no stuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay, so this was. He was fascinating, right? He's a fascinating character. And he was fascinated by me, I think, because I was so strange, right? So we would have these discussions, and I liked foreign languages. I was always studying foreign languages. I was three years of French. I had a year of Latin. So I was, you know, linguistically inclined where this was concerned. And he was as well. So we were looking at things, and then Vietnam would inevitably come up. And I said, you know, you've got all this stuff. Why don't we create our own church? Well, that's all we have to do. We just get it incorporated in the state of New York. We need somebody because we're too young to sign incorporation paper. We need people to sign for us. We create a church, we register it in Albany.

[Podcast Host]

So who did you find to do the paperwork?

[Peter Lavenda]

I think we had. I think his father was a signature. I think we had one teacher who signed as well.

[Podcast Host]

And what, he just sold it as a project?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, his father knew what we were up to. Okay. I think the teacher might have known. And as I found out later, the teacher was also gay. So I think there was something going on there between the teacher and not to defame the dead. He's gone at this point. But so my friend, he had his connections, I guess, and I had mine. So they signed the papers and we were incorporating the state of New York. We have the seal, the whole thing, the wax seal, the stamp, everything. We were legit. And, you know, Congress can make no law concerning the establishment of religion.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's in our Constitution, boys and girls. So if we say we're clergy of this legally incorporated church, we are clergy of that church. Now, the next hurdle would be convincing, right? Selective service. That this was true. So how do you. If you're both 17, a little mysterious how you can be priests at 17. We needed another priest. We needed somebody who had some clout. And he had a friend. This is the story of the 1. As a maintenance tech at a university, he knows ordering from multiple suppliers takes time away from keeping their arena up and running. That's why he counts on Grainger to get everything he needs, from lighting and H vac parts to plumbing supplies, all in one place. And with fast, dependable delivery, he's stocked and ready for the next tip off. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. And this friend had been. He's an Eastern European of some description. We don't know. I don't think we ever knew where he really came from. He had a heavy accent that was identical to Borat.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, identical. When I hear Borat, I hear this guy. He talked like that all the time. We used to make fun of him, the way he talked. And he had been a clergy of some kind. He had been stationed at Grotta Ferrata, outside of Rome, which was a place where Eastern European Catholics were taken quite often when they were escaping communism. So they were, like, set up there for a while. So he talked always fondly about this place. But anyway, he lived in this weird basement apartment in the Upper west side that had Christmas lights strung up like year in, year out. He just never took them down. And he was just a crazy guy. He was just totally crazy. But we named him our bishop. And he said, no problem. It's okay. No problem. I'd be bishop. No worries. So he was the bishop of this church. So he was. His name was in the middle, and we were on the other side. So I was Petro, which is Peter, which is just Slavic version of Peter. But my friend, he had to have a different name. So he went for Eleftheri. Eleftheri is from the Greek. It means freedom.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, nice.

[Peter Lavenda]

In his head, this was his freedom, Right? We built this church out of nothing, but we had all the garb, right? So, okay, we're going to be Orthodox now. We are now Eastern Orthodox. We can't be Catholic, obviously. The Catholics would have a word with us. But Orthodox was a free for all. We were very astute at 17.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, you were.

[Peter Lavenda]

Because Orthodox churches, a lot of them were behind the Iron curtain. So they didn't communicate with their Orthodox churches outside. So we picked a church that was in Czechoslovakia, still behind the Iron Curtain.

[Podcast Host]

Brilliant.

[Peter Lavenda]

There were no Slovak Orthodox people.

[Podcast Host]

As you're going through this, are you still Afraid of the war or are you more excited about the project?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, it's both.

[Podcast Host]

It's both. Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

So the energy into this project was because Vietnam. So we really hustle on this and we say we have to somehow create like a paper trail that we're really Orthodox. So we visited all these Orthodox churches and we made friends with brother Victor. Brother Victor was the principal of St. Sergius Russian Orthodox High School, which was part of the anti communist Russian Orthodox Church, the Czarist, which was really a beautiful outfit up on the Park Avenue. 90, 92nd Street.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, nice.

[Peter Lavenda]

They have the whole mansion that they brought with the money from Czarist Russia.

[Podcast Host]

And if he's gay as well, that's fine.

[Peter Lavenda]

Victor. I don't know about Victor, but never knew about. He never got a chance to find out if he was gay. But the church, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, as it was called. This brings us back to the assassination, because Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia is usually spelled R O C O R, abbreviated rokor. ROKOR figures prominently in the assassination. And I'll get to that in a minute. But of course, I had no way of knowing then. So we would visit this guy, we would hang out with him in our stuff and we had the hats, you know, these stovepipe hats with the veils. Right. Like, you know, never on Sunday or,

[Podcast Host]

you know, what are you on the F train? Not just in your.

[Peter Lavenda]

Absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I love this.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, you had to. I mean, Orthodox. We had to do the whole thing.

[Podcast Host]

I love this.

[Peter Lavenda]

So we would go and hang out there and of course the other Orthodox would look at us and they, they were suspicious.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

Had every right to be. But we kind of passed. We were, I mean, both Slavs, you know, and we managed to pass.

[Podcast Host]

You're doing the accent on the train and stuff, just chatting.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, I did. I wouldn't do the accent.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

We. Only when we had to do the accent, only when it became absolutely necessary. But otherwise, no. We talked about like normal English speaking people. So they were our friends. And then we would go and visit the other Russian Orthodox, which was the Communist Church, we called it, which owed allegiance to Moscow, the Patriarch in Moscow. Now, if you watched the TV series Americans, I have. Okay. The last season, there is a prominent number of characters who are Orthodox priests who are actually KGB agents.

[Podcast Host]

That's right. It took a long time to get there.

[Peter Lavenda]

It took a long time to get there. And I was so pleased when they finally got there because I'm waiting for this. Because I knew that was how they were moving agents into the country as Russian Orthodox priests. And that comes back to my story again a little later.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think I knew that. Yeah, okay, great.

[Peter Lavenda]

So KGB agents dressed up as priests, sent by. By kgb, but trained in Moscow to look and act like Russian Orthodox priests. And of course, in some cases, they kind of grew up with Orthodoxy around them, even though it was suppressed by the Soviet Union. But the churches were there, and they heard stories from their parents. They had basically an understanding. So they would move these people into the church on 97th street on Fifth Avenue. So in our heads, we would say 97th Street, 93rd Street, 92nd Street, 97th. We knew the streets. We knew what we were talking about. We said 97th street meant the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, right? We said 92nd street or 93rd Street. It was Russian Orthodox Church, anti communist, pro Nazis. It turned out another thing. But anyway, so you had these two to deal with, right? So we would go, we would shuttle back and forth and keep an eye on both. But then we visited the Serbians, the Bulgarians, everybody.

[Podcast Host]

Are you going into the churches?

[Peter Lavenda]

Absolutely. We're introducing ourselves.

[Podcast Host]

Wow, this is audacious.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, we, you know, and they took us at our word. We dressed the part.

[Podcast Host]

When you walk up, who else would

[Peter Lavenda]

dress like that, right?

[Podcast Host]

When you walk up for the first time, are you like, oh, is this gonna work this time?

[Peter Lavenda]

We had no. After the first time, it became easy after that, oh, we would gate crash. Things you would not believe.

[Podcast Host]

Being 18 is amazing, isn't it?

[Peter Lavenda]

You have, you know, testicles and you just don't really. You just walk in and do it. You know, you pass it out. You don't care what possibly could go wrong, right? So we're doing all this and we're building this sort of thing. And we're getting the robes. Right now we're making this ourselves. The hats we had to make, right? So those were made, but we had the material. And the guy turned out to be a pretty good seamstress.

[Podcast Host]

I was picturing it, picturing the sewing.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, there was going on. Everything was happening fine. So we're doing all this, and he's going to town now. He's getting more money from both sides of his family, from his mother and his father. He's buying gold crosses to wear from his neck, imported from Greece, right? Because Greek Orthodox is like the motherland for all this stuff. And he's got all kinds of stuff. He's got the staff with the serpents, you know, around it, the whole. He's got this. He's traveling with. I'm getting whatever, you know, I can get from the side because I'm. My family, as I say, is broke. So my working. My father and my mother is not going to help. But. But he's got all this great stuff. Right. So I get whatever he has extra.

[Podcast Host]

So you guys aren't hearing confessions on the train or doing anything like that, are you?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, no, no, no, no.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

But we are blessing graves.

[Podcast Host]

What?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. St. Michael Cemetery in Queens. When we needed money, we would go on a weekend, like a Saturday. We would just show up in a cemetery, fully decked out in the black robes and everything else. We would walk very sedately through among the graves. We would stop at a grave and. And we would, like, bless it in the Orthodox cross and the whole thing and mumble something in church. Slavonic people would see it, and they would walk up to us and say, father, could you come and bless our grave?

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Peter Lavenda]

Of course we would go and do that, and they give us $5.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know if that's heresy or beautiful.

[Peter Lavenda]

Both.

[Podcast Host]

I guess it's both.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's a beautiful heresy. So we would.

[Podcast Host]

A part of you has to start to connect with it, though. When you're blessing graves, you have to connect with it on some level. Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, you want to do a good job. I mean, you want everybody to be pleased with the result.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't know about the person in there. Right.

[Podcast Host]

But you're not mocking is what I'm getting.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, we're not mocking. No, but. Right. Okay. So we would bless graves. So we would do that. And we pick up, you know, sometimes $20, which in those days was a lot of money.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

And it paid for, you know, things that we needed. So we would do that every. Every weekend or so. If the weather was promising, we would go. Or if it was like a Memorial Day, we would go on. Especially a Memorial Day. There'd be a lot of, you know, customers. Oh, God. In the cemetery. So we just go and work the crowd. Let's go.

[Podcast Host]

Work the crowd.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. How is that different from any other religion?

[Podcast Host]

I was thinking the same thing. What's the difference?

[Peter Lavenda]

What's the difference?

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. So. Okay. Yeah. So hearing confessions. No, but blessing Grace. Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

So this is going on. This is going on. And then finally. Okay, the event that changed it all for me was 6-6-68, and Bobby Kennedy is assassinated. And I watched it. You know, I'm watching the returns in California on our little black and White zine the tv. And there's Kennedy saying, you know, onwards to. You know, I forget what state he was going on next, but they were just won. The California primary. He had just won. And then suddenly the newscasters are coming on, you know, Bobby Kennedy's been shot.

[Podcast Host]

So you were sitting there when it happened live.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Okay. And I'm. It's. It's. That was going to be like the savior, right? He was going to get us out of Vietnam. Yes, we believed that anyway. And remember, this happened only three months after Martin Luther King.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I remember Martin Luther King's assassination. What happened at Columbus High School in those days, I mean, that was just. That was surreal. And then this, you know, and this is the month we're going to graduate High School. June 68. And I'm stunned by this. I mean, I think this is it. This is. It's over. You know, we really got to get out of this situation because this is going to be terrible now, and we have no hope. Hubert Humphrey. Are you kidding me? So anyway, what does my friend say? We're going to go to the funeral. He tells me.

[Podcast Host]

Which is at St. Patrick's yes, they're

[Peter Lavenda]

holding the funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral. Now, because he was a third order Franciscan, he had connections at St Patrick's Cathedral.

[Podcast Host]

How as a teenager?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, because of the society. Okay. I mean, he had a mustache that.

[Podcast Host]

That goes a long way.

[Peter Lavenda]

Goes along. People don't ask questions, so. But he knew some bishop. He knew somebody there. Believe me. I never knew all the details about my friend Prosky, William Andrew Broski. I never really knew all the background here. I don't know if. I don't know what he was involved with. Know. To be. To be honest, more than what I saw myself. So I can't jump to conclusions. But he knew a lot of people. You know, we could get into, for instance, the Metropolitan Opera. We can go into, you know, Carnegie Hall. We could go to places like that and just sort of show up when nobody was there and play the organ in, you know, in the opera house or at Carnegie hall or something. He knew. He had contacts as a teenager. He had contacts somehow.

[Podcast Host]

And you didn't. I guess as a teenager, you really wouldn't ask. You would just go.

[Peter Lavenda]

You just go, yeah. Oh, this is cool. Let me. This is cool. I'll go, you know, so this kind of thing would happen. So anyway, the night before the funeral, the night before, we go down to St. Patrick's and it's like I say, at night he goes into, we both go into the building that's connected to the church and we talk to somebody who's evidently somebody in charge, a Catholic priest of some kind. I think he was a monsignor. He had the red with the thing.

[Podcast Host]

Did you go down as in costume?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, yeah. Okay, absolutely. And we said, you know, we want to pay our respects as well. Is there possible for us, can we also get in, you know, tomorrow and do that? We represent the Slavonic Orthodox Church. And the guy says, okay, maybe come back tomorrow. Right. And so we, we go into the church itself and the coffin is already there.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

So Bobby Kennedy is there.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

And Rose and Jackie are in the front pew. There's nobody else in the place.

[Podcast Host]

Oh my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they're kneeling and praying and we see the coffin, you know, and my friend doesn't miss a beat. He goes right up to the coffin and starts going, you know, doing the sign of the cross and everything else.

[Podcast Host]

And, you know, is the impact of this hitting you at that point?

[Peter Lavenda]

It, it's really hard to say. It's surreal because it really is. I'm looking at the guy who would have saved the country in my 17 year old imagination. And he's in a box in the church and I'm there next to him. I'm touching the coffin.

[Podcast Host]

This is so powerful.

[Peter Lavenda]

It is. But my friend doesn't see it that way. My friend, this is an opportunity for him to act like a bishop because he wants to be a bishop now. Priest is no longer enough. He's turning 18 that month. And priests, no, he wants to be archimandrite, which is a higher level, just below bishop. But he has his sight set on bishop. So he's like, he's blessing and he's like in his element. Me, I'm just shaking, of course. So there's two different poles happening at that moment. And I look over and there's people that I've seen since I was a kid, Rose and Jackie, and they're praying. Of course they're praying. We're not going to bother them. At least my friend had enough sense not to do that. So we left. We go back to the Bronx on the subway and he says, we're going tomorrow. He says, I'm going to rent a limo and we're going to go down that way. And I remember to this day the limo cost US$18. So that was a good $20 we got at the summit. So that cost $18. The limo picked us up in the Bronx. We had all the the stuff on, you know, and we got into the limo and he drove us straight to St. Patrick's right up to the side entrance. The door is open. Select. The Secret Service is there. Obviously you can imagine the. The security funeral of a dead Kennedy.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah, well, you had to get through PD first. No. So they just. They wave you in.

[Peter Lavenda]

Wave you in.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. And now you're at the door.

[Peter Lavenda]

They saw. They saw a limo and they saw hats. They said, come on in.

[Podcast Host]

It was probably auxiliary guys.

[Peter Lavenda]

Probably. What do you expect, Boy scouts, One of these. So, and then this, the Secret Service is there, right? They got the things in their ears and they got the lapel buttons. And they run up to me as we're leaving the car. We're standing there, and there's Rosie Greer, right? The guy who tackled Sirhan. He's right there. I mean, my mind is, what the hell am I doing here? Right? Is.

[Podcast Host]

You're just pounding in your chest.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, yeah. I don't know where this is going to lead.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't know. I don't know how far this is going to go.

[Podcast Host]

I need to hear that. I need to hear some nerves here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sure, absolutely.

[Podcast Host]

But your partner, he's probably cool.

[Peter Lavenda]

He's cool with it. And he says, we make this agreement. He will not speak. His voice was still changed.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, good God.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. His voice was a little bit still changing.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

He says, okay, I'll do all the talking. You're going to be the bishop. Because now by this time, he's bishop. He has the panagia, he has the cross, and he has this big, oh,

[Podcast Host]

well, congratulations on his promotion.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes, I'm still the schmuck. So we go up and the. The Secret Service walks up to me and he says, russian Orthodox representatives. And I say, yes, Slavonic Orthodox representatives. He says, okay, follow me.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

And he says, we're going to go. He says, a rather circuitous way into the church, but, you know, we'll be fine. So the two of us, he's. My friend is walking like this with his cane, with his crozier or whatever the hell he's carrying. I'm walking behind with my heart in one hand and my lungs in another. And so we imagine. And he opens the door and we're in the freaking sanctuary. We're in the sanctuary. I thought we'd be out somewhere in the congregation. Of course, we are in the sanctuary

[Podcast Host]

with everybody else, and that's in capitals. Everybody else?

[Peter Lavenda]

Everybody else? Yes, all the high clergy people, all the bishops, archbishops, cardinals, Whatever you want. They're all there from all the different religions as well. Not just the Catholics, right? Mostly Catholics, but. And there's the head of the Greek Orthodox Church, Jakubos, the hated and dreaded Jakubos, Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church. Very powerful guy at that time. He owned all kinds of. He was a slumlord, basically. He owned kinds of property and he was, you know. But there he was, he's glaring daggers at us, like, who the are these people? Right? I never saw these people in my life. I know everybody in the orchard. I don't know who these guys are, but he can't say anything, right? So my friend goes to that side. We have to go on opposite sides of the altar. So he's on one side, I'm on the other to keep, I guess, the numbers even or something. So he's on that side, I'm on this side. And I'm in the front row now of the sanctuary. I'm just staring at this, like, what do I do now? There's kleeg lights, there's huge lights. You know, the whole thing is happening. And I look over there and there's like the President of the United States.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

There's senators, there's names that I recognize. There's actors, there's. I'm looking at this, I'm saying, holy Christ, what am I going to do here? How I'm in deep shit. If something. If they find out what, they're going to drag me out in front of everybody. I don't know.

[Podcast Host]

This has spiraled out of control. I don't think you're aware of it.

[Peter Lavenda]

No. Out of control at this point. And I kind of think in a way this is going to sound outrageous, but the passage of like, how many years now? 50? Something like that? More.

[Podcast Host]

Almost 60.

[Peter Lavenda]

Almost 60. With the passage of all that time, I'm thinking, do we create at that moment an alternate timeline? Suddenly was the weirdness and the impossibility of this. Something that split off into a different direction. Because there's something strange about everything that happened after that. Yes. It should never have happened. I was a poor kid from the Bronx.

[Podcast Host]

Because this set you on the. On the whole path.

[Peter Lavenda]

Whole path. Completely different path than I was already set on. What.

[Podcast Host]

What were you planning on doing?

[Peter Lavenda]

I just wanted to be a writer.

[Podcast Host]

Just want to be a writer.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's all I wanted to do.

[Podcast Host]

Novels?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, anything.

[Podcast Host]

Anything.

[Peter Lavenda]

I wrote. I wrote poetry, short stories, novels, essays. I just wanted to write. It was like a thing.

[Podcast Host]

So let's Get. Let's not go to Vietnam. I'll be a writer.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right?

[Podcast Host]

All good. But instead.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I would not even to make money, I knew I would get a regular job. I would write for the drawer. I didn't care. I just wanted to write with nobody telling me what to do. So that was the extent of it. That's all that I had. That was my only dream in life, Right. Maybe travel. Of course I wanted to do that. But, you know, general terms, right. But here I am sitting in this pew, and as I'm sitting there, the service begins, right? And there's Ted Kennedy giving a eulogy, and it's all, what am I doing? Right.

[Podcast Host]

If you or anyone else think of the security breach here, oh, my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

If I was wearing one of these freaking hats. Yeah, they're tall stovepipe hats. You could have put anything in there. Yeah, you could have put a bunch of dynamite in there.

[Podcast Host]

Boy, talk about making the news like that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, I could have had that in my.

[Podcast Host]

Now, that's in poor taste.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sorry. But that's what I. You know, I could have done that. I could have had a pistol. I could have done anything. Nobody was checking me for weapons, right. I'm wearing robes like this. I could have had a machine gun underneath there. Who would have known?

[Podcast Host]

They're not patting down the.

[Peter Lavenda]

No.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

They're not patting down the A list. Right, Right. So, I mean, I could have just leaned over and taken out the first couple of rows. I mean, anything was possible. This is a horrible breach of security.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

But at that time, I'm not thinking of that. I'm thinking, how do I get out of this? And so the service is proceeding. We're standing up when we have to stand, Sitting when we have to sit. As orthodox, we have certain things that we do. So we move the hat at a certain point, put it back on. All of these things are going on. They're reciting the creed. We make sure we don't say filioque. So all of these weird things that, you know, as an orthodox, you're supposed to do, which we, you know, crash course, we figured out. So we're doing everything right. And at one point, I get a tap on my shoulder. I'm thinking, okay, this is it. I turn around and it's Andy Williams. And he asks me, am I on yet? What? I say, no.

[Podcast Host]

You say, no.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, you're not. I just shook my head and said no. I'm thinking, I just told no to Andy Williams, who at that time, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, was a very big pop star.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

If you saw Breakfast at Tiffany's, Moon river, etc.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I figured he wasn't going to sing Moon River. I just had this. That was not going to come out of his mouth. But I had no idea. I mean, there was a program, but I didn't. I'm not looking at it. So eventually then, of course, the service is over and everybody has to get up, but I'm the last one in. My partner Frosky, and I, we're the last ones in, so we're the first ones out. We have to lead the procession out of the cathedral.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

Now, a little backstory for you. I was terrible doing this in Catholic school. I was so bad, because I was the shortest kid at that time in Catholic school. And Catholic school does everything in size places. So when you're the shortest kid, you're in the front, you're the leader. You've got to memorize everything that the big, taller kids in the back, they can just dopily follow you.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I could never get straight how I go down this way, turn right here, turn left here, do this thing over here. They had all these elaborate ways to lead this procession in the church, holding candles and flowers and stuff. When you're a kid in Catholic school,

[Podcast Host]

did they want you to lead, like, down the nave or.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, completely, you know, past the heads of state and. Well, when I was a kid in Catholic school, it was the whole church. Right, right. And I always screw that up. And at one point, Sister Agatha grabbed me by the shoulders and she shook me so bad I couldn't get it straight. I vomited all over her.

[Podcast Host]

I'm telling you, I know her name.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sister Agatha. Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

She was evil. That's what that said. I was terrified by Sister Agatha. So anyway, that was then. So now it's not that much later, really, because I'm still a kid and. But now I'm leading the procession out of the cathedral, straight down the center of the church. They're going to open the doors in front of me, Atlas, you know Rockefeller center is there.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay, so what happens behind me? Andy Williams is finally on singing you out. Singing me out. The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my God.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right? And then as he's ending, right, that Leonard Bernstein, okay, has the choir and the organs, and he's doing the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah. As the door is open and as Atlas is there. And I'm thinking, well, I don't know, but I Just graduated high school, man.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm not going back for this.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

My problem was I still can't do a procession. Right? Right. So I'm walking down the aisle, but I'm hoofing it.

[Podcast Host]

You're hoofing it.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm going a bit too fast.

[Podcast Host]

The cameras are trying to track you,

[Peter Lavenda]

and somebody comes up behind me. One of the clergy says, slow down. And I realized that Praski is subconsciously walking, so we're not in sync. Right. So I have to wait for Praski, and then we start moving the rest of the way out. We leave the church this way. Now your listeners are thinking, what does all this have to do with anything? Well, this is what it has to do. We leave the church. We know a way to get out without being seen because we're going to take the subway back. We didn't keep the limo.

[Podcast Host]

Didn't keep the limo.

[Peter Lavenda]

We go out through, like, an underground passage that's there again. Who do we run into? Rose and Jackie. They're doing the same thing. They're trying to get out to avoid the paparazzi. So we mumble something about condolences and everything else. We don't. It's a shock, right? They're shocked, we're shocked. We keep going. We come out on the other side and there's a strange looking bishop waiting for us. This is a guy dressed in some purplish robes and stuff with a hat and everything. And he says, what denomination are you with? Okay. And I'm still doing the talking. Slavonic Orthodox Church. And he says, here's a pamphlet from our church. We're in the Bronx, the American Orthodox Catholic Church. Why don't you come up and see us? And we take the thing, we say, okay, fine, and we just leave. And we get in the subway, coming back home, and we're looking at this thing. We're saying, this guy's like, not that far from us. He's near the Bronx Zoo, actually, appropriately enough, as it turned out. So we said, okay, we're going to go and visit these people. So, like, a Sunday or two later, we go and visit the American Orthodox Catholic Church, not having a clue who these people are. And that church turns out to be the one that had David Ferry and Jack Martin as bishops, among others, and that they were running Chrisman as well. Well, Chrisman and they were running ops, you know, for the feds. The whole thing was totally bizarre.

[Podcast Host]

But you don't know any of this

[Peter Lavenda]

at this point, right at that time of Course, I don't know. I know nothing about Fred. I never heard the name David Ferry. I mean, didn't know anything about any of that. Or Jack Martin, nothing like that. All I knew was here's a church, a beautiful mansion. And they had a beautiful church, a wooden church, I think it was a wooden structure inside. It was. Anyway, it was a lot of wood. An Orthodox church. They had icons, they had everything set up, you know. And they said, why don't you just join us? And we thought, this is it. We don't have a church, we don't have a building. We have got nothing. We tie up with these guys, we're home free, right? And so we go on a Sunday, we're figuring we're gonna go and do this elaborate ceremony with them. There's gonna be all these people. Place is empty. There were no parishioners. There never were any parishioners. That wasn't the point.

[Podcast Host]

Wasn't the point.

[Peter Lavenda]

Beautiful church, though. They had the edifice. It was there, total front. And every Sunday they did the mass, they did the Divine Liturgy. They did it with nobody present, but they had to keep up the appearances. Right.

[Podcast Host]

And are you concerned yet? Like this is odd?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, because we don't have any parishioners.

[Podcast Host]

I guess nobody has it.

[Peter Lavenda]

Nobody has them. We're cool.

[Podcast Host]

No flock anywhere. Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Until day after day things start getting a little strange.

[Podcast Host]

In what way?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, the bishop, the guy who runs the church, a guy called Profeta, was a Ukrainian Orthodox priest first, and then he broke away from the church and formed his own denomination called the American Orthodox Catholic Church. And he was a valiant, anti crusading guy. He hated communism, really. As a Ukrainian, he despised communism. And anything that was wrong in the world was due to communism. Right. So he had these things. He was on television programs in the 50s and the early 60s talking about the Katyn Forest Massacre, talking about atrocities committed by the communists against the Ukrainians and on and on trying to build this big anti communist crusade. So much so that he showed me a letter from Dewey, who was running against Harry Truman at the time for the presidency. If Dewey had won the presidency, he would have been Profetta, would have been the White House chaplain.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

He had it in writing from Dewey. So this guy was that much of an anti communist crusader and he ran a lot of anti communist stuff in the state of New Jersey. A lot of his real background was the Ukrainian churches in New Jersey, which is a little strange also.

[Podcast Host]

Why would that be strange?

[Peter Lavenda]

The deeper we get into this, the more it all gets Very connected. But a lot of the Ukrainians in New Jersey. Okay, let me background a little bit. During World War II, people talk a lot about Ukraine and Nazis. It's a trope. You see it all the time. It's very complicated. Ukraine was under Soviet Union control. They were not allowed to speak Ukrainian print in Ukrainian. Of course, their church was basically banned. So when the Nazis came along and said, we're going to help you be free of the Soviet Union, a lot of the Ukrainians said, no problem, we'll support you. So you had a lot of pro Nazi Ukrainians just because they wanted to get away from Russia, from Soviet control and because they necessarily agreed with Nazi philosophy.

[Podcast Host]

Right. And Vatican supporting all that as well.

[Peter Lavenda]

And the Vatican was supporting it.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So you had this big movement. Let's get the Ukrainians on the Nazi side. So after the war, there was an entire Ukrainian SS division. An entire division of SS Ukrainians. They wound up in New Jersey.

[Podcast Host]

Whoa.

[Peter Lavenda]

They were brought over family, not just the officers themselves or the soldiers, but everybody.

[Podcast Host]

Were they brought over under the. The paperclip?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, it was just another special, you know, either as asylum seekers or. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Because now we're learning that paperclip was mostly just intelligence assets coming over, not scientists.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

So here they are.

[Podcast Host]

Here they are.

[Peter Lavenda]

They have a church in New Jersey and it'll come to me anyway. And they have their own cemetery and they've got, you know, famous Nazi Ukrainians buried there. I mean, the whole thing is like that. Right. So that's, you know, and that's. What's Profetta's background was this. I mean, that was his people there. So did you know this at the

[Podcast Host]

time or not later, Putting it together later.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay, but at the moment, okay, Ukrainian. And that he was anti communist was perfectly. He made that clear up front. He showed us film clips from when he was on television with famous folks, people and other bishops and everything else talking about communism. So all of this was known to me at the time.

[Podcast Host]

And anti communism was a thing everywhere. So it's fine.

[Peter Lavenda]

Big thing. So nothing too surprising.

[Podcast Host]

Right, Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

But then weird people start showing up at the church. So you get a guy from Italy shows up, an Italian, obviously a Catholic background, but he's going to be consecrated as a bishop. This guy never met Profetta, Profetta never met him. But the Italian consulate sends people to witness this, this thing and to send this guy back again. Part of the anti communist thing.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

And then holy prophet Iluya shows up. This is like the freakiest thing Right. My memory with him. There's this African priest whose name on his passport was HP Alluya. HP stood for Holy Prophet. That's his name. And he was. I don't know what he was, but he was coming from Nigeria to the United States to be consecrated a bishop and sent back. Why? Because he represented the anti Biafra wing of Christianity. Now, if you know about the Biafran civil war at that time, again, it gets into the weeds. I'm sorry for your listeners who may think, what the hell is this all about? But there was a civil war going on that was really very famous at the time.

[Podcast Host]

No, it's okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

The Biafran were mostly Catholics or Christians anyway, and they wanted to secede from Nigeria, which was mostly Muslim. So what the. What the Muslim majority in Nigeria needed were Christians who were supporting the regime. So we consecrated this guy, the Holy Prophet who showed up in African robes, right? Put him back on a plane with a big photograph of him smiling, getting consecrated, and a document sent him back to Nigeria.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right? I mean, this is the kind of stuff that went on. And at one point, Profeta told me, you know, we have no problem here. I have one CIA agent and one FBI agent as people who incorporated my incorporation as a church. He says, we are very protected here. And then once one day, these guys show up, wingtips, black suits, the whole thing. FBI, obviously. FBI. They walk in, close doors, have meetings with Perfetta and walk out again. He's working hand in glove with the feds.

[Podcast Host]

Now, what are you thinking when you see that? When you see the suits come in? Like, what, what is.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm a kid.

[Podcast Host]

What is going on here?

[Peter Lavenda]

The adults are doing adult things. You know what I mean?

[Podcast Host]

Fair enough.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. So the feds are there. I'm not a conspiracy theorist at this point. Right.

[Podcast Host]

They're not bothering you?

[Peter Lavenda]

So, yeah, sounds cool. Okay. We're cool, right, HP Lou?

[Podcast Host]

Yes. Hilarious.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. And I kind of know he's on the wrong side of this conflict, right? I mean, the. You know, Profeta must have his reasons. I mean, he doesn't look like a Christian with dressed to me. I mean, but who knows? It's African people, different customs, right? As they said in the man who Would Be King, different people, different customs. So I don't know what's going on. You know, I just go along, go with the flow until it does start to look too weird. Right? So it starts to get stranger and stranger. We go for a meeting. Why? I don't know. Downtown, Lower Fifth Avenue, a place called Delta Metal Industries. Delta Metal Industries had a showroom of metal furniture that they imported from Europe, Italy, I think, mostly. And it was like wrought iron furniture. And this is a big, elaborate showroom. Nice one. Whole floor of a building down there, third floor, I think, on this building. And it's owned and operated by a guy called Harry Kay. Kay was not his real last name. K was the initial. But he had made it his last name, I guess, for purposes of legal purposes or signing documents, whatever. So he's Harry Kay. And there was something very fishy about Harry Kay. So we would go for meetings there once in a while with Harry Kay. Harry Kay would be there, and there was never any customers at the showroom. Nobody ever showed up. Nothing like that. It's like another Orthodox Church deal.

[Podcast Host]

What are you discussing at your meetings?

[Peter Lavenda]

I couldn't figure it out because they're talking in code, you know, they're talking, like, in a code, like, they understand, but we're just there for, like, window dressing. Because we're dressed right, right? And one time there's a party, they're thrown. So they throw this party, and we're invited to this party. And there's, like, Hollywood. There's, like, Broadway celebrities, Hollywood celebrities. Like, they're at this thing. I kind of recognized some of them here and there. I thought. I didn't know what I was doing there, except, again, to give legitimacy. Right. So, making a long story short, I began to suspect there was something very fishy about Harry Kay and Delta Metal Industries. And then I befriended the secretary who worked there. And she's telling me, oh, yeah, this is not what it looks like. This is something else. And she would get a little drunk on rum and Cokes and start saying, oh, yeah, this is like a whole different thing that we're doing here.

[Podcast Host]

Did she tell you specifically or just. It's not what you think.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's not what you think. Okay. Plus, you know, they kind of want to get rid of you. Oh, not, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

But just get rid of me from this thing because I'm not on board with this program or I would not be expected to be.

[Podcast Host]

Of course. Get rid of you.

[Peter Lavenda]

Of course. I'm a liability, so that makes me worried. Now, at the same time, we make a friend, some other bishop shows up. I mean, we're up to our neck in bishops, right? There's no other clergy and there's no parishioners, but we got bishops like you would not believe.

[Podcast Host]

Are you clear of secret of selective service by now?

[Peter Lavenda]

I'M getting to exactly that point.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm getting right to that point. I know it takes me a long time.

[Podcast Host]

No, no, no. This. I. I could all day. This is amazing.

[Peter Lavenda]

So this guy shows up. Andre. Andre Pinocchio. Pinocchio, very Italian. And he, as he insists to us, very Sicilian. So he's Andre Pinachio and he's a priest with the liberal Catholic Church. Now, the liberal Catholic Church was kind of an offshoot of the Theosophical Society, and they had their own church that had, you know, they did Mass on Sundays.

[Podcast Host]

It's Blavatsky.

[Peter Lavenda]

Blavatsky's people. Really? Yeah, they have their own wing, sort of a church, Liberal Catholic, it's called.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they have like a Buddha statue with the cross and everything else. You know, whatever. Right. And they have Mass on Sundays. They used to. I went to one or two just to see what that was all about.

[Podcast Host]

Had swastikas too, didn't they?

[Peter Lavenda]

Not in the Mass.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Not in New York.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

So. But this was going on. So Pinocchio was a priest of that denomination, and he was kind of a chaplain at one of the prisons as well. He would go and I don't know what he would do in the prisons. And so he had that. But he was like a macher. He knew everybody who was anybody. He knew a guy called Harry Hirschfeld. Again, people wouldn't know who he is, but he was a very prominent kind of guy back in the day. Cartoonists, political cartoons and stuff. And he was connected with the unions. And he knew every. He had a statue of Nefertiti, which was an original head, you know, without the eyes. The eyes missing and stuff. He says, this is the original. They always show her with the eyes. But she didn't have any eyes when we found it. So he knew people like that. He knew Joseph Kono, who was a major union guy at the time. He knew everybody. I mean, he knew everybody. He knew comedians, he knew actors, he knew wrestlers. He just knew everybody. He was like a major Hollywood plugged in guy. Later, it turns out he got a role in the Godfather. Yeah. Now all the Godfather buffs are saying, no way.

[Podcast Host]

No way.

[Peter Lavenda]

He doesn't show up anywhere. He does. If you look at the baptismal scene, the famous baptismal scene, everyone knows that scene. That scene, right. He's the guy standing in the back with the purple and the white, saying nothing. He has no lines. But he's standing there, right? And he's standing again outside in the church when they're all leaving. He's that guy. That's Andre Pinocchio.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. He became a bishop. By the time they were making the godfather at the American Orthodox Catholic Church. They made him a bishop because he had all these connections, and he had connections enough that when it came time in October for my Selective Service situation, he brought me to the head of Selective Service in the federal building downtown. Colonel Kirschenbaum. Thank you very much, Colonel. And this guy sat in a nice desk. He looked like Allen Dulles. He had the jacket with the patches on the sleeves and the whole thing and the pipe and the glasses and the mustache.

[Podcast Host]

Forgive my language, but are you shitting bricks in your robe?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, because again, it's a colonel. Well, he's now dressed in a uniform.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, that's a little easier.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's a little easier. He's in civvies. Okay. But that's his rank. It's Colonel Kirschenbaum. And he's sitting there looking at me and looking at Pinocchio, who brought me in. And we want to make sure that he gets his ministerial deferment. And he's looking at me, and he says, well, we can do that, or, you know, you could be a chaplain in Vietnam. And he's joking, right? He's just, like, pulling my leg. I'm looking at him like. He says, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Okay? I'm kidding. But we do have one request. I'm looking at him like, what is it? My liver. What do you want? And he says, we want to know when the Russians are moving agents through 97th Street.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

And you guys are well placed.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Keep an eye. You see somebody, you know, who's not really a priest, which we saw from time to time.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

He says, just let us know. I said, okay. Stamp the papers. I'm done. I'm out. I got my deferment. No worries.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. From the head of Selective Service in New York himself.

[Podcast Host]

Unbelievable. Did you ever report a name that you saw?

[Peter Lavenda]

I am not at liberty to discuss this.

[Podcast Host]

Understood.

[Peter Lavenda]

But. But things went south after a while with Harry Kay and the Orthodox Church and my friend. So called high school friend.

[Podcast Host]

Are you a member of afio? Are you a member of afio?

[Peter Lavenda]

I am, yes.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. That's fine. That's.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's it.

[Podcast Host]

I'll just throw it out there.

[Peter Lavenda]

But that's another story. Okay. That brings in Michael Aquino. I don't think you want to know that story.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, I. Everybody does. Of course. Temple of Set.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

We'll get into that later.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

But that's why I was in afio.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Long story. So I'm here on the job site

[Podcast Host]

with Dale, who's a framing contractor.

[Peter Lavenda]

Hey. Good morning.

[Podcast Host]

Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We here where he. He needs us most.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yep, they sure are.

[Podcast Host]

We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's all right.

[Podcast Host]

We're so far up here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Look at me. Take a deep breath.

[Podcast Host]

I'm good.

[Peter Lavenda]

So good. Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail]

[Podcast Host]

and see how much you could save. It feels good. To Geico.

[Peter Lavenda]

So you're getting worried. We're. I'm getting worried. They're telling me. The secretary is telling me, you know, your goose is cooked. And that's the expression she used. I said, okay, in that case, I'm out of here. So I. I just told them, I said, I'm through with this. I'm out. I quit. I quit the whole thing. I quit the church. Within, I would say, a week, I get a notice from Selective Service. Your classification has been revoked.

[Podcast Host]

No. Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

A piece of paper, eyes all over you. Yeah. So I said, okay. I called Selective Service and I said, you guys want to do this? Then I'm going to talk about what

[Podcast Host]

I know, the balls on you.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they gave me back my 4D, my 4F or F deferment. I gave it back.

[Podcast Host]

Did you know how dangerous of a move that was?

[Peter Lavenda]

No. The more dangerous. I'd been in Vietnam.

[Podcast Host]

That fair enough.

[Peter Lavenda]

To me, that was dangerous.

[Podcast Host]

I guess that's true. It's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

One. One or the other, I'm gone either way.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

Did you call Kirschenbaum directly?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, no, no. I didn't call Kirschenbaum. I called. Who did I call, because I figured Kirschenbaum, Panacho, that's all part of the same cabal.

[Podcast Host]

True.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. So, you know, let me go and talk to, you know, go. Go directly and say, this is what I'm going to do. And I got my card back in. In the mail. I. Very mysterious.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

And then I started getting calls from the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, from all different groups were starting to call me, like they knew what had gone on. And they're trying to get me to join them. Right. Which would keep me sort of under control, under observation by all these guys. I even got. This is another story which takes too long. To explain, but I even got involved with the Syrian Orthodox Church at one point.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my. It's out of control.

[Peter Lavenda]

The Syrians were saying, I knew somebody, knew somebody. And they said, you know, you can join us. And I'm thinking the person who made that introduction was a questionable political background, let's put it that way.

[Podcast Host]

Understood.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. Middle Eastern, questionable. So I said, maybe not. So I just. I joined no one. You know, I met some of them just to visit, to see what they were talking about, what was up. You know, I met the. The. The Russian Orthodox guy who was very strange. But then, okay, so I break off my contacts with all of these people. I have my deferment. That's all I really care about. Everything is copacetic. I'm fine. I've left the church. And, you know, but before I do, before all this has happened, Panaccio has one or few tricks up his sleeve. And then before I actually leave, while we're still sort of all friendly, kind of, he says, we're going to go to another meeting. We're going to go to a meeting at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Greenwich Village. I didn't know what that was, but that was a synagogue. That was half synagogue, sort of, and half Presbyterian Church. And the guy running the Presbyterian Church side and the guy running the. The synagogue side, Bonacio knew both of them. So we're going to go to a meeting. I don't know why we're going to these meetings. I have no freaking clue. I'm just showing up because I'm supposed to show up. So Praski, my friend, is there, as usual. The robe comes back on everything. I'm there, Pinacho is there. The rabbi of the rabbi block of the Brotherhood Synagogue is there, and another guy shows up. Turns out he's a famous wrestler, Antonino Rocca.

[Podcast Host]

Antonino Rocca. Doesn't ring a bell.

[Peter Lavenda]

Famous wrestler from. Again, back in that time. Argentine, Italian. Okay, Italian ethnicity, but Argentine.

[Podcast Host]

I came into Bruno San Martino years. That's maybe a little later.

[Peter Lavenda]

A little later. So this guy is there. What the hell is he doing here? I never heard the name before either. I didn't know who he was. Huge guy, right? Hands like this. And he starts telling us stories of working for CIA in the Middle East. Right?

[Podcast Host]

The wrestler in the synagogue.

[Peter Lavenda]

Wrestler in the synagogues, Talking about CIA in the Middle East.

[Podcast Host]

Nothing makes sense.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, of course not. This is all David lynch material, you know, except minus the smoke machine. Right. You know, and the little guy dancing. But everything else is there. I mean, so he's going on about this. He says, don't worry. He's telling the. The rabbi, don't worry. We got you covered. Doesn't matter what Congress does. He says, we're. We're flying in Phantom jets. They've not been approved by Congress. They were sold to Luxembourg. He says Luxembourg ordered these jets. Luxembourg doesn't need jets. He says, we're flying them from Luxembourg to Israel. No worries. He said, in Lebanon, I had two people killed out from under me in Lebanon. No worries. We got it under control. Everything is fine. I'm listening to this thing. What the hell am I listening to?

[Podcast Host]

Is this still 68?

[Peter Lavenda]

This is 60. Early 69. Spring of 69. In March of 69, I was elevated to an abbot. So I forgot about that. Slipped my mind. That was in March. So, yeah, this month in 69. So, yeah. So I'm still in good graces there. Everybody at this point. But now Panacho is running the show. And so there's Antonina Rocco now. Okay? I filed this away. A couple of years later, he died. There was a funeral. The whole thing was there. But before he died, I tried. There was an agency you could call to get contact information. And I thought to myself, I want to talk to this guy again. I didn't imagine all this, right? So I called this agency. Oh, yeah, we have Antonio Raka's control, you know, contact information. Nope. No worries.

[Podcast Host]

What, you call his agent or something?

[Peter Lavenda]

It's not an agent. It's like an agency that specialized. This is before Internet again, right. So this agency specialized in having contacts of famous people. That was their thing. Oh, yeah, we have it. I'll call you back. I said, okay, fine. They call me back. I'm at the office, right? I'm working at, I think the Bendix Corporation at this point. And they call me back and they say, no, we got nothing on it. Hung up, Right. What the hell, right? And then I find out later that the whole CIA stuff was most likely true.

[Podcast Host]

So do you ease out of the clergy?

[Peter Lavenda]

I leave eased out of all of that until I get a call from Prasky again in 1972, I think was 72. And he says, listen, could you do me a favor? I want you to meet. I have a favor to ask of you. I don't have any heart feelings. All right? Okay. You know, I show up. He says, listen, there's these guys, these monks, They're. They're. They joined the church, you know, I'm a little nervous about them. They don't Know you. They've never seen you. They don't know you exist.

[Podcast Host]

Which church is he with now? The one in the Bronx.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Oh, oh, yeah. No, no, no. He. He's now has his own Autocephalous Slavonic Orthodox Church of North and South America, Inc. So he has this. Yeah, autocephalous. Not autocephalous as people used to make fun. Autocephalous. So it's a self governing. Right, right. Orthodox Church. So no, he has, you know, he's doing that, but he's. He's involved with the Ukrainians. This is another story. He got involved with the real Ukrainian Orthodox Church and they acknowledged him as a bishop. They consecrated him as a bishop, and then he became a genuine Ukrainian Orthodox bishop.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

And there's photographs of him at meetings at the. And he was a kid.

[Podcast Host]

Right, right.

[Peter Lavenda]

They consecrated him when he was not even 20 years old.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my goodness.

[Peter Lavenda]

I have photographs of him with the bishop. Very famous Bishop Rijkori.

[Podcast Host]

Does he have a mustache in the photo?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, he's got the beard. Now he's doing the whole thing. So, you know, so he's now heavily involved with the Ukrainians. He's learned pretty much to communicate in Ukrainian. He's actually learned to pick up some Greeks. So he's talking to the Greek Orthodox, like the breakaway Greek Orthodox groups. So he knows, like a lot of people in the church. But now, most importantly, he's really affiliated with the Ukrainians. And that eventually proved his downfall. But at that moment it was fine. But he says, you know, and he shows me this library that he's been developing, all these ancient rare books, you know, stuff hundreds and hundreds of years old. And they're all like palmistry, astrology, you know, occult oriented stuff. Because he still, he got the bug from the time. So he started collecting all these books. He became fascinated. He says, look at this, you know, and I'm looking at books. My jaw is dropping. You don't find this stuff in libraries.

[Podcast Host]

And you know, that stuff already from the magazine.

[Peter Lavenda]

I know it already more than the magazine, but yes. Okay. So I'm looking at all this and I'm thinking, wow, this is great, you know, and he says, they just bring me this stuff all the time. He says, I don't know where they're getting it. He says, can you just kind of go over there and like, spy on them?

[Podcast Host]

Go over where?

[Peter Lavenda]

To where they have their operation and just kind of spy on them? Because they have a separate little, you know, chapel, quote unquote. He says, just Tell me what they're up to, because I have a feeling these books are stolen. And if they're stolen, I got all this hot property here. He didn't have really much of a problem with that. He just didn't want to get busted for it, and that would be the end of everything. So he's letting me know I need to know if this stuff is hot or not. So I said, yeah, all right. Okay. Sounds like fun. I'll do it. Where are they? They're in Queens.

[Podcast Host]

So you suit up.

[Peter Lavenda]

I suit up.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I suit up. I got all the stuff. I got the collar and everything. So I go to their chapel. I have the address. And I'm looking at the address and I'm saying, this can't be right. It's a strip joint on the first floor, and they're on the second floor, right?

[Podcast Host]

What part of town?

[Peter Lavenda]

Jamaica.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. Down in Queens.

[Peter Lavenda]

Jamaica, Queens. So I go upstairs. Creaking upstairs. And I knock on the door timidly because I don't know what's going on the other side of those doors. And it turns out they have this little chapel set up in the front facing the window that faces outside. But in the second half of this apartment, I guess there's this elaborate operation for steaming seals out of paper and for eradicating ink, right? But it's back there. Like, they're not talking about it up front. So I walk in there, you know, I was here. I did this. I was this background. That background. And they. And Trotsky had told me, these guys, you know, they seem to be really into books and book binding. They claim to be book binders, read up on bookbinding. So you sound knowledgeable on book binding. Can you imagine? The intelligence operations were running in our teens and early twenties, right? So anyway. So, yeah, okay, so I do that. So I'm. At least I know the language and the lingo. So I. What's versa. What's rectangle? You know? So I go in there and I'm talking to them. They look at me like, oh, this guy could be useful. He knows this kind of stuff, right? I go back two, three times by only I think the third time they're inviting me into the back to show me their operation.

[Podcast Host]

What did you tell them the reason for your visit was?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, because I was. I found your church and I wanted, you know, just okay, you know. And of course, they were vain enough to believe that must be true.

[Podcast Host]

And the strip joints downstairs.

[Peter Lavenda]

And the strip joints downstairs. That's convenient. So, yeah. And you have to convert all these people. So they say, okay. And they kind of introduced me. Well, we use this machine for steaming out the seals. And they're showing me, you know, we get this book, it's got this seal. And they didn't say they stole it, but they have a book. And they got to remove this seal, or there's an ink stamp. We got to get rid of the ink. So they do all this. We sell them to collectors, you know, okay, fine. And then the thing that tore me, they had maps, old, old maps that they had taken out of the books. They were in to sell them separately because they make more money that way.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, where are the books coming from at this point?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, they're not saying. Right. Okay. I'm looking at them, and I'm sort of smiling and going around with it, but my soul just died. Yeah, they're tearing maps out of book. Are you kidding me? So I put all this together, and I go back and I tell Paradsky, I say, you know, this is what's happening. And he says, you know, I was afraid of that. And within a couple of weeks, they were busted by the Feds.

[Podcast Host]

By the Feds.

[Peter Lavenda]

And what happened was they had another clergyman, this clergyman up to here on all of this, Father Fox. And if you're listening, Father Fox, give us a call. Father Fox was remarkable character that everybody seemed to know, but nobody knew. Father Fox had been with the Russian Orthodox Church. He had been with the Syrian Orthodox Church. And at one point, I had access. I had to hold him in my house, a lot of his personal papers. And in those personal papers were all of these air tickets, these stubs from flights to Vietnam in the 60s.

[Podcast Host]

Why are you rifling through Father Fox's papers?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, somebody had Father Fox's papers. They wanted me to hold on. I think it was Prosky. He wanted me to hold onto this stuff because he didn't want it in his place in case they got busted for the books. So I'm looking at this stuff, and there's, like, letters, there's stuff. This guy was in constant contact with the Vietnamese, with our army in the Vietnam. Like, what the hell is he doing flying? Who flies to Vietnam for vacation? You know what I mean? This doesn't look right. And then I start, I find more documentation that shows he's married and has a wife and child in the Bronx. Right? Which is unusual to say the least, because he was not. He was supposed to be a monastic. Russian Orthodox priests. Orthodox priests in general can be married. That's not the problem. But his reputation was quite different. So I'm thinking, wow, this is weird. What is all this about? Then these guys get busted. The two monks who are stealing books, they get busted by the feds. The guy who turned them in was Father Fox. Oh, why did Father Fox got the call? Probably from Prosky.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Fox calls the feds, has them turned in. Why was he so eager to turn them in? Because he and one of the other monks had fought over a woman.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, you're kidding.

[Peter Lavenda]

So you know, this is as pathetic as this whole situation.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

Then you're in the middle of a soap opera with priests and guns in Vietnam and spies and communists. I mean, and it turns into a soap opera overnight, you know, because of the profeta church experience, because of all of that, the anti communism Vietnam, everything else that was going on and the fact that I had been brought up, as I said, on Casablanca and Passage to Marseilles and you know, all the Claude Raines and Humphrey Bogart and all of that. I was fascinated by the Nazi phenomenon, let's call it that, because I. There was something about it that was to me indigestible. I couldn't quite get past what it meant. And talking to people who were viciously anti communist to the point that they were pro Nazi, like the Russian church on Park Avenue, which was kind of pro Nazi, they, they wanted the Nazis to win and to defeat the Soviet Union. Not because they were necessarily, you know, in tune with the Nazi ideals, but they, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, that kind of thing.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

The same thing with the Ukrainians there. Were you anti semitic Ukrainians? Don't get me wrong, there were some who embraced the idea, but there are a lot of Ukrainians who simply wanted Russia gone, the Soviet Union out of their lives. So I'm kind of sensitive to the fact that there's nuance in the world, but when it came to the Nazis, I wonder how much nuance can there be really? How can I understand it a little bit better? And the best way to do that would be to confront them face to face just to see what these people believed. Neo Nazis. Okay, I can start there, but that's not the real thing. Neo Nazis are like fan bros of Nazis.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

I wanted to know what the real Nazi was. And that basically was what led me to South America. I wanted to just to see it with my own eyes. I wanted to talk to them and see in their eyes what they really, how they act. I wanted to get a vibe, I wanted to Get a feeling from them. You know, I wanted to say, okay, this is what we're dealing with here.

[Podcast Host]

Were you writing a book?

[Peter Lavenda]

I was writing Sinister Forces.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so this was research. This wasn't just.

[Peter Lavenda]

This is research. Okay, But Sinister Forces, the. The original idea was the relationship between religion and politics. That was like the original feel because I was. I was in that world, right, with the Orthodox churches. I was in religion and politics. I was awash in it. I wanted to understand it better. How do these things interact? How do they influence? They should not be on the same page. Right, but they obviously are. They're all over the place.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I wanted to know more about that. So I started researching that and I started going to. I started reading these weird things about Nazi occultism and, you know, Morning of the Magicians. Everybody was brought up on that in my time. So I said, half of this book has got to be fake. You know, there's no documentation, there's no sources. I said, it's cool, but, you know, I need to know more. And then more books came out, and they were also really badly researched. And I said, I. This is not good enough, you know, so I'm going to the National Archives and I find out that they have a, you know, a captured German documents section. And again, boys and girls before Internet. And so I'm going to this thing and I say, I want to research the Ahnenerbe. I heard that there was an organization called the SS Anenerva, the ancestral heritage research division of the ss. And the very kindly guy, I think his name was Wolf, the archivist there, very famous guy. Everybody knew him at the time. And he says, oh, you want these documents on the SS documents on the. On it. And everybody. Yes, you come with me. And he had all this microfilm, Right. In those days, microfiche, these cards.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

And he said, all of these. These trays here, that's what you're looking for. Have a nice day. Right. So I'm there at the microfish reader. My eyes are, like falling out of my head, and I'm looking at the SS expedition to Tibet, where I'm looking at ss.

[Podcast Host]

Well, hold on. Like the Shambhala, that document.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's there. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know that. I didn't.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I cover these stories and it's half of them. It's like, this is all nonsense.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, it's what's there.

[Podcast Host]

So Tibet. I didn't mean to interrupt. I just blew my mind.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, in detail. Not just the Nazi documents themselves. Not just the Authorization form signed by Heinrich Himmler with Heil Hitler on them and his signature in the swastika, allowing these guys to go to Tibet and do this.

[Podcast Host]

Tibet, Antarctica. Search for the Spear of Destiny.

[Peter Lavenda]

No spear. I didn't come like I came across the spear from a different angle. But this stuff was Antarctica for sure. Tibet for sure. It was research on runes and can we have a yoga that's based on runic symbols instead of the other stuff the Indians do, which is like maybe untermenched, we don't know. So all this kind of stuff is going on, right? I'm looking at this thing, I'm thinking, holy shit, how come nobody's gone here and done this, right? Why are they writing all these books when the motherlode is sitting right here? Well, it's all in German, okay? But there's pictures. So I'm there, you know, spending a fortune copying page after page after page. It was very expensive. It was like 25 cents a page or some damn thing at that time. So I'm copying page after page of this thing. I'm coming back home with the stacks of this. I'm thinking, oh my God, nobody's going to believe this. You know the Daresten Schweizzen? No, the first, I think they said the first white people in Tibet, not the first German. The newspaper articles about the Tibet expedition, right? And there's photographs of, you know, of these so called archaeologists and anthropologists with their Tibetan contacts and with swastika flags behind them and everything in Tibet in the 30s, you know. And so I'm freaking out. I look at all of this and then I discovered there's a place called Tibet House in New York that was. I don't know if it's still funded by Richard Gere, but it was like a major thing. And they had all this film footage, film footage, film footage of the Tibet expedition and film footage of when OSS sent their people to Tibet to see what the hell was going on, right? So I'm thinking, oh my God, are you kidding me? And I'm looking at all this and I'm just like, I'm going crazy. This is now in the 80s now I'm doing this, right? By this time, all kinds of other things have gone on in my life. I've been to China, right? And I've come back with, with photographs of Chinese, you know, Tibetan rituals in China, you know, the Tibetan Buddhist rituals in China. And I'm showing them to the people in Tibet House and they're telling me, oh, you Know, Richard would be love to see these. Richard Gere. So I'm researching the Tibetan stuff in the 70s, but I'm amassing this information. I got nothing to do with it. I mean, I don't know what to where to put it. Right. So again, no Internet, nothing like that. So you're very painstakingly trying to create drafts of books and manuscripts and proposals and going publisher to publisher. It's taking forever. Right. So in the meantime, I'm still doing the research, so I'm still collecting it, but I'm telling anybody who will listen, listen, there's this weird chicken. So then I find out there's this place down in Chile and what's his name writes about it. Ladis Las Farago. He writes about it in a book called Aftermath and it's about the post war Nazi underground. Well, he is roundly attacked by people who claim that he's making stuff up, and he obviously was not. Did he make mistakes here and there? Possibly, sure, everybody does. But did the basic story come through to me? As far as I was concerned? Yeah, he was looking for Martin Borman. He thought Borman had escaped to South America.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So he was on the trail of Bormann. Now the standard ritual that we have to say is Martin Borman died in Berlin in 1945. There's no mystery there, blah, blah, blah. We have his grave, we have his body. Yeah, I don't think so.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think so.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't think so.

[Podcast Host]

In my research. I don't think so.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't think so. I agree. I think he did get out, but that's another story. So I'm researching this, I'm reading Farago and he says, you know, there's this place in Chile, it's called Colonia Dignidad and it's run by ex Nazis and they have a weird cult that they operate out of there. They're doing weird cult things and they're Nazis and it's weird. And I thought to myself, book me a ticket, I'm there. I'm 28 years old, I'm invulnerable. I'm going to go down to Chile in the middle of martial law and the Pinochet regime to go and take a look at a Nazi estate. What could possibly go wrong?

[Podcast Host]

Oh my goodness. Is it common knowledge at this point that Nazis were fleeing to South America? It must have been.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh yeah, of course. Oh yeah, sure. But Argentina was everybody. Yes, Argentina, because Eichmann had been picked up in Argentina. So they're Thinking Argentina. And that's it. They cross, they cut it off there. Brazil then came into play because of Mengele, Dr. Mengele, he was, you know, dead in. In Brazil. So. So it's Brazil, it's Argentina, but Chile, nobody knew who knew from Chile, except I had Farago to lead me, to guide me there. So I said, I'm going to go and figure this out, see if this real place really exists.

[Podcast Host]

Martial law.

[Peter Lavenda]

This is 1979.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's in June of 79. So they had taken over. Pinochet's people had taken over in 73. On September 11, 1973, they had deposed Salvador Allende. Salvador Allende. Allende, who historically was notoriously anti Nazi. Right. He was like, he was a political leader at the time, during the war, and he was very much anti Nazi in a country that was kind of pro Nazi the whole time.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I'm down there and, you know, I'm going to go to Colonia Dignita in this town called Parral. And so I'm just waiting for a couple of days. I'm getting the lay of the land. I'm looking around and it was the weirdest vibe ever, right? I'm downtown Santiago, the capital, and it's quiet. If you can imagine a downtown municipal, municipality of any kind, imagine downtown New York. People are on the streets. There's cars, there's people, but nobody's talking. There's no noise.

[Podcast Host]

You know, it's like a Twilight Zone episode.

[Peter Lavenda]

You go into a restaurant, it's deadly quiet. People are there, they're eating. They're deadly quiet.

[Podcast Host]

Why?

[Peter Lavenda]

Because they don't know who's listening.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, right.

[Peter Lavenda]

They don't know what to say. They're afraid, right. So then I go, there's a. There's a military school, right? And there's Bavarian style architecture. Okay. So you know what's going on here?

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

And then there's this young guy, he couldn't have been like 18, 19 years old in the guard house in front. And I wanted to take a picture of the school. And I raised my camera. No phones in those days, boys and girls. It was an actual camera. I'm raising my camera to take a picture. And this guy goes like that. And he sees this terrified look in his face like, don't make me shoot you. You know, But I will if I have to. And I dropped the cameras on around my neck. I dropped my back door. I said, okay, no problemo. So it was that, that was the atmosphere. So in that atmosphere, I decided, let Me go to Colonia Dignidon. Anyway, just to take a look. It's in a small town in the middle of nowhere in the Andes mountains. What could go wrong, right?

[Podcast Host]

It'll be fine.

[Peter Lavenda]

It'll be fine. So I go and I buy a bus ticket. Now, I'm a New Yorker. I never learned to drive at this point. Okay, I take a bus wherever, public transportation. I'm not going to rent a car.

[Podcast Host]

Look, we didn't know what gas cost.

[Peter Lavenda]

Exactly. No clue. So I go and I get a bus to Parral, the town where this place is located. And I get there and I get off the bus. It's the middle of the night. It's like 4 o' clock in the morning, freezing cold. It's June, but, you know, the seasons are reversed. And I'm wearing, you know, a trench coat. Why? Because I want to be really visible, right? So I'm wearing this really visible, obviously foreigner trench coat with the thing around, belt, the whole nine yards. And I'm just there and it's quiet, it's deadly quiet. And then out of nowhere comes this guy on a bicycle and a dog. And the dog is attached with a rope to his bicycle. And he bicycles over to me from like a street, from a corner. And I mean, it's so quiet, there's no lights and everything. It's like a ghost town. And this guy comes out, he's wearing a beret. It's like something out of a Fellini movie.

[Podcast Host]

What the hell is this, you're thinking?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. He doesn't look dangerous, but that dog, I don't know. So he writes up to me and he asks me who I am, what am I doing. Like, he didn't say, what the are you doing? But he said. I said, well, the train station was right there. He said, I'm waiting for that train. And he starts laughing. He says, there hasn't been a train here in years.

[Podcast Host]

Right, Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Are you kidding me? So plan B, Plan B, Tell the truth.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm here to see Colonia Dignidad. And he says, are you out of your mind?

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Peter Lavenda]

You better just wait for the train. You'd have more luck there. You're not going to. No, you don't want to do that.

[Podcast Host]

Did you tell me I'm a writer? I'm looking into this.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. I didn't go into all the explanation because my Spanish at that time was pretty rusty.

[Podcast Host]

But he's saying, poor K. Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I'm saying, you Know. Yeah, I'm doing research, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

So, okay. He says, come with me. And I'm thinking, where? So he goes to his house and his. His. This stunning wife sleeping and his kids. This is an old grizzly guy on a bicycle. And he says, this is my wife. He's. They're sleeping in bed, right? They kind of wake up and look at me. This is my. These are my kids. Oh. Oh, buenos no placer. What can I say? So then he leads me out of there and he says, come with me. I said, now, where are we going? Right? And two guys walk up to us. They're obviously carabineros, they're police, army, combination. They walk up to us and then he introduces and he makes the introductions and he says he wants to go to Colonia Dignita. Predictably, they laugh. So they said, come on, come with us. We go to this hut, you know, and we walk into this hut and we're sitting there and they bring out the aguardiente. Now, aguardiente is rot gut. Basically, it's homemade. It's like moonshine, right. And there's like grapes in it and everything else at the bottom, and it's really strong stuff. And we're going to sit there and drink until the sun comes up.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, you are. You have to.

[Peter Lavenda]

What are you going to do? And then they start opening up. You don't want to go up there. It's like they have their own embassy up there. These are not people from Chile. They don't obey our laws. They're dangerous. Okay. And they said, besides, they're heavily funded. Every week a car comes down from Chile, a Mercedes. They were very pointing that out.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they go to the bank to go to the post office. First they get a bunch of envelopes and then they go to the bank and they take money out of the envelopes or checks or whatever, and they deposit it into the account for the colonia. They said they're getting money from overseas, from every country. He says, from Europe, from the United States, every place. Sure. He says, they've got this funding. They're very dangerous. But they have a clinic, and that little clinic is open to people from Chile for free.

[Podcast Host]

Really?

[Peter Lavenda]

He says, but we don't want to go there unless we really have to, because sometimes we don't come back.

[Podcast Host]

They said that.

[Peter Lavenda]

They said that. They said we've lost children mostly up there. They said, so you really should not go. It's not safe for anybody. It's not safe for us.

[Podcast Host]

Why do they lose Children. I mean, is it that dark?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, yeah, as it turns out.

[Podcast Host]

Trafficking.

[Peter Lavenda]

Trafficking, yeah. And the leader, whose name was Paul Schaefer, oddly enough, which confuses with the bandleader at Letterman show. But anyway, he was evidently a pedophile. That's what really came out about that later.

[Podcast Host]

And U.S. embassy is aware of all of this?

[Peter Lavenda]

All of this, you can say. So, yes, as we found out more. As more time went on. But at that time, what do I know, right? So I'm thinking, okay, I came this far, I'm going to go. I don't give a shit, right? So I find a driver. It's Sunday morning. The church is going to open. Dawn is breaking, you know, the birds are singing. There's this.

[Podcast Host]

The hangover is pounding.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And there's this, the driver, you know, there's for hire a car. It's an old, old Chevy, you know. And I say, look, I'm looking for someone to take me to Colonia Dignidad. And he looks at me. Colonial dignity. He says, yeah. He says, bueno, bamos. You know, you didn't care. Come on in. So I set up in front with him, you know, and we drive up to the colony and he's telling me his stories about the colony.

[Podcast Host]

What does he hear? Because it's. It's local legend.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, local legend says Nazis, you know, it's Nazis.

[Podcast Host]

He flat out said it.

[Peter Lavenda]

He just came out and said it's Nazis.

[Podcast Host]

Was he the first one to say that word?

[Peter Lavenda]

I think he's the first one to say Nazis.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

The others were saying Germans. They were saying evil. They were saying this, they were saying that. They were saying they don't use the same religion we have. They're not Catholic, Right? That was a big deal. They were not Catholic, right?

[Podcast Host]

They talk around it, they talk around

[Peter Lavenda]

it, but they don't really get there, right? So this guy is, you know, he's having a great time. Sunday morning. He's making money, more than he probably ever made in a week because I agreed to whatever he wanted, you know. So we're driving up and we pass, you know, basically gauchos, guys on the horseback with the hats and everything as they're coming down the mountain and it's a dirt road going up. And I realized we're getting really, really remote. Then we pass by a place called Colonia Italiana, which is like the first place you get to before you get to Colonia Dignidad. And I said, colonia Italiana? He says, yes, you know, Italian. And it was kind of poor and run down. And I said, okay, an Italian colony. Now the German colony.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. All right. So we get to the German colony and it's quiet. There's a gate and it's open.

[Podcast Host]

What does it look like? Does it look like German architecture?

[Peter Lavenda]

Not yet. Okay. We cross over a little bridge, a little tiny, like, pointless kind of looking bridge. There's a gate that's wide open. We drive to this gravel parking lot, but there's nothing in. There's no cars parked there. We're the only ones. And there's a building there that seems to be like maybe a guard house maybe or something like that. It's a large enough building. It could be for meetings or something or maybe for dealing with the press. I mean, I don't know. It's just a building. No sign on it that I could see. I walk up to the building and I hear voices on the other side of the building. And it seems like they're talking on a radio.

[Podcast Host]

Can you. Do you hear the language?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, it's German.

[Podcast Host]

It's German for sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I said, okay. I took a bunch of pictures. I got into the car and I said, okay, let's go. I just want to take pictures. I said, let's. Let's get out of here.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

He says, okay with me. Yep. And as we're pulling out, that's when the Mercedes, the mysterious Mercedes pulls out. The gates close. Mercedes blocks our way of getting out. And two really big guys get out of the Mercedes and they stand on either side of the car just looking, not say, not speaking.

[Podcast Host]

Big blonde guys?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, big, Big heavy set wrestler types?

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

On either side of the car. And I'm looking at each and my driver, all he can say is, uh, oh, uh, oh, oh. Over and over again. I wanted him to stop saying it,

[Podcast Host]

please stop saying it.

[Peter Lavenda]

But he was. He was pretty frightened at what was happening. This isn't good, right?

[Podcast Host]

Were you?

[Peter Lavenda]

The funny thing is, a kind of switch went off in my head that said, keep your cool. We got to get out of this.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Do not freak out.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

It was a kind of something took over that said, just brass it out,

[Podcast Host]

right, man, you're no armchair researcher, man. This is balls of steel. This is real, real stuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

Stupidity of steel.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

And as I'm sitting there, I hear someone's running at the car. And I'm thinking, and as somebody's out of breath and he's wearing a lab coat. What? Yeah, a lab coat. That's all I needed to see, you know? So is it safe So I don't, you know, I'm flashing on movies.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

Marathon Man.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

So here's a guy in a lab coat, and he knocks on the window, tells me to roll down the window, which I had rolled up. I rolled out the window. Yes. And he looks at me and he says the classic line that I've waited my entire life to hear since Casablanca. Your papers, please. No, exactly those words in that tone. Your papers, please. How wonderful was that moment, you know,

[Podcast Host]

fear and joy fighting.

[Peter Lavenda]

Fighting. So he's looking like, you better hand me your passport or we're going to get it. So I took out my passport and I handed it to him, and he walked away with it. Right. Which is a sinking feeling for any. Sure. Like what, what, what, what? That's happened to me a number of times since. But not as bad as this. So this was, you know, when am I getting it back? No one's talking. And then who shows up but Paul Schaefer himself. The leader. The leader stands behind the car like he doesn't want to be seen, but he's wearing a Sam Brown belt. He has the military jacket on, the whole uniform. And he's got, like, a fatigue campaign cap on his head. And he's, you know, hands on the hips like this, you know, and he's barking questions in German to this person who's then translating it into English because I refuse to speak Spanish under these circumstances, my Spanish being not good enough to negotiate for my life.

[Podcast Host]

Fair enough.

[Peter Lavenda]

I make a grammatical error, I could be doomed. Right. So.

[Podcast Host]

But at that point, you could probably hear a little pick up a little German for yourself. So you're catching words.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, of course. Right. But not enough that I could speak. So I'm listening to that. Go on. And so they're translating for me. Why are you here? Right. I'm here researching German immigration to South America. That got a huge laugh out of Schaeffer. Right? Yeah. Bullshit. Basically, he's saying, of course. Yep. Yeah. Okay. That's not it. Okay, next question. When did you arrive here? Right. Kind of give them. Basically, when I got here at the same time, they're talking to me. They're talking to the driver, but they're asking him more pointed questions. How many of them are there? When did they arrive? Where are they living?

[Podcast Host]

Did they pull you out of the car? Separate.

[Peter Lavenda]

We're still in the car. Okay. I still feel safe. I'm still in the car. I don't have a passport.

[Podcast Host]

Nope.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I can't get out. But I'm still Safer. So they're asking him these very pointed questions. And finally, in Spanish. And I can understand perfectly what they're asking him. And then they ask him, they say this one thing. We have to be careful of the Jews. There's a lot of Jews these days. They're around, and we have to be very careful.

[Podcast Host]

What an odd thing to say.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, it was odd until just a couple of years ago, I found out what that meant. I only found out recently what that really meant. But at the time, I thought, they must think I'm some kind of an Israeli commando.

[Podcast Host]

Do you want to tell us what?

[Peter Lavenda]

That this was an Israeli commando.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

If you can see me. No, this is not what an Israeli commando looks like. And I was in my 20s at the time. You can imagine, 120 pounds. No, not a commando.

[Podcast Host]

But are they also worried about Mossad? Nazi hunters. All of that.

[Peter Lavenda]

All of that.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Of course, yeah. Nazi hunters, for sure. As I found out later. But again later, at this time, I'm going on Ladis Las Farago's book. That's all I got.

[Podcast Host]

That's all you got, Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So the rest of it, I don't know. So I'm there, and they're talking back and forth to me, back and forth. They come back and they hand me the passport. Thank God. But they tell me a very strange thing. They say to me, you're no longer welcome in this country. You must leave immediately. Go back to the United States and do not come back again. People who are Germans in Chile telling me I'm not welcome in Chile, not welcome here at Colonia Dignidad, no problem. I won't be back. But telling me, no, we don't want you in Chile.

[Podcast Host]

But you don't say, you don't have jurisdiction.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, sure, I'm going to say that you have my jurisdiction.

[Podcast Host]

You say, okay, okay, no worries.

[Peter Lavenda]

Remember, I had the driver as well. They pull me out and kill me. He's a deader for sure. He's the witness for sure. That's not gonna happen. Right? We cannot fight with these guys. So, all right. The car pulls away, the gate opens, we hit the road. My driver starts laughing uncontrollably. He says, oh, my God, you don't know what danger we were in. We got out of there. You are so lucky. He says, this is. This could have turned out so. He's just, like, laughing the whole way down. He can't believe the relief, of course. Incredible. Incredible. He gets back into Paral, into the town. He wants to tell everybody what Happened, of course. And I pay him. Like, I forget how much money he must have made. Hundred dollars that day. And then.

[Podcast Host]

Are you relieved as well? You just wanted your passport back?

[Peter Lavenda]

I wanted my passport back. I'm okay, right? I don't know if I'm getting out of the country, quite frankly.

[Podcast Host]

Still.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, I don't know what's going on here with these guys. How can they tell me I'm not welcome? What influence do they have over the Border Patrol?

[Podcast Host]

But you felt they had it.

[Peter Lavenda]

I felt they had it. Because what happens next? Two more carabineri walk up to me, two more cops, and they say, are you the guy that. And I said, yeah. Is your name Peter Lavenda? Oh, shit. How do you have my name?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Can we see your passport? I show them the passport. They look at each other. Okay, are you going back now to Santiago? You bet. You're a sweet ass. I am. So, okay, I waited for the bus as usual, because I'm a New Yorker. I take the bus. I got on the bus and I'm going back to Santiago. And halfway up, like, not halfway, twice on the way up. So I guess every third of the way up, the buses stopped. That didn't happen on the way down. And troops come onto the bus asking for me by name.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, no.

[Peter Lavenda]

To make sure I'm on the bus. That freaked me out.

[Podcast Host]

That did, yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

That means yes. They have that clout. They could tell. Chilean military and the Chilean army. Right. Look out for this guy, make sure he leaves the country.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I get back to Santiago. I get back to my room in the hotel there. I open the door and there's a note. Your reservation is confirmed.

[Podcast Host]

You're going.

[Peter Lavenda]

So they got me. They got Lon Chile to make sure they controlled that as well.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. So I was on. I was on the flight. So I get on the plane and I'm still. I'm cool as a cucumber. I'm sitting next to two people, a married couple who actually worked for Flying Tigers in Asia. You believe it. There was a shipping company, but it started as, you know, this ad hoc sort of civilian military air force that was bombing the Japanese back in the day during World War II. And they became then part of the regular Air force, kind of. And then they became, you know, a shipping company, basically. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That was like a Shanghai check thing, wasn't it?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're sitting next to me in the plane. That's weird. And as I'm sitting there, suddenly I start to feel ill. I get up and I go into the. To the restroom in the back of the plane. And I am sick as a dog for almost the entire flight back. The tension finally hit. Finally, the adrenaline hit on the plane, out of the country. It. It kept me sane and sober and perfectly measured until I got on the plane. And then I was freaking out.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I finally got myself together just before landing. That's a long flight from Santiago. And actually, it was only to Santiago to Miami. I wasn't supposed to go to Miami. I was supposed to go to New York. But it was the first plane they had that could get me on and get out of the country. So I get off the plane in Miami, and I'm sick as a dog. I'm walking through immigration, and then it starts again. Then two guys meet me at the airport, at immigration. Two of our people, they flash some badges too fast for me to see what it is, and they say, are you Peter Lavenda? Can we see your passport? And I showed it to them. They looked at each other, they nodded like the Chileans did, and they walked away. No explanation. My people, right? People were supposed to protect me, were making sure I was getting off the plane. They didn't get off somehow, somewhere else,

[Podcast Host]

all being controlled by some remote German village.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Imagine that. Having our people ask me. And they did ask me in the Patreon. They asked me, you know, what do you think? Does this still go on?

[Podcast Host]

Are you kidding?

[Peter Lavenda]

So then, okay, now I'm still shaking, right? I get past immigration, I get a booking to go to New York. And there's the Miami Herald. And I open it up, and there's the headlines. West German parliament votes to continue statute of limitations on Nazi war crimes. In other words, they were voting in the German parliament that week. Oh, no. Whether or not they would continue to hunt Nazis.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, no.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they voted to continue to hunt Nazis. And they thought at Colonia Dignidad I was there as a Asian provocateur or something, to try to make them do something stupid, of course, to switch the vote, to make sure I influenced the vote. That's their thinking, their rationale. So I said, oh, my God, this is what happened.

[Podcast Host]

This was a terrible idea.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. And then I get back to New York, right? I'm fine. I get back to Bendix, right? Oh, where did you go? Chile. For what? Not to hang out. I didn't tell them what I was doing, so that's fine. And then what happens? Jack Anderson. If anybody remembers Jack Anderson, he was a famous journalist at the Time. An investigative journalist. He was in all the newspapers and stuff. He had columns everywhere. Very famous guy in the 70s and 80s. He had stories on Colonia Dignidad. He was running stories on it. After I got back, I said, thanks a lot, Jack.

[Podcast Host]

After you got back?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, not about me at all. Just about that colonial dignity was being investigated. The CIA knew about it. Were there Nazi war criminals there?

[Podcast Host]

And that was all happening while you were there? Yeah, just. Yeah, just wandering.

[Peter Lavenda]

So of course, of course there's synchronicity, right? Yes, of course. These things happen, right? So I'm thinking, okay, my goose is cooked now. They think I was responsible back at the Colony. My friends down at the Colony, back at the ranch, they think I did something here. So now I'm freaking out, right? And I did have problems. So now I'm on the street, I'm in Queens. I'm going to Astoria. I'm going to eat Greek food in Astoria. That's what you do in Astoria?

[Podcast Host]

It is.

[Peter Lavenda]

I went to Astoria to have some Greek food. And I'm walking down the street and this guy walks up to me. He's wearing a white suit and he has a red carnation in his lapel. And he walks up to me and he says, don't worry, you're among friends. Oh, and then he walked off.

[Podcast Host]

I don't want any part of whatever that is. What are you talking about, right? What are you talking about now?

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm going to Brooklyn. I'm going to Brooklyn. Just because I used to live in Brooklyn Heights, I'm going down to Brooklyn. And a taxi with four big guys in it starts following me down the street, calling me Yuden, right? They're talking to me in German, calling your blah blah blah, so and so Jew, on and on and on going on about this, right? And they're following me and I have to. I don't know what to do. They're getting ready to get out of the car and beat the shit out of me. So I have to get. I have to find, go down a one way street that they can't drive down and try to try to lose them, you know. So all of this is taking place, this is all in 1979. This is all so weird. This is all like, you know, part of the same problem that's going on. So that went on for a while and then that same, I think just a month or so after I got back from Chile, Bendix no longer needed my services.

[Podcast Host]

Of course not. That's that.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's that. So all of this was, you know, all tied in, all connected together, I imagine. But that was what was going on. So that was my. My adventure down there in Colonia Dignidad in South America. But that led me to really energize me on the research. This was too much. I couldn't walk away from, and I couldn't say, well, that's it. This is too dangerous. I'm not going to do this. This was like, if you're an investigator, if you investigate, you're a journalist of any kind, you need this. Right?

[Podcast Host]

You do.

[Peter Lavenda]

You have to.

[Podcast Host]

You needed that experience.

[Peter Lavenda]

You need the experience and you need to keep going.

[Podcast Host]

I'm the armchair researcher, though. I don't have the balls to go down there these days.

[Peter Lavenda]

Armchair can be just as dangerous.

[Podcast Host]

Well, this is a great time to take a quick break, because we come back, and then now it gets thick. Now it gets thick.

[Peter Lavenda]

Now it gets thick.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, back in a minute. I didn't realize how amazing that story is.

[Peter Lavenda]

The problem is, when you start with one, there's so many tentacles that reach into other aspects of everything that, you know, that's the problem. You just can't tell the straight story. I have a problem doing that, and I know that I can go on. So I've tried to, like, narrow down to the essentials, but sometimes there's an aspect that connects to something that we've talked about already that's, you know, pertinent and is relevant. And, you know, what can I do that's, you know, I tell people I use this expression all the time. I say, a forest gumped my way into this. Right. I wasn't intending to. To join a church that, you know, a front for an intelligence operation. I mean, to begin with. Right. I just wanted to get out of going to Vietnam. Right, Right. Had this been 1942, I would have enlisted. You know, it's just. It's. It's a. It's what happened. Right. So there was no intention to. To wind up where I. Where I wound up. I look back now and I took. There was a fork in the road at that point.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

You know, and that's what happened. And then people think, well, you must have this. You must have these connections or those connections. Now you just pay attention. You just show up. You know, 90% of success, right. Is just showing up.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So what you have to do is show up. A New Yorker said that. So what you have to do is just be there. Be there, be aware, keep your eyes open. And when you see opportunities you take them if you can. If you can't, you file it away for next time and you'll be more aware. But I think that a lot of people essentially go through life either afraid to take those chances or smarter than I am and don't take the chances or whatever, but.

[Podcast Host]

Or don't recognize the.

[Peter Lavenda]

Don't recognize. Don't recognize the opportunity. Right. And they don't have this question of imagination. And I was. That was my. My thing as a kid. I was really, you know, an imaginative kid. So I lived in my head a lot. I read a lot of books. I imitated the writing of people that I liked and that kind of thing. So I was like, in that mindset all the time. So it made me sensitive to certain things maybe other people weren't. Were insensitive to.

[Podcast Host]

Well, this is a storytelling show, so whatever detail, color you want to add, that's fine. So is the Chile experience what led to Unholy Alliance?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. See, basically, the Chile thing was supposed to be a chapter of Sinister Forces. I was just going to do one chapter on the Nazis. That was my idea initially. But I came across all that data at the Archives, the National Archives, the stacks of paper on the. On the Tibet expedition and all this other weird stuff the Nazis were doing. And then, you know, Colonia Dignidad, all of this said it became a book, basically. I didn't know what else to do with that information. I was gathering it together and run around about 19. In the 1990s was when the Holy alliance finally became a book. That was my first book. It took that long. When I made the trip in 1979, it took that long to find somebody who was interested in that story.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I said, it's Nazi occultism, you know, but it has ramifications beyond that. Right. It has political ramifications. People tend to think Nazi occultism is this kooky, you know, side alley of history, and most historians think of it that way, too. A lot of the feedback I still get from academia where this is concerned is, yeah, it's not that important. It's not really, you know, essential to understanding it. You're overblowing it. It's not. I said, I'm just quoting what I saw.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. I disagree. I think it's very important.

[Peter Lavenda]

I kind of think so. Because it speaks to something darker.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, it does. Something that's still here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. It's not only a story about battles won and lost. Right. Why did they go to war in the first place? Why did the Holocaust happen? Why did they invade Russia? That didn't make any sense. Right, right. Why did they do half the things they did? Why did they send SS officers all around the world looking to see if there were swastikas painted in old pots, you know, in the jungles of South America or the jungles of Asia or someplace? Why were they doing this? What was the end game here? What was really what they were trying to establish? They were trying to establish a complete ecosystem for Nazism. Right. To rewrite history completely from a Nazi racist, eugenicist point of view. That's what they were trying to do. And if we look at it only in terms of the battles that they fought, we won't understand them.

[Podcast Host]

No, the Reich meant the whole thing.

[Peter Lavenda]

The whole thing?

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

And that's why I always tell people the Nazi Party was not a political party the way you think of it. It was a cult. It was a complete cult. If you study Nazism, you are studying a cult. That's. That's it. So Nazi occultism is almost, you know, a tautology. And we are talking about Nazism and occultism. But it was kind of the same thing for a while under Himmler. Of course it was. But Hitler as well, he didn't. I always fight with people who claim that Hitler performed magical rites or something. No, I don't think that at all. But he was very well aware of all of that material. As a poor, impoverished painter in Vienna, he made a lot of very strange friends, of course, and he read a lot of strange literature which helped fuel this idea of a master race, fuel the idea that Europe should be for one race only, fuel the idea that there was pure Germans and not pure Germans. All of this he was reading in the occult magazines of the day, the fate magazines of their time. He was picking all of this up at the time.

[Podcast Host]

But do you think Himmler was driving it?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, Himmler was off to the races where this was concerned. He was totally sold on it. Remember, Himmler was one of the earliest followers of Hitler.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

As well was Rudolf Hess.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Rudolf Hess was very much into the occult as well. I mean, he picked an occult auspicious day for his flight to England. Right. He was very much into. He claimed he was in telepathic communication with his wife after he was arrested and thrown into Spandau Prison. So he claimed he was in telepathic communication all the time. They talked occultism all the time. So Hess, Himmler, and then the other people around him in that circle, including some of the people who got him involved with Japan. Right. These were people who said, don't get involved with China. They're like the mongrel race of Asia. You know, the Japanese are the. The elite. You want to be aligned with the Japanese. A major political decision was made on some guy that had visited Japan. Right. And was studying Japanese and thought that this was, you know, a good thing to do. I mean, and he died in the camps. He was. Eventually they got rid of him and his son because they were thinking about maybe joining conspiracy to overthrow Hitler. At the end, that didn't work out. But the Nazi party itself, where did it come from? Right. The Deutsche Arbeiter Partei was invented almost out of whole cloth in the basement of a hotel in Munich in the Four Seasons. And in the same hotel, it's a Thule Gesellschaft, had meetings in the same rooms. The Thule Gesellschaft was blatantly occult organization.

[Podcast Host]

We know it as the Tula Society.

[Peter Lavenda]

Tula Society, right. Gazelle Society, same thing. The Tula Society, Their symbol was the swastika. Right. That's where that came from. But it has earlier antecedents. Right. So the swastika, not only as around the world, it's a symbol from around the world, but the Theosophical Society embraced it. When the American Theosophical Society was founded in New York City, the. It was called the Aryan Theosophical Society, and they had the swastika. And these were the Blavatsky followers.

[Podcast Host]

And when was that?

[Peter Lavenda]

This is around the same time as Blavatsky had started the. What we know as a theosophical society, which also started in New York City.

[Podcast Host]

Did Hitler and his crew base this ideology on Blavatsky?

[Peter Lavenda]

No. Well. Well, not Hitler. No. What happened? For those of you interested in this part of ancient history, what happened was that the swastika was seen by the German racial theorists of the turn of the century. So we're talking 1890s, 1900s, 1910s. They saw that as the symbol of the Aryan race, and they got some of that from Blavatsky because Blavatsky talked about Aryan race in terms of root races and what races were coming into power, which races were leaving it. She had some kind of dark things to say about Jews. She insisted that the Afghans were the real Jews in one book.

[Podcast Host]

I discount her importance in history, I think. Yeah, I think I do.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. I think that.

[Podcast Host]

Because when I read it, it's like, who would believe this is wacky? Theosophy is wacky.

[Peter Lavenda]

But at the time, it was a response to Darwin. Right? The religions were being shaken by this idea of the origin of species and the possibility of evolution. The religions were the ones to get the brunt of that because science was saying, no, it was not Adam and Eve, right? It came from this long line of monkeys, right? And then branches branched off and you had monkeys on the one side and the humans on the other. That didn't sit well with the Genesis people, right? So that was a problem. So you had Blavatsky come along and spiritualize Darwinism and say, we can look at it as spiritual evolution. And that kind of made everybody sit back and say, oh, maybe we can work with this. Right? But then that worked for everybody. So you had the Germans, the Austrians, and people in the northern regions thinking to themselves, yeah, well, you know, we had religions before. We had symbols, we had runes, we had all of this stuff. You know, we had our own race, we had our own religion, we had our own. So there was this. This idea that maybe, yeah, we could go along with this theosophical thing. Maybe this is. They're talking to us right now, you know, this ancient racial knowledge, ancient racial mysticism theory. So that was very much, I think, part of it. When World War I was coming to an end and the Communists were in danger of taking over Germany, which we forget was going on in 1918. Yes, Germany was falling apart. They had lost the war. Their troops were coming back from Russia saying, yeah, we want a workers revolution, right? So you had this. You had. The navy was turning red, different cities were turning red. All this was happening. And suddenly, out of nowhere in Munich comes the Stahlhelm, the Freikorps Brigades, these sort of militias. And one of these militias had the swastika symbol as their symbol as they marched into Munich.

[Podcast Host]

Just one unit, one unit, one big

[Peter Lavenda]

unit, but one very violent, brutal unit. But the swastika was their symbol, and the Tula Gesellschaft had the swastika as their symbol. In 1919, there was a massacre of people who worked at the Tula offices. I think it was seven people who were massacred on April 30, 1919. Walpurgis Nacht, which is a very famous holiday in Europe. It's their Halloween, basically. So there was a massacre that took place. These people were killed. And there was an ad in the newspaper that the Thulis put out commemorating this massacre. They said these people were just killed. One of them was a Von Thurnen Taxis, which is one of the noble blood Prussian types, was killed also part of this. So you had all these people who were Killed. And that sparked an outrage in Munich. So suddenly you had Red units fighting the German unit, what color we call them, if they're not Reds. The Reds fighting the fascists. So you had the Sahlhelm Brigades, the Freikorps Brigades. Now they're fighting, and they're using the swastika as their symbol, maybe in commemoration of the tulists who were killed, because that was their symbol. Right, right. They didn't really know the chain of events. Yeah, there could be that. But they came in with that, with the swastika, with a song about the swastika. They even meant, at a song made up, that they would sing as they were marching. So that was 1919 already. Long before Hitler came to power, long before there was the Nazi Party, as we understand it. So Hitler, who had been in the trenches in World War I, had written poetry to the Nordic gods, to Thor.

[Podcast Host]

That's right, Thor and Odin.

[Peter Lavenda]

So he was already on that wavelength.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

And those poems have been reproduced, I think, in the famous. One of the. One of the big histories of one of his biographies. One of the biographies, yeah. Toland. Toland's history. So he's. It's in there. You can read the poetry yourself. So it's there. So he was already on that wavelength. He was already talking about, you know, and he was. What was he a fan of? Wagner. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

He was a total Wagnerian. He would stand SRO in the back of the. Where they were doing, you know, Tannhauser, and stand there for, like, four hours, however long that thing takes. And he was just totally into it. So you got Wagner, which has a mystical element writ large, but it's mystical Nordic paganism.

[Podcast Host]

How do you think Hitler got attracted to that? Where did that leak in from? Because that wasn't a movement.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, not particularly, no. I mean, Wagner, of course, was, but I think he got into. I think it was. It was an emotional thing. He had watched his mother die of cancer, I think, on Christmas, on Christmas Eve. And the doctor who was treating her was Jewish, as it turned out. So there's something going on in the background there. I don't know all the details, but having your mother die on Christmas Eve is kind of Wagnerian.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, it is.

[Peter Lavenda]

So it could be something to do with that. So anyway, he is sent to investigate the German Workers Party by a group within the military that's trying to salvage whatever they can of the German government before it collapses entirely and becomes communist. So he is sent there as a spy, basically. Go and check these people out and See what they're up to. And he was looking at them and thinking, you know, he went back and said, they need a little help. I think I can help them. And he went back and said, we're going to change the name of this organization, German Workers Party. Sounds too red, too communist. You know, you guys are toolists, basically. You're in the same freaking building in the same room as theirs. We're going to change this. We're going to make it the National Socialist German Workers Party. And they said, national Socialist. That sounds a little red too, doesn't it? And he says, but it's National Socialist, right? We're not internationalists like those other guys. We don't care about other countries. We only care about National Socialism. He joins that and he changes it entirely. And he adopts the swastika, though, as their symbol. He takes from the Tula Society and puts it there. So there was a guy called Sebatendorf, Baron von Sebattendorf. He had founded or one of the co founders of the Thule Society. When Hitler came and took it over. Sebatendorf says, yeah, maybe I'm out of here. So he goes back to Turkey where he's appreciated for what he is. And he had been an occultist and astrologer and all this kind of stuff. He had been doing all of this. He had basically given the Tula Society all of its mystical fascinations, right? He goes to Turkey. He comes back from Turkey and he writes a book. Before Hitler came, he's going to reveal what happened, how Hitler took over the party, what the party was like before, what Thule Gesellschaft was. The Tula Society was all of this stuff. And it's banned, right? They throw him in jail, right? They're going to kill him. I think he escapes, if I'm not mistaken, goes back to Turkey, but his books were unavailable. You couldn't get it because that was especially after the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler really took over power, right? All of that stuff was out, right? People who knew him from before killed or they disappeared. Anybody who was part of that scene. So we have reason to believe that Hitler maybe was more involved in occult thinking than he was. But. But all the witnesses are dead, so we don't know. I don't think he had patience with occult societies per se because he didn't have patience with the German Workers Party either. I mean, he didn't have patience with sloppy organization and stuff. And that's pretty much the hallmark of most occult societies. There's a lot of sloppy Organization. So I think he thought to himself, no, we can't have this. And he definitely was not going to join any society that he was not the president of.

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Peter Lavenda]

So it's. It. None of it made. Made sense after that point. The generals knew. Right. And generals. That some generals tried to kill him.

[Podcast Host]

Mm.

[Peter Lavenda]

And, you know, it didn't work. That didn't make sense either. Right. They were all there in the room. They had the bomb. Hitler escapes.

[Podcast Host]

He's behind the table or something.

[Peter Lavenda]

Behind the table. Right. So this is the problem. This is the problem that I see. It's not just what we can see improve. There's something else that's going on. Something else underneath the surface of all of this that's making sure these things happen.

[Podcast Host]

I was just gonna say Hitler was inevitable because of whatever it is under there. I think that could be part of our fascination is it's a way to tap into that darkness just to try to understand it. Because I'm drawn to those stories. Even though you despise the man and everything he stands for, but. Oh, he's digging for Spear of Destiny, Holy Grail, Ark of the Covenant. That's interesting stuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sure, it is fascinating. It's somebody who has the money, the means, and the resources to say. And the will to say, we're going to go and find the Holy Grail. Right. Send poor Otto Ron out there to find the Holy Grail. Yeah, let him do it. He can do it. He's written stuff like that. So, I mean, that's. Yeah. And we're looking for that. We're looking for somebody to say, let's go find the Holy Grail, you know, and we don't have that yet. We don't have a person that has that division that can excite people to that extent to the better angels of their nature. Right. We're looking for somebody to do that and to do it with class, to do it with elan, to do it with style. To do it in a Hugo Boss outfit. Yes. To do that. We're looking for that. We're kind of conflating it with masculinity. I think to a certain extent. We think it's masculine to be that. That rigid to be that. Nazi.

[Podcast Host]

I think so.

[Peter Lavenda]

Stoic. Stoic. Yep, Yep. Courageous.

[Podcast Host]

Courageous in control. Organized.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. So we. We associate that with Nazism. Right. And. Or we associate Nazism with that. You can be that and not be a Nazi, but people. Nazi is the most easily accessible image of that. We have.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Of that. Right. And we've it's our fault that it is, because we keep portraying them that way. There are a lot of cowardly Nazis out there, of course. Drug addicted. They were psychopathic. They were horrible human beings that put on the uniform and had the badges, but they. They didn't strut like, you know, Werner Klemperer, you know, I mean, they were not, you know, Hogan's Heroes. I mean, they were comic opera Nazis. There were a lot of them.

[Podcast Host]

And we need to stop calling each other Nazis. Yeah, well, that's not.

[Peter Lavenda]

Unless you really are.

[Podcast Host]

Unless you really are.

[Peter Lavenda]

But we need to. We need to draw a distinction as to what means Nazi. We do. We do. So that's. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

1947, Kenneth Arnold sees some weird stuff, draws the little delta wings, and then I think it's a couple months later, Tacoma, Seattle area, Maury Island. There's a UFO incident. Do you want to tell this? I've covered this at length. You want to tell the story, you tell it.

[Peter Lavenda]

Great. Well, I mean, I'll try to make it brief because I know there's a lot more we could do with it.

[Podcast Host]

Don't.

[Peter Lavenda]

You don't have to, you know, you don't have to.

[Podcast Host]

And I'll just add color like John Madden.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. Well. Yeah, well, the. The Kenneth Arnold sighting was. Was June, I think.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Roswell was in July.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

So it was in between that period. Kind of. It was really close to. To Kenneth Arnold's sighting where a guy called Harold Dahl, D A H L, he's in a little boat out in Puget Sound. He's got his dog there and his son. And they're in the boat. I forget for whatever reason, but they're just sailing around.

[Podcast Host]

There's. There's scavenging logs.

[Peter Lavenda]

Scavenging logs. There we go.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Log scavengers.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Which is a thing. So they're out there scavenging logs. And in the middle of their scavenging, what happens is something flies over them. A bunch of things fly over them. But one of these things that are flying over them is in distress of some kind, and it rains down a kind of shrapnel or slag onto the boat, killing the dog and wounding his son. In some case, Harold Dahl freaks out, sails back to port, and he goes to the port master, I guess, at that time, who's a guy called Fred Crisman. And he says, fred, they killed my dog. It's the first ever UFO fatality.

[Podcast Host]

I don't mean to laugh.

[Peter Lavenda]

No. And by the way, also, my son got damaged. But the main thing is the dog. So. And Chrisman says, what happened? And he shows him the Slag, whatever that was that fell. And Chrisman is saying, you saw what? What did you see? Well, you know, you heard this thing about Kenneth Arnold. There were these things flying around. Was it like maybe like that? And Doll is saying, well, yeah, kind of like that. It was like a squadron of them or something, and they flew over and. But one of them was like, was raining this stuff on top of us. So one thing led to another between Chrisman and Dahl, and they start calling people, and this is a long story, but to make it manageable, they eventually call the. The Air Force. Right. This is 1947. The Air Force is in the middle of a transition. They're going to become a separate entity. But right now, they're Army Air Force, and there's an Air Force base near. Near Tacoma. And, you know, going to send some guys down to look it out. There was something going on. So let's look it out. Let's check it out. At the same time, though, Chrisman decides to contact a friend of his, Shaffer, who writes these Weird Tales magazines. He's an editor of these magazines that

[Podcast Host]

does these strange stories, amazing stories, something like that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Something like that. And tells him the story, says, you know, we could do a story about this. We can, like, make, like, a weird story and write about it. And like, Schaeffer says, yeah, it sounds good, right? Write about it. Let's write it up and do this. So we're in this area era where it's kind of fact and fiction already is together. There's something factual that happened, but now they're creating stories about it to sell magazines, you know, at the same time, he's contacting Kenneth Arnold saying, ken, can you come and talk to us? We're going to get some guys from the Air Force. We're going to get together and talk about what you saw and what happened to us, you know, in Puget Sound. And Arnold is like, I don't know. He was kind of hesitant about it, but they eventually managed to convince him to go.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

So he shows up, but there's no reservation for him at the hotels.

[Podcast Host]

Everything's booked.

[Peter Lavenda]

Everything's booked. There's a convention or something in town. It's a small town. Anyway, by today's standards, everything is booked until he calls, like, the most expensive hotel in town. And they already have a booking for him.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, they do.

[Peter Lavenda]

How do they have a booking? And he's amazed, like, I didn't make a booking. Nobody that I know, made a booking, but there's a booking, so he gratefully accepts the booking. And he's in this hotel, a very, like I say, a fancier hotel than what he was expecting. And they have a meeting in there. There's Fred Kriseman, Raul Dahl, and these two Air Force guys. And, you know, Kenneth Arnold.

[Podcast Host]

Did those Air Force guys come out of Wright Patterson? Was that a blue Book Dispatch?

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't think, because they came right away. I think they must have been local, close by. Okay, I think they were local, but they were Air Force Intelligence. Yes, they were for sure. So.

[Podcast Host]

And we know their names.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's all we know their names. They were a foci, or what would become a foci later on. So they show up and they listen politely to this whole discussion. And Kenneth Arnold's a famous guy now because of the saucer stuff, the Delta Windcraft that he saw. So they're all having a nice time together, talking about this. And then the Air Force guy says, listen, okay, can you give us this stuff that you collected? We'll take it back and have it analyzed. We'll take it back to base. And charisma says, okay, you know, they get a cereal box. They couldn't think of anything better than a cereal box, and they put all this slag in the cereal box. Not all of it, probably, but a box full. And at the last moment, they hand it over to the airline, to the Air Force guys. They put it on board their plane, they wave goodbye, see, you get onto the plane and take off. And moments later, the plane explodes in midair, and these two. These two Air Force people are killed. I think the pilot makes it out alive.

[Podcast Host]

Did he?

[Peter Lavenda]

I think somebody made it out alive.

[Podcast Host]

That was a B25.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

I think. I think he made it out, but they definitely did not. And the slag went with them, wherever that went. So these are really not the dog, but these are the first fatalities of the UFO era? I guess. So this is bad enough, right? But there was a reporter who was trying desperately to find out what they were talking about in. In that hotel room, and they were not talking to the reporter.

[Podcast Host]

I think it was Tom Morello. Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes, Tom Morello. And yet old Tom, he did manage to find out what was happening.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, he did.

[Peter Lavenda]

He heard a transcript of what was happening in that hotel room. Yep, they had that place miked in 1947. Okay. They had that room set up. Of course, everything was all arranged. They went there. So who was doing the taping? It wasn't The Air Force officers, most likely. They went down with the ship. So who is doing that taping? Who is actually behind the mic? We don't know. Tom Borello can't tell us. He died.

[Podcast Host]

That's right. Pretty soon after.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, pretty soon after. Died very mysteriously. So he's gone. And that transcript, I guess, gone with him. So what was going on? What was that all about? Now, that's not the end of the story.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, by no means, unfortunately, it gets worse.

[Peter Lavenda]

Because at the same time this is happening, there's this rather portly dude called Bannister. W. I don't know what the W stands for, Walter. Maybe Guy Bannister. W. Guy Bannister.

[Podcast Host]

Rings a bell.

[Peter Lavenda]

He's an FBI agent out of Pacific Northwest. Out of Pacific Northwest. But he has a brief. He's been told directly by J. Edgar Hoover himself. There's all this weird UFO stuff going on. Flying saucers, Kenneth Arnold, all this stuff. I need you to go out there, keep tabs in all of this. Any UFO sighting, I want to hear about it. Any people who saw occupants, aliens, you tell me. You get back to me on this. And fortunately, what we do is we have the documentation. Because old Guy Bannister, he sent Airtels. And Airtel was the old fashioned form of. Of a telegram. I'm saying telegram, people know what I'm talking about. But anyway, it's a way of sending a digital message to somebody. But it had to be printed on paper eventually. So Guy Bannister is out there and he's religiously. He's. He's visiting people. He's like a Men in Black kind of guy. He's going where there's sightings, he's asking questions, and then he's reporting back to Hoover directly.

[Podcast Host]

And just to jump in, those. That telegram, those are X Files.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes, they are.

[Podcast Host]

Those are designated as X Files.

[Peter Lavenda]

If you look at the originals, they're called X Files.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. Real thing.

[Peter Lavenda]

These are the real thing. The real X Files. And they're all about UFOs? Definitely. It's consistent. So this stuff is going back, you know, to Hoover constantly. This is 1947. Guy Bannister is doing his thing. He's a respected FBI agent. I think he becomes SAC Special Agent in Charge in Chicago.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

And then eventually he retires from Chicago and he winds up in New Orleans.

[Podcast Host]

Interesting.

[Peter Lavenda]

And he opens up a detective agency. Okay, so it's the Guy Bannister Detective Agency in New Orleans. And Guy Bannister is a racist son of a bitch and very anti communist. Belongs to all the right wing organizations, hates everybody. He's a guy you really have a hard time getting along with. Based in New Orleans, Involved with a lot of shady characters, including a guy called Jack Martin. Jack Martin was one of his so called researchers. He worked for a guy out of that office. And another guy that was around at the time was a guy called David Ferry. David Ferry also did some research for Guy Bannister. David Ferry also involved in very strange extreme right organizations, anti communist groups, stuff like that.

[Podcast Host]

As was Chrisman.

[Peter Lavenda]

As was Chrisman. Because why, why do we even know about this? Well, because one of the other people that kind of hung out at Guy Bannister's location was a guy called Lee Harvey Oswald. Now we all know Lee Harvey Oswald, Guy Bannister Detective Agency. He had, he had stamped the address of his agency on his Fair Play for Cuba leaflets. Which is how we know these people went together, right? Not only that, but Lee Oswald was in the CAP unit that was being run by David Ferry back in the day.

[Podcast Host]

And did we mention that address was the same building as Guy Bannister's?

[Peter Lavenda]

Same address. Guy Bannister's address, just the other side of the street. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Camp Street, I think it was.

[Peter Lavenda]

Camp Street. Yeah. It was the same building.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Depends what door you walk.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

So there you go, all these people, right? You have David Ferry, you have Jack Martin, you have Guy Bannister, you have Lee Harvey Oswald in one building. But wait, there's more. So back in 1967 or so, is it 68, we have the District Attorney in New Orleans, right? Very famous guy. This district attorney decides, he says, you know, there's something really weird about this Kennedy assassination stuff. I was disturbed by what happened in 63. There was like notices there was something to do with David Ferry. There was, you know, connections to New Orleans. I didn't quite understand at the time Guy Bannister was involved. I know Guy, weird guy, he had that detective agency, right? So he's putting these pieces together and he opens up an investigation into the assassination, thinking that the plot took place in New Orleans, the Harvey Oswald was there, everybody was there who mattered in this thing. Maybe it had something to do with New Orleans. So they start pulling at threads. And the threads they pull lead them to Guy Bannister, obviously, who was hunting UFOs in 1947. And it leads them to Fred Krisman, who was a victim of a UFO by association in 1947, who was involved in this thing with the, the airline pilots and the blowing up of the Plane and all the rest of it. What are the odds that in 1947 a UFO incident that attracts Fred Kriseman and Guy Bannister then turns into the assassination conspiracy in 1963? The purported conspiracy. Right. Same guys, Chrisman involved, Bannister involved, Chrisman involved in the same kind of weird extreme right organizations as everybody else. They all know each other. Fred Kriseman's in a weird church, David Ferry's in a weird church, Jack Martin's in a weird church. And it's all the same church. The one that I belong to in 1968.

[Podcast Host]

United life, right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, Well, I wasn't involved in any conspiracies, thank you very much. But the same bunch of people.

[Podcast Host]

And Chrisman has a strange background that he was maybe oss. He was a pilot. The EZ papers, which are a kind of myth.

[Peter Lavenda]

Myth. But he knew Clay Shaw.

[Podcast Host]

So Clay Shaw, which was the Tommy Lee Jones character.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

For some reason, he was the only arrest. I think Garrison made. The first call goes to Fred Chrisman.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Why?

[Peter Lavenda]

We don't know. To this day we don't know. But.

[Podcast Host]

But he was subpoenaed.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

He was interviewed. He was interviewed and he said, I'm in New Orleans to help this guy Tom get a record contract. Right. And I think the transcript is like a page and a half. That's it.

[Peter Lavenda]

Really? That's it.

[Podcast Host]

That's it.

[Peter Lavenda]

And it was Beckham, right? Tommy Beckham. Tommy Beckham and Tommy Beckham also involved in the churches.

[Podcast Host]

Yep. And the right wing stuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

All the rest of it. But nothing to see here, right?

[Podcast Host]

Nope. And I think Crispin is accused of being a chaos agent for Boeing.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. There was that rumor.

[Podcast Host]

Trigger man, possibly Gressy Knoll. We don't know.

[Peter Lavenda]

We don't know.

[Podcast Host]

One of the tramps, perhaps?

[Peter Lavenda]

One of the tramps. Yeah. Howard Hunt might have been one of the tramps.

[Podcast Host]

Might have been.

[Peter Lavenda]

Howard Hunt had a major beef with Kennedy, we know. Hated him because of Bay of Pigs, not giving the air support.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

When Kennedy hated the CIA at that point. So who do they put in charge of the water of the Warren Commission, but Alan Dulles.

[Podcast Host]

The last guy.

[Peter Lavenda]

The last guy.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Charge of that investigator. The last guy you would want. So it goes on and like that does. But nauseating.

[Podcast Host]

But Dulles is. Is a great segue, unless you want to add more color to that story. Is a great segue into the nine.

[Peter Lavenda]

I know where you're going. Yep. Well, yeah, that's.

[Podcast Host]

So now. Now we're going to New Year's Eve. 1952 in A.

[Peter Lavenda]

Let's not, let's not get there just yet.

[Podcast Host]

Take, take it away.

[Peter Lavenda]

Let's open the door, okay, and say, why are we going to talk about the nine in this situation? Well, because of Oswald, right? We already talked about how weird it was that you had Fred Kriseman. You had, you know, David Ferry, Jack Martin, Guy Bannister, all these people involved somehow in the assassination. And they all have like UFO connections and weird religion connections.

[Podcast Host]

We know they've been together, we know they're spotted together. We know they're. We knew each other at the Ruby's Bar, Tippetts and Ruby's. Everyone's there, everybody's there.

[Peter Lavenda]

They're all part of this. And now there's poor Lee Harvey Oswald in the middle of it. The poor bastard never had a chance, right? He's surrounded on all sides.

[Podcast Host]

He's a patsy.

[Peter Lavenda]

He's like the ultimate patsy. He's like the poster boy for patsy's. So here is this poor guy. I mean, I'm saying poor guy in a sense, in a kind of pejorative sense, right? He's desperately trying to find a job, right? He's looking for a job in Texas. Now he was in New Orleans. He got busted in New Orleans for the fair play for Cuba stuff. So there's a problem there. So now he's going to go from New Orleans. He's going. He was from New Orleans. So now he's leaving New Orleans, he's going to Texas.

[Podcast Host]

What's the timeline of his defection at this point? Is this prior.

[Peter Lavenda]

He's back, he's back from the defection.

[Podcast Host]

So he defects to Minsk.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, he's where he's known as Alec.

[Podcast Host]

As Alec.

[Peter Lavenda]

We'll get to that later.

[Podcast Host]

Okay?

[Peter Lavenda]

So he defects to Minsk, where he's known as Alec. And he defects back to the United States with a Russian born wife who's the niece of a GRU colonel, a military intelligence colonel in the Soviet army, and with a. No problem, no problem.

[Podcast Host]

And with a convenient loan from State Department.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, sure, yeah, come on back. I know you defected and you gave up your citizenship and all that. No hard feelings, man. So he comes back. So he's now in Dallas and he needs to find a job. He needs what to do, you know, what am I going to do? There's a guy called George de Morenshield, a very strange operator himself. A guy with a lot of sleazy connections, maybe Nazi connections, all this kind of stuff. And he says, you know, we can help you out and he introduces him to. Well, to a number of people. I'm trying to. How do I parse this down to where it makes sense?

[Podcast Host]

Ruth?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, yeah, it's Mary. It's Ruth Payne. Okay, well, let's use that. Ruth Payne.

[Podcast Host]

This is a lot right now.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, it is a lot. And I know people are listening. What? I can't keep track of all this.

[Podcast Host]

It's gonna work.

[Peter Lavenda]

Ruth Payne wants to study Russian. That's her story. This is 1963, when the world thinks Russia is the Antichrist, right? So she wants to study Russian. She's Quaker. She's open to it. Yeah, no problem. I want to study Russian. And Mauricio says, well, I have the perfect guy for you. Here's Lee Oswald. He's from Russia. I mean, he's speaks some Russian, but his wife speaks fluent Russian. She is Russian, Right. And, you know, this is their group that they're meeting of Russian Orthodox people. Right? So a lot of the people attending this party where they all meet are members of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, which I introduced to you a long time ago, about four or five years ago in this interview. And we talked to you about the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. The anti communist, pro Nazi, briefly, Russian Orthodox Church. Oh, they're going to hate me for this. You're going to get mail. But this is inescapable. This is what happened. So. And Ruth Payne is like, oh, this is cool. Let me. Let me learn some Russian from, you know, your wife, your very beautiful wife. And you have these kids stay at home with us. You're looking for an apartment. Stay with me for a while. You can teach me Russian. Meanwhile, I'll help you find a job in the Texas School Book Depository. Okay, so he gets a job in the text because of Ruth Payne. Yeah, Ruth Payne is the key. Ruth Payne also is another key to another whole branch of this thing. She's the daughter in law of a guy called Arthur Young. Arthur Young invented the Bell helicopter during the war. Arthur Young gave up on military technology and all that sort of thing. He wanted to study occultism and the paranormal and astrology and spiritualism. He devoted his life then to studying

[Podcast Host]

that because he made a fortune with.

[Peter Lavenda]

Made a fortune, right?

[Podcast Host]

So he said, I'm out.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, he says, I'm out. I got my money. I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm going to study spooks, right? So he has a friend called Andrea Puharich, who's a medical doctor, but also with a lot of very strange Intelligence. Intelligence ties, yes. And in ties to anti communists as well. And Puharich was about to take up a position at a hospital on the west coast. And Kaiser Wilhelm, I think. And instead he meets some friends of his who are fellow Serbo Croatian people and they're saying to him, nah, why you want to do that? Why don't you set up here? Just stay in Maine, the state of Maine. It's winter. You're snowed in now. You can't go home anyway. Stay here and open up an institute to study like paranormal things, you know, and to do your electronics research too, because you're doing weird things with electronics. You're putting microphones in people's brains and stuff. This sounds pretty cool. Why don't we do that? So he kind of falls in line with this and says, okay, yeah, maybe I'll do that. And he opens up this thing in Maine where he's going to do this, the Round Table foundation. And he's going to do all this kind of weird stuff there. And the people who induced him to do this, these fellow Serbo Croatians of his, they were friends of Nikola Tesla. In fact, the gentleman in charge of this defection played the violin at Tesla's funeral.

[Podcast Host]

I didn't know that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. So these people were really in with Tesla and they're telling Puharich, I think you should do this stuff instead. And Puharich says, sounds good, maybe I'll do that. I won't take up a prestigious position running a hospital on the West Coast. I'm going to stay here in Maine, in a barn and do this instead. So 1952-53, there's a seance. He invites all his closest friends. His closest friends are blue blood Americans, right? Astors, Duponts, you know, people like that. Forbes Royalty. Royalty. American royalty and American money. And American royalty. Arthur Young is there with his wife, the excessively nomenclatured Ruth Forbes Payne Young. Okay, so she's her name tells you her story.

[Podcast Host]

It does.

[Peter Lavenda]

Forbes is in there. Okay. Ruth Forbes Payne Paine Thomas was her husband at that time. Was kind of a Trotskyite or something, but he was related to one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. And then you had of course, Arthur Young himself. So she has all these connections. And her best friend is Mary Douglas, I think her name is. And Mary Douglas was the bff, the best friend of her, of Ruth Forbes Payne Young, but also the girlfriend, the mistress of Allen Dulles.

[Podcast Host]

Long time. Mistress.

[Peter Lavenda]

Long time. Wrote about it. Everybody knew. Very intense connections between all of These people? Yes. So those are just two of the people at the seance. There's an Aster, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

Of the famous Aster family. Who's. Was it her father that died in the sinking of the Titanic?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, the wealthiest person on that boat.

[Peter Lavenda]

Wealthiest, yeah. And there she is. She's attending. There was a Dupont there. Dupont? No, not one more needs to be said. And a couple of other people who have kind of strange pedigrees, which we can kind of explore later. They were hard to pin down. So there's a group of nine people and a medium from India, and this medium, who, according to his family. Because I contacted them.

[Podcast Host]

You did?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, yeah. I went back and contacted the family to see if I could find out if he ever was really a medium in India. And they said, are you kidding me? He was never a medium in India. He was interested in religion. He was in the United States for some world religious conference or something. But he never evinced any mediumistic abilities to us. At least that's what they said in writing to me. So he's the medium, though, and he's going to make contact with some forces. And he does, evidently. And he starts talking and Puharich is taking all this down, like he's transcribing exactly what's being said. Puharich asks him questions, scientific questions. He's getting correct answers from this guy who has no scientific background.

[Podcast Host]

Who's he channeling?

[Peter Lavenda]

This is what we don't know yet.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

In the beginning, we're not quite sure, except they say something strange. They say, you are nine individuals, you are nine people. We are nine. So whoever they were, were nine of them, and you are nine, and we are nine. Together, we're going to change the course of history, right? We're going to change the course of what's happening in the world. We don't quite know what that means yet because they're kind of ambiguous about it. But they go on and on about it. They go on about different things and they talk about all kinds of stuff. You can actually read these transcripts. Buharich published them. There was no mystery about it. There was no. No attempt to hide anything about this.

[Podcast Host]

We know all these people were there.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, we know the people were there. We know who they are, who their background is. He started attracting more people like that later. So there was a lot of other people from the paranormal sort of community were involved, but these were all people that were involved in this, in this seance. And it turns out eventually it's revealed that These nine individuals are in some kind of ufo. They're evidently in what they deliberately term low Earth orbit. So they're here. They can't be seen, but they're here. And they're somehow directing things that are happening on the planet, which is what a lot of people are saying now anyway, right? They're saying, are they controlling us? The alien presence is here. How is this happening? Right. Back in 1952, 53, that's what these people believed.

[Podcast Host]

52 is a wild year for this stuff.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, because what else happened in 52?

[Podcast Host]

The UFOs over or the White House? The weird press conference where the Bible's

[Peter Lavenda]

mentioned along with the press conference freaks me out.

[Podcast Host]

That's a wild thing. Why they're talking about angels and demons in 52.

[Peter Lavenda]

And who was at the press conference? Who was one of the people organizing that and speaking at it was the guy at Roswell, the Air Force General who was there at Roswell.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Who doesn't bring up Roswell in this press conference.

[Podcast Host]

So step out of the story for a second and tell me what's going on in your mind as you're untangling this. Are you? Are you? Like, these are all holy shit moments. And they just keep piling up.

[Peter Lavenda]

They keep piling up. Especially when I realized that, you know, Ruth Payne went up and visited her relatives just a couple of months before the assassination and told them what was going on. Said, I got this Russian defector in my house and his wife and kids.

[Podcast Host]

Right? Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

I mean, that means that's a direct plugin to this whole world, this whole other world that's going on. And poor Lee Oswald's like, in the middle of this. He's like, clueless.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

I believe. And he's also involved in New Orleans with all these other weird people. More UFO stuff, more UFO connections. This is the UFO connection to the assassination. And you're not.

[Podcast Host]

You're not a UFO researcher up to this point. Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

I wasn't. I wasn't. This would brought me into the UFO stuff, was finding this out. I was fascinated by UFOs like everybody else, but I wasn't planning on writing about it. And then I come across all this UFO stuff for the assassination. I'm saying, oh, my God, who's going to believe this?

[Podcast Host]

I was just going to ask you. You've got to be thinking, I don't want to do this. This sounds nuts.

[Peter Lavenda]

Absolutely. I said, I'll have to start from scratch on the UFO stuff. Then I'll have to become an Expert on it at least as much as we can be, and figure out why this connects. And it turns out you can't figure out why it connects. It just does. So you got to start with the basic premise. It connects, okay? Now how? What are the ramifications? What are the implications? What can we predict on the basis of this? It's tough going because these people show up and then they disappear. They show up and disappear. I'm talking about the actual people, not just the UFOs. So you're dealing with this conundrum. It's impossible to figure out. And one of my favorite characters in this whole thing was David Ferry. I mean, David Ferry, played by Joe Pesci in the movie jfk. You can't forget him. He has the fake red wig and the whole thing, and he's like, smoking cigarettes like crazy and drinking coffee, and he can't. You know, they revealed it in the JFK movie in that scene after his suicide. Supposed suicide.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So there's. There's Kevin Costner there. There's the clerical garments. There's a photograph of Fairy with the bishop's miter.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Not a Catholic bishop's miter, an Orthodox bishop's miter. Only if you're. You're into it, would you pick it out right away. That crown he was wearing is what the Orthodox wear, not what the Catholics wear. So he was in the orthodox doing this Orthodox stuff.

[Podcast Host]

I don't think they really addressed that in the movie, do they?

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, not at all.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Even Jim Garrison, the DA at the time, doing this, he couldn't figure it out. He wrote to the church committee. He said, guys, there's these weird churches. I don't know what they represent on those. You should probably check it out. I couldn't find out what the connection was. He blatantly said, I have no idea. Threw up his arms, can't handle it. So I feel for him, believe me. So, yeah, so there's the church stuff, there's the UFO stuff, There's the intelligence operations that are obviously underneath all of this as well. And there's people who are obviously not really intelligence type people. There's the, you know, the Arthur Youngs of the world, you know, yes, they have intelligence connections for sure, but they weren't running ops. You know, these are just people who were peripherally around them. Puharich also, of course, became. Had a military commission during the Korean War. When all this was happening in 1953, he was giving speeches at Edward's Arsenal, but he was Giving speeches on weaponizing the paranormal.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So we're in the thick of it with these people. We're in the thick of it there.

[Podcast Host]

And he's the one who brings Uri Geller to sri.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. And Uri Geller starts channeling the Nine.

[Podcast Host]

Starts channeling. So what blows my mind is you've got Poharidge brings Uri Geller into what will be Stargate, sri, Russell Targ, Hal put off to the stars. Peter Lavenda. There you are again.

[Peter Lavenda]

There you are again. Can't get out of it.

[Podcast Host]

What's going on?

[Peter Lavenda]

Every time I think I'm out, they

[Podcast Host]

pull me back in.

[Peter Lavenda]

What's going. You know, I didn't approach Tom DeLonge. I was like a poor innocent guy when he called me. And I thought, yeah, sure, you're Tom DeLonge from Blink 182. Yeah, right. Tell me another one. Right. It turned out it was true. And he said, no, we. We're going to do this. You know, we're going to knock on doors. We're going to get some answers, man, but we're going to do it in the right way, and I want you to help me do this. I said, okay, fine, I'm on it. Sounds good. You know, I don't know how much I can help, but I'll try. So, yeah, that came out of the clear blue sky. I did not go looking for Tom DeLonge or Blink182. I didn't go looking for any of this stuff.

[Podcast Host]

I'll find you. We're gonna come up on a break, and on the other side of the break, we'll get into consciousness. Maybe some Jacques Fillet. But before then, how about a yarn or two about Kino? Your Men in Black experiences. Wild. If you want to tell either of

[Peter Lavenda]

those, well, Aquina will take us a bit more, probably. Well, it'll bring us back whatever you want to do.

[Podcast Host]

Whatever you want to do.

[Peter Lavenda]

The Men in Black thing is something that, again, makes no sense also. And it's because it makes no sense, makes it important, if you know what I mean. It means there's something else at work, something else at operation that we cannot realistically comprehend. I was living.

[Podcast Host]

Every time you tell a story, the skeptics step up and then you smack them right in the mouth. Which is what you're gonna do right now.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do my best to tell you straight what's going on here, but I can't promise anything. I can't promise Your reaction, what we. What it'll be. I'm living in. In Rhode Island. I'm living in Westerly, Rhode Island. It's a small town on the. On the border of Connecticut. You can go back and forth state from each state, it's just walking across the street and suddenly you're in Connecticut. So it's that close. And I have. I'm living in this house on Ashaway Road. And you know, this is a town. It's a small Rhode island town. It's not a city. There's not like a lot of traffic. There's, you know, it's a small town. A couple of houses here, a couple of houses there, a house across the street. It's like that rural, I mean, very suburban. Look that way. On the verge of rural. So I'm living in this old house and on kind of a hill, there's a driveway that leads down to the main road, which is just two lanes, right? Basic road. And I've just come from shopping. I think I had learned to drive by this point. Just for those of you who are keeping track, yes, I did learn to drive, but I was 38 years old when I learned. So people tell me, you really haven't learned to drive yet. I did learn. I'm unpacking the car from shopping and I notice, I look up and I notice there's an old black Cadillac, like an old model Cadillac, big black car parked, not parked, idling in front of me, in front of the house and my car and my driveway. And out of the window, the driver's side window, somebody's aiming a camera at me with a very large lens, this wide lens. And I'm thinking, what the hell is this? I put down the bag of groceries and I started walking over to the car. This is not done right. You know, it's small town New England. You don't do this. I walked over to it and they just took off. And I tried to see the license plate number, but I didn't get a chance to get all the numbers. But it was the same color as the Rhode island plate. But a Rhode island plate and a federal plate, they were the same colors at that time. So I didn't know what I was looking at. I said, this is very weird. I ran back to my car. I was going to follow them. For some reason, I felt I had to do that. This was just too strange, right? And you know, I had run ins before with people doing things like that, you know, following me or doing that kind of stuff. So it pisses me off. So I'm going to follow. I got to my car and another car pulls in right behind me. Blocking my way of getting out of the driveway. And it's another old car. It's an old station wagon with the wood paneling on it. I haven't seen those like in years. And out of the car there's two women. The front seat, driver's side and passenger. They open the doors. They have these sort of wide eyes. They get out of the car and they're dressed kind of oddly in like old fashioned clothing. Not really old, but like 1950s era clothing. Like cloth coat, that kind of thing. And they walk out of the car and they look at me sweetly and they say, do you know where De Vilbus lives? And I'm really pissed off. I want to get out and follow the other car, right?

[Podcast Host]

It's getting away, it's getting away.

[Peter Lavenda]

I said, there's nobody named De Villabus here. Thank you. They get in the car and they drive off. But of course by then it's too late. I can't get out. And I don't realize. I always kick myself. It's obvious it was a two car team. Of course they blocked me from leaving, right. Obviously because they were just as weird as the guys in the other car. Two very old model cars but in pretty good condition with strange people in them, you know, messing with me. So that kind of bothered me and kind of really bothered me.

[Podcast Host]

That wasn't. That was. Feels like a message that could. If. Because you're obviously you've been surveilled the whole time that.

[Peter Lavenda]

By what?

[Podcast Host]

I. I don't know.

[Peter Lavenda]

Because it's. Because that's.

[Podcast Host]

So that's sloppy tradecraft.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, yeah. Plus it's expensive trade, right? Two cars, four people, right? That's a lot of money for somebody like me just sitting at home.

[Podcast Host]

So if they're sending you a message,

[Peter Lavenda]

right, it has to be a message of some kind. So I look up, I think to Vilbis, to Vilbus. I said that name sounds vaguely familiar. I start looking it up. Nobody in Rhode island with that name at all. So that's not happening. But then it occurred to me. I know the name. It's the name of a company in Ohio. They make machinery. And the reason I know is because a guy I worked with in Rhode island gave that name and phone number to me saying you should call these guys because they might be good customers. Right? So I had called De Vilbus I think once or something and nothing ever happened. With it, that's fine. But the guy who gave me the phone number to call De Vilbus had used to work at Huntington. Huntington. What's the name? In Alabama? Huntsville, Huntsville.

[Podcast Host]

NASA.

[Peter Lavenda]

NASA. He worked for NASA. He was an engineer. He worked at NASA. And he retired and started working up in Rhode island and worked at this thing. So he knew Wernher von Braun. He had met von Braun personally.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

So he had stories he would tell, you know.

[Podcast Host]

And he recommends devilbis.

[Peter Lavenda]

And these two people come in there and ask me about De Vilbus. It's like they looked inside my brain for a possible name, a connection. Devilbis. That'll work. And they gave me De Vilbus. Okay. That's not the end of the story, though. That was weird enough. Okay. I was fine, but I was really annoyed. I was annoyed at myself for not being more alert. Back to Singapore. Remember I said I was in Singapore. I was constantly in and out of Singapore for years. And so I'm in Singapore. I just landed at Singapore airport. Probably from abroad somewhere from the States or from Europe. I forget where. And so I'm dragging myself through the airport. This is why I always term it dragging myself, because that's what I felt. I have my same suitcase, probably the similar one that I came in with today. I was dragging it in and I feel a tap on my shoulder. Someone just taps me on the shoulder. Now, this is Singapore, and people don't do that. You know, it's kind of straight laced here. We don't go chummy each other.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

But it could have been somebody I knew from the States or somebody. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder, but they just tapped me on the shoulder and left. I turned around to see who it was. It was the girl from the car.

[Podcast Host]

What?

[Peter Lavenda]

And she looks at me and smiles and waves like that.

[Podcast Host]

How many years later is this?

[Peter Lavenda]

This would have been in the 90s. This happened in.

[Podcast Host]

And the first is 10.

[Peter Lavenda]

At least 10, 15 years.

[Podcast Host]

So it's because the first one was, I think, 88 around there.

[Peter Lavenda]

It was.

[Podcast Host]

It was the time of the first Gulf War, 1990.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. So this would have happened in about 10 years later. 1999. Roughly 2000, something.

[Podcast Host]

Are you sure it was her? Okay, I have to do my job.

[Peter Lavenda]

She looked at me like she recognized.

[Podcast Host]

I have to.

[Peter Lavenda]

She looked at me like she knew I recognized her, you know, and she waved.

[Podcast Host]

This is the message.

[Peter Lavenda]

And I said, holy sh. I started following her. Right? Because you don't do that. I mean, that's like too blatant. And I said, who is this? What is going on? I go running after her and of course she disappears in the crowd. Later, a couple of years later, I meet Timothy Good, the ufo. British UFO researcher. We were doing this thing in Amsterdam and this secret space conference in Amsterdam. There's videos of it all over the place. So I used to read Timothy Goode's book. So the two of us were in this hotel in the middle of nowhere. It's Amsterdam, but we're in the middle of nowhere. It's not like the cool part of Amsterdam. So we're sitting there going, okay, what are we going to do now? Right. And he had a bottle of scotch. I said, okay, we're going to drink it. So we just sat there in his room. We drank, I think the bottle of scotch that night. And he started talking to me, and he's talking to me about, you know, if you want to see. Catch them in the act. If you want to know if they're among us, it's all you have to do. I think he wrote about this in one of his books as well. Just go to a very public place, and an airport's the perfect place, or just any very public place. Just sit there, close your eyes, think for a second, and I'll say, just say to yourself, to them, if you're here, say hello. Give me a sign. Just give it a minute and open your eyes and look and see if anything happens. And somebody will turn around at some point and kind of look at you, wink at you, give you the high five, something they will acknowledge, and that will be it.

[Podcast Host]

Well, you just took a turn. So we went from intelligence surveillance to non human intelligence surveillance.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. And I interpret what Timothy Goodtel told me as a way of saying they are here. Right? And we can mistake them for people like us. We can mistake them for intelligence agents. The whole Men in Black. Were they really intelligence agents or were they something else?

[Podcast Host]

So did you think like I just did? Did Timothy make you go, holy shit? I thought, I thought they were just. Just sloppy, sloppy agents.

[Peter Lavenda]

But. Well, yeah, I mean, initially, until. Until Singapore, I thought they were sloppy agents.

[Podcast Host]

So Singapore, then you're like, there's something more.

[Peter Lavenda]

There's something more. You know, this is not right. Right. If you're an intelligence agent, why would you call my attention to the fact you were in the same airport?

[Podcast Host]

I. I would think it was a threat, you know, as a horse head

[Peter Lavenda]

in the bed, possibly. Yeah, but they weren't carrying any suitcases in the airport. They were like, free as a bird. Just walking around, you know.

[Podcast Host]

So what? So speculate. Then what was this? Clearly a message. What is it?

[Peter Lavenda]

A message. I think we have to interpret the men in black, generally speaking, not as intelligence agents working for the government, but as something else, that this is part of the phenomenon. Because I never saw a UFO at that, at that point in time, I had never witnessed personally a ufo. I didn't deserve a visit from the men in black. Right. According to the mythology. So why do they show up?

[Podcast Host]

I don't know if they're saying, stop doing this, or they're saying, you're onto something, keep going.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's what I felt. The latter.

[Podcast Host]

The latter.

[Peter Lavenda]

In fact, Whitley Strieber, I think, kind of came down on that side of the argument as well. They're just saying hi, he would know. They're just acknowledging now.

[Podcast Host]

You hadn't had a UFO sighting until then, but you had one since?

[Peter Lavenda]

I had one, only one since. And it was.

[Podcast Host]

It's one more than I've had.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, I believed in the whole subject. I understood it thoroughly. I know that whole thing exists without having to have the benefit of personal attachment. Right. Nothing like that ever happened to me. So, I mean. But I saw the evidence was strong enough that I had to believe in the UFO phenomenon. And that's why I wrote about it and sinister forces and everything else. This is a real thing. I didn't need to see a UFO to do that. And then a couple of years ago, just when Covid started, the December before the whole Covid thing happened, I'm now back in. I'm in Florida at this point. I get around. I know. So I'm in Florida and I'm driving back from having eaten at a restaurant and it's like a little gated, sort of pseudo gated community. I get past the gate, I'm driving down, and suddenly I see what I thought were the lights, the very bright lights of a helicopter. We get helicopters all the time. We're close enough to the private airports, a private airport there that we get sometimes jets and stuff. So I was just interested. A lot of light right in front of me. I stopped the car, I'm looking at it, but I don't hear rotors, I don't hear a helicopter. So I'm confused by it because I know the terrain very well. There's nothing up there that has. That emits light.

[Podcast Host]

Do you hear anything?

[Peter Lavenda]

Nothing. So I get out of the car, I sort of open the first. I open the door, I roll down the window and I look up and I See, there's light, but then I have to get out of the car and then I can see the whole picture. And it's three lights in a triangle, right? And I'm looking at this triangle and I'm thinking, what kind of plane looks like? I'm so freaking stupid, right? I think I would be the best one. Like the Men in Black thing, I

[Podcast Host]

hear it all the time. No one takes the picture because they're like, I didn't think of it.

[Peter Lavenda]

I didn't think of it. Obviously you're thinking of every other possible explanation.

[Podcast Host]

You're just trying to make this work.

[Peter Lavenda]

And as I look at it, I suddenly realized it was gone. And then I had this terrific sensation. Look behind you. I looked behind me and it was out there, all the way at the horizon and then gone again.

[Podcast Host]

Did it fly or did it.

[Peter Lavenda]

It just teleported from here and appeared over there. I didn't hear anything. I didn't see it. Didn't like accelerate that you would expect to see it go slower than faster. Nothing. It just was there and then not there. I said, I just saw a ufo. And I emailed. Everybody emailed Tom. And you know, sure, I just saw him for the first time in my life. I saw this thing. And then Tom was jealous. I said, it's. It's. I saw it. What can I say? I just. It's the weirdest thing.

[Podcast Host]

Did anyone else see it? Did you report it to MUFON or.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, no, I knew a. Pointless. Yeah, mufon, okay.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, I didn't. It just was there. I mean, I. I talked about it enough and I, you know, reported it like online kind of. But I didn't actually go to. Efforts. I mean, would have meant nothing. I just. It was a momentary sight of this thing that made me stop the car and look up and then took off. And then since then, there's been odd things, you know, and Whitley says it's, you know, they're just saying hello, don't worry about it. But I had the. It was after that very late at night, maybe 2 o' clock in the morning. I frequently work late at night, so it's extremely quiet.

[Podcast Host]

Is this about 2:00am?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Let me tell you a quick story first.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay.

[Podcast Host]

I had Mark d' Antonio in here very recently. Great guy, astronomer, scientist, had a visitation. He woke up middle of the night, 2:3am and he heard rhythmically, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. One, two, three, 1, 2, 3, proceed. Yesterday, 2:00am he told this story yesterday, okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, this is the first. I think this is the first time I'm talking about this on air. It was 2am One, two, three. One, two, three. 1, 2, 3. Nine knocks. Three groups of three, but only once. And then this weird electronic sound like I blew something. Like something went. I blew a fuse. This sort of zapping sound. And then it stopped. And I searched the house for whatever could have caused that. There's nothing. I had nothing that would do that. There was nothing plugged in, nothing that could have caused it. My computer was fine. It was not making that noise. So there was nothing. I had nothing. It was just an electronic noise in the middle of nowhere of nothing after those knocks. So who do you call when you have a problem like that? You call Whitley. I didn't call him. I sent him an email. I said, this just happened. Now what am I supposed to do? Says, ah, don't worry about it. They're just saying hi. They're just saying hello.

[Podcast Host]

Did. Was there a follow up to that? Because Mark had another experience the next night.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, I did not. No follow up from him and his

[Podcast Host]

experience was not a positive one.

[Peter Lavenda]

I avoided that because they like me better.

[Podcast Host]

Maybe the three knots.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sorry, Mark.

[Podcast Host]

It blows my mind. It's. I heard that story yesterday in this room and there it is again.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, that's bizarre.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. So now I want to look for that.

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm glad you said that first.

[Podcast Host]

So, you know, speaking of Whitley, I know we have to take a break. I can't help myself. There was something that you were working on with him I had never heard before that he may be suppressing memories that have to do with Nazis again.

[Peter Lavenda]

Sure. Yes. That's the reason that we basically got in contact the very first time. I was still living overseas and Unholy alliance had come out already. That came out in 95, I think it was. So I'm overseas 96, 97 already. And he manages to get an email to me, I guess through the publisher. And so we start communicating and I'm thinking, well, this is cool. This is the guy from Communion. This is Christopher Walken. So this is, you know, this is. The book was great and the movie. I love the movie, but I know, creepy. Yeah, I like the creepiness. That was the point.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

So. So we're in contact and so we're communicating. He's. This. Is this the thing about Whitley? If I can tell tales out of school, I guess I'm not violating any confidences. Whitley is a. He's a sincere guy. He's not trying to sensationalize anything. And when he contacted me, it's because he was extremely okay. He was okay with figuring out that what he was having maybe were screen memories, that the UFO stuff, the alien stuff, was a memory that was hiding something darker that he had developed this to protect himself against. And he was more than willing to accept that his experiences were not, you know, alien UFO stuff, but that they were hiding something darker. And he said, here's what. Here's the reason why. I grew up outside of Randolph Air Force Base. My father worked there. You know, we had relatives there. All this other stuff I know that struggled. This famous Nazi doctor had his aviation science operation there. He said, and I have memories of being in a room with a German guy. I guess I won't mention the name. I think that's probably between Whitley and whatever. But he gave me the name. It was a very common German name. And I have the feeling of this guy was SS or something. He was a Nazi. And I think what was going on is that these experiences seem to connect with that in some way that I can't understand. So maybe if you could find out, because since you wrote this book about the Nazis and the Nazi underground post war, maybe you can find out, well, who this guy was. You wrote about struggle, you've written about this. Maybe you can narrow in on who this might have been. Maybe we can solve this problem that way. So, yeah, that's how it started. That's how relationship started with Whitley Strieber was me looking for that. And it took years, I mean, it took decades, I would say, to find this, because a lot of those documents don't survive. Randolph was not forthcoming particularly on this either. So that was a problem. I wouldn't even know who to ask at Randolph to narrow this down. Maybe it happened off site, you know, maybe it was something that was Strughold, you know, was. Was doing. Having to do with psychiatry, having to do with mental manipulation.

[Podcast Host]

I was just going to ask, is this an MK Ultra? Is this a Bluebird?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, I mean, it's come up in conversation, right? It's a possibility.

[Podcast Host]

No, nothing definitive.

[Peter Lavenda]

No.

[Podcast Host]

Where do. Where do you land? Opinion wise, I had.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, I had a name. I had Whitley's definite insistence this was a Nazi. I wasn't so sure about SS necessarily. This could have been any Nazi, or it could have just been no SS at all. It could have been something else completely. It could have been Gestapo. He mentioned Gestapo. I said, that's not secret police. This is not what this is about. So I started to investigate it. And that meant doing a lot of investigation in South America, long distance for the most part. But there was a connection with Colombia for some reason. Now, a lot of people don't realize there was a large Nazi presence in Colombia during the war as well. There were pro Nazi sympathizers, but also Nazi agents in Colombia running stuff down there. And after the war, there was a post war Nazi presence in Colombia.

[Podcast Host]

FBI was hunting Nazis in Colombia as well?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes, they were.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I was following that up. And one thing led to another very long, tedious process as this kind of investigation is. But you'll find a school that was a kind of an international school, but designed for German speaking people, only for German speaking students. And I started to peel back the layers of that that got closed during the war mysteriously, no reason given. And then opened mysteriously after the war. No reason given. But enough after the war, not immediately after, sort of 1950s era. Ish. 52, 53 maybe. And then I found that one of the guys there had the same name as the person Whitley was looking for. And he was a teacher at the place, and he was known for, you know, having the Nazi sympathizer sympathies and everything else, but he was also involved in medicine in some way, whether it was psychiatry, psychology, or something like that. And so I managed to put it together and I said, okay, well, this is Columbia. This was the school. This was the location they were closed during the war. They reopened. This guy traveled back and forth, I know that much. And then it kind of. The trail goes kind of cold.

[Podcast Host]

What brought you to Columbia? What was the thread that pointed you down there?

[Peter Lavenda]

That's just a long. That, that's a long story. It's like, fair enough. It's documents, it's names found here, names found there, the link back to Colombia that way. And Colombia being kind of, I thought, like everybody would think Mexico or Argentina at first. Right, right. Because I was looking for. I was looking for Nazi agents in Mexico, at one point crossing the border into Texas, back and forth for another project I was working on that had nothing to do with this. And that led me, that opened up some documents and archives that I had been looking at that I then went back to and looked at. But eventually I got to Colombia. So that's what. And I started researching Nazis in Colombia because I had to do that. Right. So that's why I look older than I am. I'm actually only 25 years old. But, you know, it's so.

[Podcast Host]

And now we have to do this if you have the energy. Operation Eagle flight. Ever hear of that? It's a theory about Hitler escaping the U boats. And I think part of that theory is Bariloche is where he ends up, lives out his life, divorces Eva, new wife, that sort of thing. I was able to track down quite a bit of that. Not Hitler himself, but there were U boats bringing stuff down there, the sympathetic government, all of that. When I read that you ended up in Indonesia, I had never heard that. Can you connect those dots? And did Hitler make it out? Because I covered the jaw. The skull doesn't make sense. Digging up the body, It's a mess.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's a mess. It is a mess. 100%. And I happen to know. I've never met him, but through emails and phone calls, I know the archaeologist who used to be the state archaeologist of Connecticut who had gone to Moscow to investigate what they claimed was Hitler's skull. Right. And he came back and said, no, it's not.

[Podcast Host]

It was like a woman skull.

[Peter Lavenda]

Woman skull, yeah. Right. And it wasn't Eva. He had enough information that he could do DNA testing and he said no.

[Podcast Host]

And I think then the Soviets stopped cooperating after that embarrassment.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Because it was essential that they had the skull to their mythology. And. No, it's not. But anyway, yeah, that led me on a whole. Kush going to Indonesia. That Indonesian story is a whole story. You sure you have time for the break?

[Podcast Host]

I do you want to take a quick. We'll take a quick break and come back with that. It's too good.

[Peter Lavenda]

Whatever's comfortable for you. I'm easy.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, you are. We'll be right back. So we were talking about these. Hitler escaping and. Let's just get right to it. Do you think he did?

[Peter Lavenda]

I think that the. There's enough evidence to suggest that he did. That hasn't been investigated. I think they don't investigate it because they just say, well, he died. He died in the. In the. In the bunker. The problem is the eyewitnesses of that all have a different story.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

He shot himself. He took poison, he shot Ava, Ava took poison, Ava took poison, then he shot her. So there's all these different stories. Was he shot or did he take poison or did he do both? How did that happen? Right, so there's enough of doubt there, but the doubt comes because the. The people that were captured who knew what happened in the bunker were split among the British, the Americans and the Soviets. They all had their own witnesses telling them a different story. None of these stories matched. Right. Away, you know, there's a problem, Right? So then the second problem was burning the corpse. They say you took the corpse out outside of the bunker, they poured gasoline, they cremated it. End of story.

[Podcast Host]

And this is the Soviets.

[Peter Lavenda]

This is the obvious. Well, that obviously didn't happen.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

The amount of fuel it takes to burn a corpse, not counting he and Eva in the same at the same time. It's an enormous amount of fuel that has to be tended. Nobody was doing that. They were being bombed. So they took the bodies out, they poured some gasoline, set a fire. That was it. Those bodies would be not necessarily 100% intact, but pretty much intact.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

You would have a lot of tissue to work with. You'd have a lot of skeletal material to work with and all of that. But according to Soviets, no, they didn't have any of that. They had his skull, Right. At one point, they said they had his skull with the bullet wound in it, and that was the proof that he was dead. But then we found out, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the KGB files were opened on this case, and they told a completely different story. They found bodies. They didn't find cremains. They didn't find ashes. They found intact bodies. Okay? That was number one. They had bodies. Now they're transporting these bodies. They don't know what to do with these bodies because this could be a rallying point for neo Nazis, you know, whatever Nazis still existed. To have the body might be trigger some kind of an uprising.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

They got to bury the bodies. Yes, they bury the bodies like a week later. They dig them up and bury. Take them someplace else and bury them again. They do this a couple of times, yes. And that's in their own records. No one's making fun of them. They're actually telling you to say, this is what we did.

[Podcast Host]

And why did they do that?

[Peter Lavenda]

They didn't know what to do with it. They kept giving different. They kept getting different because it was

[Podcast Host]

like, we're waiting on orders. Bury him here. We'll come back.

[Peter Lavenda]

We'll come back and get him.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

And that's what they had to do. They came back and got him. They buried him again. They buried him again. They finally buried him under what? What would be in East Germany? A KGB headquarters in a parking lot. The parking lot paved over their graves.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

And they had this KGB headquarters, so that's where the bodies remained. Okay. There's also the dental records.

[Podcast Host]

I was just gonna ask you about that.

[Peter Lavenda]

This was so strange. Both Hitler and Eva went to the dentist In Berlin to have new dentures made. Hitler had notoriously bad teeth. He only had like one or two teeth left in his head, right? So he had to use dentures. He went and got new dentures a month before Berlin fell. What? You're in the bunker?

[Podcast Host]

You're in the bunker.

[Peter Lavenda]

There's bombs falling everywhere.

[Podcast Host]

You've lost the war for a month

[Peter Lavenda]

and you're getting new dentures?

[Podcast Host]

New dentures.

[Peter Lavenda]

Eternal optimist, Right? Ava, you get a pair of dentures, too. In fact, you get two.

[Podcast Host]

The food's great in Nuremberg, right?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yes. So two sets for each person, according to the dentist. Two sets of dentures. What would you need two sets of dentures for? Unless you're going to leave one set with the bodies and take another set with you.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

They found the dentist. That's what dentist said. Look, I can only tell you what happened. They came, they got two sets of dentures. You know, are these. Are these Hitler's teeth? Yes, those are the dentures that I made. That's Eva Braun also. But, you know, they made two, Right? Nick's neigh on the two.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So that's. That was a problem. Now a British researcher went and did all of this. It wasn't, you know, some weird conspiracy theorists. This is a British researcher saying there's some discrepancies here, man. I got to find out what this means. Okay, the other story was. Oh, Hitler could not possibly have left Berlin at the end, except Hanna Reich, his famous favorite pilot, flew into Berlin right at the end. Right. Flew right in, no problem, into Berlin, visited with Hitler, hung out with him for a while, got in the plane, flew back. As far as we know. Flew back alone. We don't know.

[Podcast Host]

Right, Right. But we do know he was there.

[Peter Lavenda]

We know he was there.

[Podcast Host]

We do. Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

So now what? Right? What's the next avenue of escape? Right, so all the stories that we have, the bunker story and everything else. Yeah, it's, it's. It's. We prefer that to be the story. Right. We prefer. That's. That's the way maybe he made the two dentures because he was planning this whole thing and maybe didn't make it out in time. That's a possibility. The problem is the Soviets do not have the skull. What happened was around. I'm losing track of the dates when that would have happened. Around 1980 or so. Whenever it was that the KGB guy became. No. Before he became premier of the Soviet Union. Anyway, I get back to it in a second.

[Podcast Host]

We're talking in drop off.

[Peter Lavenda]

No. Before. And drop off the other one. And drop off was later.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

I think. Okay. It might be Yuri Andropov.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, it might have been him. Then the same time that my Indonesia story is taking place, this other story is taking place. Some guy, some weird guy in Indonesia dies sort of unexpectedly in the town of Surabaya on the coast, the northern coast of Indonesia. He dies. Nobody pays much attention to that particular death. It becomes important later, the same time, this guy dies. Within a month, I think Andropov, I guess it was Andropov, orders the KGB to dig up the bodies of Eva and Hitler, of Adolf, and really destroy them. This time.

[Podcast Host]

And this time we mean it. Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

This time we need those bodies gone. They dug up the bodies. They took them to the bank of a river. They. And they did a complete full cremation. The ashes into the river, the whole thing. They allegedly kept the skull of Hitler with the bullet hole. As we know now. That's not true. That's not what they have. But for some reason, he took that particular moment to say, we have to destroy these. Get rid of the evidence. So they did. Testimony of the eyewitnesses all contradicts the dental records, the sightings. My problem is that the. The trip to South America. I am not on board with him going to South America surrounded by people who would have dimed him to save their own ass, quite frankly. Right. He was like the commodity. Sure. Everybody wanted this guy and they wanted him dead. So would Hitler have trusted his henchmen? Would he have trusted, you know, an Eichmann? Would he have trusted a Mengele? Any of these guys, right?

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

Klaus Barbie?

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

These guys that we know are in South America, Would he have trusted them to keep him safe?

[Podcast Host]

Would he have trusted Peron, Perrone?

[Peter Lavenda]

He might have trusted.

[Podcast Host]

I think he might have trusted.

[Peter Lavenda]

Might have trusted Peron. But then Peron would really have had to keep him under wraps from all the other Nazis. He'd have to go out of his way. Look what happened to Eichmann. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, so that was Argentina, you know, so that's. I don't know, but I think going to South America would have cost him. But Indonesia, There were things I didn't know until I started looking in that story. And then I said, well, how come I didn't know this? One of them was Hitler's closest friend was a guy called Walter Havel. H E W E L Walter Hayle. He was known as Surabaya Walley among the Nazis because why? He had been on the march for The Beer Hall Putsch with Hitler. He was an old guard guy. He was with him right at the beginning. He was a kid at the time. He was a teenager. He marched with Hitler. He was arrested with Hitler in 1923 when they had the putsch. The attempted putsch.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

Okay. He was in. He was in prison. He gets out of prison kind of early because he's a kid. He winds up in England for a short time. He gets a job with a tea trader, some guy who sells tea in Indonesia. So Wally Havel winds up in Indonesia, and when he's in Indonesia, what does he do? He establishes Nazi party offices. Everywhere, of course, all over Java, from one end to the other. Jakarta, which was not known as Jakarta, Batavia in those days, Surabaya. Everywhere. He's opening up these offices. There's photographs of these Nazi party meetings in Indonesia in the 1930s. Right. So this is Surabayawale. He has all these stories about Indonesia, how great it is and how safe it would be for Hitler because they're Muslim and, you know, they don't care about any of the stuff going on here. You might be. You might be a hero to these people. You don't know. But you'll be anonymous because they don't know what's going on.

[Podcast Host]

I'm annoyed that I don't know any of this. I never heard this theory. No, I hadn't heard about the gold either, which I. Which I think is documented.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, the documented. Yeah. So. Yeah, it is. So Walter Havel, I'm thinking, well, this is outstanding. So Hitler would have known about Indonesia because why? Havel was always telling stories about Indonesia. He was regaling everybody around with these stories. And Havel had no other job but to hang out with Hitler. He was called Ambassador without Portfolio, which is like, you know, a bullshit job. So he just sat there and hung

[Podcast Host]

out with Hitler entourage.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, he was entourage. And he was really, like, a tall guy. He was, you know, very. A dignified kind of guy. But he told all these ribald stories about growing up, all this stuff, the tea plantations and stuff. Now I'm looking at this, and I'm thinking, well, this is really strange. Indonesia and Nazis. That's kind of a stretch. And then I find out about the. The Freundes Greis, Himmler. Himmler's friendship circle. Himmler. Not Hitler, but Himmler. Himmler had what they called a friendship circle. And these were wealthy industrialists who were kind of financing Himmler and his stuff. Right. When the Nazi party couldn't have enough money These guys pooled their resources, and Himmler wanted to do this. I want to do that. I want to buy Wewelsberg Castle. Okay, no problem. So these were people. And this same Freundesgreisse friendship circle then went and they lobbied for Hitler to be instated as Chancellor. They went to the President of Germany. Hitler had lost the election in the Reichstag, but he was still alive because the Freundish Christ said, no, we need Hitler. He'll. He'll protect us from the unions and the communists. And so they bent and they put Hitler in charge. The Freundeskreis was composed of most names that people would know from the German companies. But one of the people that was there was from Indonesia. This guy was a major shareholder. He was the owner of that company, basically. And he was based in Indonesia, outside of Indonesia, in a town called Bandung, which is where all the wealthy people hang out. And if you're based in Jakarta, you live in Bandung. It's kind of cool there. It's nicer. The weather is better. So he was based there in Bandung. And there's a cemetery for Nazi U boat people in that town. You can go to that cemetery. There's a cemetery for U boat people.

[Podcast Host]

Did they set up these. These mini German cities like they did in Argentina?

[Peter Lavenda]

No, it wasn't the same like. Like in Chile or Argentina.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

It wasn't a German city. It was just kind of quiet. But, you know, you can go and visit the U boat cemetery. Why? Because there were German U boats all over Indonesia during World War II. They were transporting stuff back and forth. Oil, rubber, all the things they needed for the war effort was going back and forth. And then the Indonesian side needed other stuff. The Japanese were getting stuff from the Nazis. So there was a major trade route. So the Nazis were very, very much there in Singapore, Malaya would have been taken over by the Japanese. You had German U boats, and you had German U boats all over Indonesia, all over the port cities. And there was a Nazi party there. And during the war, of course, the Dutch were the colonial powers in Indonesia. They were taken over by the Third Reich in the Netherlands. So now the Japanese were putting people in jail who were Dutch. Right. So they were working with the Nazis to do this. And the Japanese were saying, I don't know why we're putting these people in jail. We don't put just normal people. Our war is with, you know, our wars with ideologies, not with people. Some experiments. They said, no, you got to put these guys in jail. So the woman who became known as the Happy Hooker back in the 70s, she wrote. She was. She wrote these very risque sort of biographical accounts of her life. She was one of those people who was sent to the camps in Indonesia. She was Dutch, but she was sent to Indonesia in the camps. You know, she was there already with her family. So there's a lot of connections. You start pulling this apart, and it becomes insane.

[Podcast Host]

Are there any sightings of Hitler there?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, that's where I'm getting to this. This guy that died in Surabaya was supposed to have been Hitler, according to the Indonesians.

[Podcast Host]

What year, what age?

[Peter Lavenda]

Much later. I mean, he was. Died in around 1970 something, I think.

[Podcast Host]

See, that's the thing, is, this is true. This is a massive failure of every intelligence agency on the planet.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, this is. This is the thing. So I saw a picture of this guy when I was in Indonesia. They kept talking about this, and I thought, this is bullshit. This is not true. Hitler died in the bunker. You know, I was sort of married to that idea for a long time because he died on April 30, Walpurgis night. You know, Cool. Makes sense. I like that. I was happy. Don't disturb me.

[Podcast Host]

It's neat.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's neat. I don't want to be disturbed. But they came and said, no, you got to look at this. You got to look at it seriously. You really have to. So they showed me a photograph of this guy, and I said, that's not Hitler. It's this thin, skinny, little looking guy with this mustache. He had the mustache, but that's about it. Then I saw a photograph of Hitler in the trenches in World War I. I'm thinking, oh, my God, these guys could be brothers.

[Podcast Host]

Really? Yeah, because he's kind of a scrawny kid.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, they were both kind of the same. The head shape was the same. The earlobes looked like they were the same. And they said, oh, no, we have his passport. Oh, well, that should tell me something. Could be fake, but at least it'll tell me something. Oh, the guy was born in Austria, like the same year. I'm thinking, oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. This can't be right. You know, So I started to think. I started to doubt myself, and I said, maybe, maybe. But they had his diary or a notebook of some kind, which is addresses and a diary, and it was written in Gablesberg shorthand, which is a famous shorthand that was famously studied by Eva Brown when she wanted to be a secretary. She wrote Gabelsburg. And it's shorthand. If I'm writing a diary, would I write it in shorthand or would I dictate it to somebody to take it down in shorthand? So I'm thinking, okay, this is starting to look more real. And then there was an account of an Indonesian military doctor who visited this particular guy while he was alive at his weird clinic on a remote island in Indonesia.

[Podcast Host]

Well, did you authenticate the diary?

[Peter Lavenda]

I'm getting to that. Yeah. Okay. The diary is full of stuff that really blew my mind. But anyway, so this guy goes and he. He visits. He says, this guy and his wife, they're very strange. They're German, obviously. They speak to each other in German. She kept calling him Dolph, but that's not his name. According to their records. His. His name was George. Why is she calling him Dolph? And this kind of stuff was. And he was, like, kind of, you know, spooked by it. He goes back. He was not like a World War II buff or anything, but it was like. It's just strange, people. He goes back and then he reads this article on the fake Hitler diaries. If you remember, that was back in the day.

[Podcast Host]

I did.

[Peter Lavenda]

Was this. You know, they faked the diaries. Really well done. Fake. But it was a fake. And because it was in the news in Indonesia, he saw all these photographs. He saw this stuff. He thought, holy Christ, that's the guy that I saw, you know. So he died in Surabaya. He was. He never would leave any. His little island. He was on the island of Lombok, which is kind of far east of Bali. I mean, it's. In those days, it was remote monitor, lizards this big and stuff. It was that kind of, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

And. And it was next to the Komodo Dragon Island. It's like right next door. So we're talking out there. Why would this guy. This. This. Why would he wind up there? What's the whole point? You know? So he put it all together, and he said he went to visit the widow because he died. He had converted to Islam. His wife left him. The German life. Wife left him, went back to Germany, which I found interesting. Yes, he remarried. He remarried one of the people who worked at the clinic, a nice, sweet little Indonesian lady. But in order to do that, he had to convert to Islam. So he did that. There's photographs, right? There is. Yes, there's photographs of him with his wearing Indonesian, you know, outfit and the wife and all the rest of it.

[Podcast Host]

Hand tremors or anything.

[Peter Lavenda]

One photographs not video.

[Podcast Host]

I'm just wondering, is he hiding his hand like he always.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't know. I couldn't. Couldn't tell from that. But I think by that time he was off drugs, so maybe, you know.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

But he received this emergency. He had to go to Surabaya and he hated to leave. He would never leave, not even to go to Jakarta. He would always stay in the island. He never left, except he went to Bali. And he went to Bali during 1965, during the massacres of the Chinese, where they killed hundreds of thousands of people. And he went there happy and came back happy.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

His wife, you know, we're finally getting somewhere, right? That's according to his wife's testimony, his Indonesian wife and I. There's more to that story. So anyway, so he did all that. He died. He went to Surabaya for this emergency thing. Didn't last 24 hours. He's in Surabaya. He's dead as a doornail. Nobody knows why. They say heart attack. They don't know he's buried in Surabaya, in that town. I know the grave. I know the cemetery. So I said, I'm going to go and take a look. So I go to the cemetery.

[Podcast Host]

It's.

[Peter Lavenda]

It's an Islamic cemetery, which is distinct, has distinct special nature than cemeteries you might be used to here.

[Podcast Host]

Islamic cemetery, Yeah. I didn't think they did that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Muslims, they bury for sure. Yeah. And they're very specific shaped headstones and everything else. And he's buried that way. So I went to look at the cemetery and a guide, there's a guide there, a guy walking around the cemetery. I'll take you. I know who you're looking for. I had the name written printed out. Oh, yeah, I know who. He takes me there and I'm walking through the cemetery. We get to it and he gets to the cemetery and he shows his hands and he says, Hitler.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

So I'm looking at him saying, okay, and there's the gravestone. The gravestone was missing data. Now if, you know, I spent a lot of time in Muslim countries. The, the dates are very important. Birth, like they are here. Birth of date, date of birth, date of death. That's like a given. That's always there. That wasn't in this.

[Podcast Host]

You grew up in cemeteries. You were always.

[Peter Lavenda]

Basically, I was blessing graves. I'm used to cemeteries. Yeah, I'm used to it.

[Podcast Host]

So no dates?

[Peter Lavenda]

There were no dates.

[Podcast Host]

Just George.

[Peter Lavenda]

George Anton Poch. P O C H, O umlaut C

[Podcast Host]

H. That name does Ring a bell? Maybe from here.

[Peter Lavenda]

Anton Poch. Yeah. So he was buried there. His name is there, as I believe I have photographs of it and I posted them. So they're there, but the dates were not inscribed on the stone. They were written in later, like with the Magic Marker. Doesn't make sense.

[Podcast Host]

No, no.

[Peter Lavenda]

So then I'm talking to the, to the guy and he says, oh, you know, people come in from abroad every once in a while. Foreigners, they come from Europe and they stand here and they, they're at the grave and they, they have some ceremony of some kind and then they go back. He says they come here maybe every year or so on the anniversary and they show up. The hell is showing up for this guy? Eventually I managed to see the diary, or enough of it that I could start to make sense of it and translate the shorthand, the Gabelsberger. I found somebody who knew it and could help translate it for me into German and then back into English. This might have been the actual grave of Georg Anton Poch. That might very well have been because this document is him running from the authorities, running from the Allies.

[Podcast Host]

That's the diary.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's the diary. And his hatred for the Allies and his contempt for Jews. It's all in there. Right. But this guy, as I later found out and one of my other friends then had a missing piece of the puzzle and they said, oh, my grandmother knows this story and sent me her grandmother, I think it was his grandmother, and had newspaper clippings when they were looking for him in Austria back in 1945, 46. They were going to put this guy in jail. He and his wife, they were both wanted war criminals.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

So they wind up in Indonesia, not in Argentina. So here's a leg of the rat line we didn't know existed.

[Podcast Host]

That's right, the rat. That's another rat line.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's another rat line. We didn't know this existed. We thought it was Argentina and that's it. Right. Or at least South America, Bolivia, Chile, whatever. But Indonesia, who thought?

[Podcast Host]

Did the diary tell us how he got out?

[Peter Lavenda]

Evidently, kinda. He escaped across the border into northern Italy, which was the major stopping off place for the Ratlines, because you went to Northern Italy, then you went across Italy and he had the names and addresses of the Ratline stations. They were there. I could verify them, including a few new ones we didn't know about. So the churches for the monastery route, they're in there?

[Podcast Host]

They are.

[Peter Lavenda]

They're in there in his handwriting or somebody's handwriting, but in ancient Handwriting.

[Podcast Host]

Because if this is a fake, this is very convoluted to get.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, no, I'm sure it's not a fake. I have. I've seen the passports as well. Everything, the real, the originals. So I know this is all real, this all exists. So it's there. And this, a whole other element of the rat line we didn't know existed. And that ties into the gold, it ties into 1965, it ties into the overthrow of Sukarno, all the rest of it. This guy didn't have to be Hitler, but he was a damn good imitation of one because of what he managed to have had to cause happen. And they wanted. They were looking for him. The Allies were looking for this guy. They wanted him. His wife was a famous anthropologist. She was at one point head of the Austrian Anthropological Society. She worked with the Nazi authorities in the Netherlands because she wanted specimens of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews to find out what the genetic difference might be. She had this whole plan worked out with a guy who was executed at Nuremberg.

[Podcast Host]

Do we have documentation of the Allies looking in Indonesia?

[Peter Lavenda]

Indonesia? No. Looking for him in Europe? Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Yes. And South America? Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, South America, they weren't looking for him there. They were looking for him in Europe. They thought he was still somewhere in Europe. And he remained in Europe until, like 1952. He didn't go out. And that mystified me. Why didn't the guy take off? He had all the documentation, he had all the contact information. He knew exactly how to get out. They got out through Genoa, my people, they got out that way. It's like, why didn't he go? Why didn't he go? There was a reason. Suddenly he gets very active and it's in the passports and it's in the documentation. He leaves his nice comfortable hideout in northern Italy, in the Tyrol. He leaves that, goes into Switzerland for a little while, couple of days, buy some tickets in the Netherlands.

[Podcast Host]

Switzerland was friendly to the Party, I believe.

[Peter Lavenda]

Quite. And of course, there were large accounts.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

He goes into Switzerland, then he goes to this port in the Netherlands, boards a ship, and the ship goes very leisurely through the Suez Canal and everything else to finally to Indonesia, to Batavia, to Jakarta. P. And his wife, Hella. Hella, very famous name in Austrian anthropology circles. So they both wind up there in the 50s. They go and to that bank account, right? They open up these accounts, then they go to this remote island in the middle of nowhere. Why wouldn't they have stayed in? I mean, these guys, these were people from Germany. From Austria, right? They wanted their schmaltz. They wanted whatever, right? They wanted. They want this. They had a lifestyle they wanted. No, now they're in, you know, far away. So. And she couldn't take it after a while, evidently she went home. Now you're not going to believe this part of the story because I don't either. I'm in Costco or someplace. I mean, I'm in one of these places. This is in the way in the 2000s already. I've already published the first book on Ratline on. On this guy. So I published Ratline, that's come out in 2000 something. And I get a call on my cell phone. Now, as I mentioned, I'm an introvert. I don't answer the phone. I don't want anybody to have that number. I don't give it to anybody. It's an unlisted, as far as it can be. And then the phone rings. It's number I don't know. And on a whim I answer it because I ordinarily would not. I answered the phone and it's this woman calling me from Pennsylvania. And she says, you're writing about Gerhard Georg Poch and Helle Pog. I said, yeah, I know them. They were family. Helle Poch was family? Yeah, she came back after the war, after Indonesia, she came back to Austria. I can tell you stories, Georg. Very unpleasant human being she's telling us on the phone.

[Podcast Host]

Well, how are you just chatting with her, aren't you? Like, how did you get this number?

[Peter Lavenda]

Who is this exactly? She's. Don't worry about it. Right?

[Podcast Host]

Don't worry about it.

[Peter Lavenda]

So then she, you know, she asked for an address or I figured if I give her the nurse or whatever. But she sends me, you know, a letter and she sends me some details on the story and I can't believe it, that Hella pokes like niece or something, I guess the relationship might be. Is now telling me the story of what she knows. And she says, yes, it was Hela and yes, she came back and yes, she was, you know what, what she said she was. But she came back and she was very quiet, you know, she wasn't sure if they were still looking or not for her, right? So she came back and she lived under the. Under the radar. She had been a very famous anthropologist, published everywhere, very important. Published a lot about the Middle East, a lot about all parts of different parts of the world. Her first husband was a famous anthropologist. The first guy to use tape to record songs in the field. You know, to record speech and everything else in Africa. So it was like a major, major influence. He died kind of young, and then she married. I think it was his brother, same last name. I was always mystified by that. But they cleared it up. Yeah, it was the same family. So she married this guy, and this guy became the chief medical officer of Salzburg in Austria. So as chief medical officer, he was the guy responsible for putting people out of their misery. He was the person responsible for the war against the Life Not Worthy of Living program.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[Peter Lavenda]

So people who had mental disabilities, physical disabilities, were exterminated. He was in charge of that program. That's why the authorities wanted him when the war was over. They were looking for him, and he found out they were looking for him. He had been questioned once by the authorities, and then he said, that's it. I'm out of here. He wrote that in his diary. I'm gone. He and his wife left, but they split up, and they went into the Tyrol separately. And they finally met at the Tyrol because traveling together was too obvious. So they split up, they went to the Tyrol, they met in the Tyrol, and that's where they stayed for a number of years, which to me is still mystifying.

[Podcast Host]

It's very strange.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. They could have gotten out. They could have wound up in Argentina. I mean, immediately. The paperwork was all there. They even had names of Spanish tutors to learn Spanish. It's in that diary. Plus they had a couple of other addresses that opened my eyes. There was a museum, I think, in Rome that they were using as a. As a transit point as well.

[Podcast Host]

Of course.

[Peter Lavenda]

So all this stuff was there.

[Podcast Host]

This is compelling. If George is really him, what does that mean for us in history? What can we do with that information?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, there's two things. If George was George, that's already a major thing. It is. There's a story there that has not been told. The Nazi involvement in the overthrow of Sukarno. That's one story. The other story is the rat lines to Asia. We're all looking in the wrong place, like in Indiana Jones. So, you know, there's that. All the people we haven't found, maybe that's where they are. The Nazi gold story is a story that won't go away. Okay. There's been some people who've written about that at length. They've been tracing that in all over Asia and the Japanese gold as well. It's another whole story. So there's that. But what if he was Hitler? What if that was really the story That's a whole other. That's. That's, of course, as you said, a main, huge failing of intelligence. Or deliberate.

[Podcast Host]

Or deliberate is where I lean.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know how to. I don't know how to even process or sit with that. Because no one's looking there.

[Peter Lavenda]

No one's looking. No. And, you know, the Indonesians, they've kind of. I get it. They don't want to talk about the problems that they had in 65. They don't want to talk about the problems they had in 98. There's a lot of bad blood there. There's a lot of water under the bridge that they don't really want to go back and look at that anymore.

[Podcast Host]

No, they'd be happy if that could happen.

[Peter Lavenda]

They forget it. They want to have a nice, peaceful, happy life. And dredging this up is something that they're fighting. But some groups are out there trying. No, we have to address this. We have to face it. We have to talk about it. But if you throw the Nazis into this pot, it becomes a whole other story.

[Podcast Host]

And Israel hasn't looked into this because, boy, they looked everywhere.

[Peter Lavenda]

I. I have no idea if they had. But, you know, now that you mention it, that's the story that I wanted to tell about Colonia Dignidad. That was the piece that was missing. Israel looking for war criminals. Because when I was in Chile and I was looking at Colonia Dignidad, I just found out about two years ago that Mossad had sent agents already to Chile at the same time, the same month and year that I was there looking for Walter Ralph. And Walter Ralph was the guy who created the mobile gas vans. He was one their major person on their list they wanted captured. And now we have video of Mossad agents staking out the house where Walter Ralph was in Santiago while I was down in Colonia Dignidad the same week looking for Nazis down there.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's what they meant when they told the driver they're here. That's what they meant how many and where they are.

[Podcast Host]

So they weren't saying there are Jews here is just, like, Jewish. They meant agents.

[Peter Lavenda]

They met Mossad.

[Podcast Host]

They meant Mossad is here because that is dangerous.

[Peter Lavenda]

And that I found out only recently. So much I've only found out recently about that trip in 79. It's not funny, you know?

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

And when I went after trying to get people interested in this story in 79 and nobody wanted to hear it, and I went to a lot of the. I went to some of The Jewish agencies. I went to the Simon Wiesenthal people. Yeah, right. I went to them and said, you know, I got this thing happening. Yes, I should know. No, it's okay. We know there's Germans down there. We don't. Nothing to look at. I found out later this was a deliberate decision by. By Israel. They didn't want to piss off Chile. They were in business with Chile. They were trying to get some deals done. They were kind of warming up the relationship between the two countries, doing something like Colonia Dignidad. Spilling that all over the newspapers would have been bad. Getting Walter Ralph privately. Okay. They could see that one guy, take him out, maybe take him out right there and call it a day. And nobody knows who did it. One thing. But making a big deal and going after Colonia Dignidad and making a major investigation. No, they didn't want to do it. And I found that out much later.

[Podcast Host]

And I find that hard to digest, actually.

[Peter Lavenda]

They had so much trouble with Eichmann.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Everybody criticizing them over Eichmann going to a sovereign country, kidnapping the guy, taking him back. They didn't want to go through that again.

[Podcast Host]

That's true. And I feel like it's got to be America's fingerprints on that too.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Saying, take it easy. Take it easy.

[Peter Lavenda]

Could be. Sure. Especially after the overthrow.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Now that Pinochet was in charge.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Don't rock the boat.

[Podcast Host]

Don't rock the boat. So how does an. I'm shaking. How does. How does a Nazi researcher researching occultism go into UFOs and consciousness? What's the consciousness connection? Now? That's. That's now. Now is not a leap. Yeah, but at that time it would have been only. Only Jacques Fillet, I think, was talking about that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And this is leading into my question about Cargo Cult, which I love

[Peter Lavenda]

back, you know, during the 60s. I read a lot of. I guess you'd call it popular anthropology and popular Psychology or psychiatry. I read a lot of R.D. lang, who wrote the Politics of Experience, a great book, you know, sort of mind blowing kind of book at the time. Everybody was talking about it. Then I read Victor Turner. I read the Standard. Like Margaret Mead, like the standard stuff. Right. Because it was just interesting. So I used to read that and then we would discuss it. I had friends in Brooklyn Heights. We would meet and drink coffee like 14 hours. And just at a coffee shop there. And in those days you could do that. And so we would just hang out and talk about these things. We had a lot of cross fertilization. Where that was concerned. So I found that kind of stuff fascinating and I had exposure to different points of view. People were artists, they were writers, they were musicians. So it was a kind of. There was different perspectives in all of this. And I think that that contributed to it somewhat. And the fact that I'm autodidact, right? So I had not gone to college, I didn't go to college until the 21st century. So I had been, you know, self taught on everything. And when you're self taught, you read whatever you want to read, you don't care, you know, there's no organization to it at all. So I read a lot of stuff. And so you, eventually you'll run into John Keel, you run into Valet, you have to. Then you run into weird Nazi occult books, right? And weird, you know, other things that people are telling you, different stuff that you can't believe. But you start putting things together in a way that's kind of sub rosa, you know, it's right under the table. And you, you kind of think that there's connections to things and you can't like, can't quite put your finger on it. And then when weird stuff happens to you, as it happened to me, the whole church thing, that's a consciousness thing, right? That's all about ritual. It's about how you're dressing, the effect it has on people. They immediately make certain assumptions about you.

[Podcast Host]

Symbolism.

[Peter Lavenda]

Symbolism, very much so. So symbolism is like a major thing, right? So I was reading all kinds of, you know, sort of otray kind of literature in that area, reading about liminal experiences. So you have Victor Turner talking about, you know, there's the, there's this place which is regular, this is a sacred place. And there's a spot between, right. The transition, the transition between the two. And that was, you know, very fascinating stuff. And you read Jung because in the

[Podcast Host]

60s you have to read Jung and his synchronicity story.

[Peter Lavenda]

Synchronicity story is very important. So all of this and direct experience of weird stuff makes you think that there is something more to everything than meets the eye. If you're living an ordinary life, God love you. Because if you can, if you can lead an ordinary life without having these experiences without being introduced to something different, except maybe it's a nightmare or a spooky sound one day or something and that's it and you forget about it. Well, that's great, right? But if you live in a world where weird things happen to you all the time, you tend to pay attention.

[Podcast Host]

I'm glad you said that because you're one of those people. Yesterday I spoke to Mark. He's one of those people with all these experiences. People listen and they're like, oh, I wish that stuff would happen to me. You kind of don't.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right, right.

[Podcast Host]

You kind of don't.

[Peter Lavenda]

You kind of don't. Because it will change your life.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Because now you're looking. Always looking.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. You're always looking. You're always sensitive to it, you know, when it happens. Yeah. That's what I. That's what I mean. God love you if you don't have this, because you're. You're kind of secure, you know? And if you're listening to this, to this particular broadcast right now, there's, like, spooky stuff happening. Right. And you're listening to all these things happening. But it's. There's an entertainment value aspect to it.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

And if it stays that way, that's cool. Right. But there's some of you listening that you're going to hear this and it's going to resonate with something that's happened to you.

[Podcast Host]

It will.

[Peter Lavenda]

And it's happening to you now or it's happening to you later. It will happen to you. It has happened to you in the past. And now you're starting to put things together, and that's when it gets a little tricky. You can go off the handle completely and you can say, wow, I'm talking to God, you know, or I'm the incarnation of, you know, Cthulhu. You know, all those things are possible happen to me. But seriously speaking, things like this happen, and you take them too seriously. You can take. You can identify with them too much.

[Podcast Host]

That's a good point.

[Peter Lavenda]

Because what happens then is you close off to the rest of the experience. You don't want to do that. Once you've got this ball rolling, you might as well see it through. If you close it and you say, no, this means this. You've missed the boat. You're. You're. You're deluding yourself, really, because there's so many other things that will talk to you that will expand and elaborate on what you're experiencing that make it more clear, make it more obvious what's going on. You'll feel a bit more comfortable with it later on as well, eventually. But you'll be able to put it together and say, this is happening. For this reason. Now I'm beginning to understand why this is going on.

[Podcast Host]

That's a good point. You have to walk that line between wanting it and seeing Something that's not there, and just relax and let it happen.

[Peter Lavenda]

And then recognize, because it will continue to happen. It may not happen tomorrow, but it will happen next week or a month from now. And when it happens, it's going to be one of these things where you say, oh my God, really?

[Podcast Host]

Because you're surprised every time.

[Peter Lavenda]

Absolutely. So you're not looking out of left field.

[Podcast Host]

It's like, here I am again.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right, Here I am again. And the synchronicities. I mean, my books, let's be honest, they're not up there with James Patterson, they're not selling multimillion dollars of copies. So you have a rather smaller but dedicated readership and they notice things. Yes, I don't need millions of people to do it. I need the thousands or the 50,000 or whatever to sit there and say, okay, we noticed this, this is here, this is there, and you didn't notice it. Here it is. Right. You can't put a price tag on that. That's perfect. And it also shocks me every single time it happens, and it shouldn't, but it does. Somebody comes out of left field and said, but you said this here, and now you're saying it over there. Don't you see the connection? I'm thinking, well, yeah, now that you mention it, now that you make me feel like an idiot. Yeah, I do. But this happens all the time. You cross the Rubicon at some point. And I mentioned it some time ago, somebody asked me about, you know, how do people protect themselves from this? And I say, well, this is the problem. You can read a lot of books about it and you'll be safe. You know, all those books that you're reading, you can chalk it up to fiction. You can say it's fiction. You can say the non fiction books are fiction, they're fake in some way or something. It's very popular now to say what you don't agree with is fake. You can protect yourself that way. You light that first candle in that first attempt to talk to something else. It's over for you, babe.

[Podcast Host]

It's it. Now you're in.

[Peter Lavenda]

You can stop it, you can blow that candle out, you can say, sorry, only kidding, but you've opened a door.

[Podcast Host]

So the connection between consciousness and UFOs. Whitley said the same thing. Yes, just sit with it and it

[Peter Lavenda]

will be there because it's part of our reality. It's there only now because of our technology. We have cameras, we have tape recorders, we have video. We're now recording something. And this is the tricky Part, right? I have a dream. I'm not recording it, Right. I don't see it later on and look at it and say, well, that was really weird. That doesn't happen. Right. So you could have chopped everything off. All religious experience to delusion.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

Chalk it off.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

You're deluding yourself. That's it. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Throw it out.

[Peter Lavenda]

But now you got it on tape. Now you have a meteor that stops and changes direction, right. You've got weird stuff like that happening. You can't explain it. Now, why are we talking about consciousness? Because that is the interface. Now they're saying, guess what? Right before we were angels and demons. Well, now we're craft, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that.

[Peter Lavenda]

And now you see us and now you don't. And now it's one craft. Oh, no. We split into three. We split into 12. Oh, now we're back into one again.

[Podcast Host]

That's right.

[Peter Lavenda]

Explain that, assholes. So it's that kind of thing, you know, that's why it's consciousness. Because now we need the tools to understand that. We need to understand what we've known for millennia as people who've been either religious or not religious, but having these experiences, having basically paranormal or occult experiences. We now have to get to the point where these experiences are now becoming material, materialized in front of us. They are materializing. The Tic Tacs materialized in and out. They were there and then they weren't. You know, they decide when and where. That is an effect on our consciousness that's almost impossible to over emphasize because we can't explain it. So we don't look at it right. We file it away like it's not happening. But now we can't get away from that anymore. So that is a consciousness problem. You know, is this a material thing or not? Is this some ectoplasm that's able to appear on photographic plates on our radar that we can see it? And then they're suddenly. They're not there. They're screwing with us. Yes, deliberately. So they know what they're doing. I think I'm making that assumption because they seem to be operating according to a kind of cause and effect. They turn off our missile bases, turn them back on again.

[Podcast Host]

It feels like Loki coming out of the ether or the Jinn playing with us.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Which means that all those old stories had some truth to them.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, and I believe they did.

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, so do I. Now I have to go back and reevaluate all this and say, what is. What does it mean that's a consciousness problem? It's not a technology. You can do the technology thing till the cows come home, but until we understand how we perceive, how is this perception situation going? What is consciousness made out of? Because that's consciousness, too.

[Podcast Host]

That's the question. Because we could talk about ancient Sumerian, we can talk about Anunnaki. And I'm on board. I'm on board with the Promethean theories. That's not the big question, though. The big question is, what's going on? Is this consciousness? Are we all connected? Are we being guided? How many different entities exist? What is. I mean, what's going on? What does it mean? Why is it. Why does it suddenly feel like it's accelerating? Art Bell would call it a quickening.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah. Because of our technology. Our technology has made it less possible for them to hide. Maybe in the old days, we didn't have cameras. We didn't have photographic evidence. There's nothing like that. Someone came and said they saw a spaceship. Yeah, okay, fine. Now, here's the picture.

[Podcast Host]

Right?

[Peter Lavenda]

Now, of course, with a slop. We got too many of them.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, that's true.

[Peter Lavenda]

Now, that's a problem. And that's devaluing the entire field to an extent. It'll fix itself later, but right now, what we have to ask ourselves is, whatever that is, let's assume it has consciousness. What does that mean for our consciousness? Is it the same consciousness? Does it come from the same source?

[Podcast Host]

That's what I mean.

[Peter Lavenda]

Is it totally different? Right. We don't understand ours well enough to understand theirs, and they're forcing us. Pay attention.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

Pay attention to what this is. It doesn't necessarily mean it's hostile, but I understand the defense departments around the world saying, well, we can't take that chance. Right. We have to develop some kind of a defensive position here where these things are concerned. They're turning off missile bases. They're imitating missile attacks, you know, as they did with the Soviet Union. Can we, like, live with this, you know, constantly?

[Podcast Host]

And, look, I don't think they're dangerous, but I still want my government to be prepared, just in case. Yeah, so do that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Or the corollary to that is our governments have no sovereignty over our own skies. In fact, over our own seas or maybe our own land. The corollary to this is, if you can't defend us to it, what are you good for? Because this looks like a bigger existential threat than any of these countries that we're constantly screwing with. Right? So shouldn't you be defending us against that? Well, we don't know what it is. We don't know where they live. We don't know what they are. We don't know what they want. We can't go and bomb their cities because we have no idea where they are or if they have cities or if that even makes any sense or if we could bomb them. Which means they don't have legitimacy as government. That's the one. If you're wondering why there's no disclosure. That's why there's no disclosure.

[Podcast Host]

That's absolutely true.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's it in a nutshell. It's not because they have alien bodies or they have a flying saucer. Maybe they do, I don't know. But they can't come out and say what they really know to be true, which is that they don't know.

[Podcast Host]

Is there a cabal? And maybe that's the too dark of a word. Is there a group of kind of controlling disclosure that live above sovereign nations, above the government? The Majestic 12, the whatever, the builder, whatever theory or conspiracy is. Is that a thing?

[Peter Lavenda]

I mean, such groups existed in the past. They existed during Cold War. We had scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain secretly communicating with each other. Not just the Nazis, but our own people.

[Podcast Host]

That table of nine really did change history.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. So you have that going on. You have groups like that that did exist. Are they the same as the Illuminati? Is it something like this? No, I don't think so. But they're still human beings. They're still fallible.

[Podcast Host]

Yes.

[Peter Lavenda]

They're still weak. They have weaknesses that we don't, you know, that everybody has. So this idea of this super secret organization that's, you know, militarized to the death and is controlling everything, I doubt that very much. I know a lot of people. I wouldn't. No, I don't think so.

[Podcast Host]

Couldn't keep a secret and we're too greedy and selfish.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. Greedy and selfish and frightened and terrified. And maybe having moral qualms. And you can't keep it. You can't keep something like that operating for too long. So my feeling is that kind of a cabal does not exist. But are there people who have seen things and decided to shut up about it and told their subordinates to shut up about it? Yeah. And if all those subordinates got together and compared notes, would they have disclosure? They'd have something like it. It wouldn't be real disclosure. It would be what they're being told not to look at, not to say, not to reveal. And what that is may not be Very much. But it may be the revelation that people that we have in charge don't know what the hell's going on up there. That may be the disclosure, and that's what they're afraid to unleash. Now, if they suddenly release all the UFO documents they have to me, physical impossibility, but let's just say they can and they do it and they release all this stuff, Is that gonna tell us anything more than we don't know already?

[Podcast Host]

I don't think they're gonna release it, and I don't think it would tell us anything if they did.

[Peter Lavenda]

I don't think so.

[Podcast Host]

I really don't think so.

[Peter Lavenda]

There'll be a lot of stuff. There'll be a lot of documents with names and places, and we'll be forced to try to make some sense out of it. And it'll take years to. And by that time, there'll be a new sets of documents and new players on the field. So if let's. Let's characterize it this way. Let's make it easy. What if we're not talking about UFOs? What if we're talking about witchcraft?

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

There's people out there who perform witchcraft ceremonies.

[Podcast Host]

Sure.

[Peter Lavenda]

Some are people with a pedigree going back hundreds of years as witches. Most are not. There are covens. They come in and they come out of existence. Are we covering up anything about the covens? Is there documentation? We're holding back on witchcraft, right? Not really. Right. No. If we're talking about magic spells, do they work? There's going to be some scientists that say, yes, they work. Sometimes. I know you're diluted. Some scientists that say, well, there's physical properties that could be construed as. And you're going to get all of this. It's not disclosure.

[Podcast Host]

It's not. Here's. Here's all the remote viewing documents. Have at it.

[Peter Lavenda]

Right. We got them.

[Podcast Host]

Right. Have at it.

[Peter Lavenda]

We got the Stargate stuff.

[Podcast Host]

Yep.

[Peter Lavenda]

We got the gateway tapes. We got all kinds of stuff we can do on this.

[Podcast Host]

Go ahead and chew on that.

[Peter Lavenda]

Nobody's doing it.

[Podcast Host]

No.

[Peter Lavenda]

Why? Because they're looking for a smoking gun. You want to know what Stargate was all about? Do the damn Stargate stuff. Do it. Do the remote viewing. You want to find out about it? It's a consciousness thing, Right. You're not going to find proof in the documents. The documents don't tell you. You've got to do it. There's a line in the Bible that I quote a lot. People hate Me. For faith without good works is dead. Okay? Martin Luther hated that line. He wanted faith to be enough. But I'm a firm believer that you can't have one without the other. You've got to actually physically get involved in order to understand what this is all about. You can't just read the books because everybody's well meaning. Mostly when they write these books, right, they're trying to tell you, I'm doing the same thing. We're all trying to explain it. But if you actually go. And just one impulse from a vernal wood will teach you more of man, of moral evil and of good than all the sages can.

[Podcast Host]

I don't know that one.

[Peter Lavenda]

That's a poem. I learned that in high school, I think, and I. Now I've just forgot the author. Anyway, it's this idea of you actually experiencing something which makes all the philosophizing about it suddenly put into a very calm perspective, very narrow perspective. The experience will tell you more. I'm not recommending everybody go out there and start lighting candles and talking to orbs and trying to make, you know, saucers appear.

[Podcast Host]

I would actually recommend against.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, I would as well. But my point is that the disclosure will be more like that than anything else. It will be people talking about weird stuff that happened that they can't explain because what else are they doing? If they're aliens, they're not talking to the President of the United States. They're showing up in your backyard. They don't care.

[Podcast Host]

There's no treaty with Eisenhower.

[Peter Lavenda]

No, there's no treaty, believe me. There's no treaty with Eisenhower. That can't happen. Right? So if that's not happening, what is happening? If UFOs have been cited since the beginning of recorded history, as Jacques Vallee has a book out with that, if that's true, then no, it's not tech the way we understand it. What tech did they have? A thousand bc, Right? What was it? So it was something different, right? It wasn't tech. During the Great Airship Mysteries, right, where the airships are floating along, you know, across the country and into Europe. That wasn't tech. It was seen, it was observed, it was reported on. Wasn't tech. But now we're saying, oh, no, it's all tech. It must be tech. It has to be tech. I love that. In a sense, I wish it was. I wish it was tech, because that would explain everything. We didn't have to worry about consciousness.

[Podcast Host]

Well, then tell us why we're a cargo cult, because that kind of Leads into it. Why? We're. Why?

[Peter Lavenda]

Well, that's it. That's it. That's the. That's the key. That's the thing that. I think Tom and I came up with this in the very beginning of the to the stars thing, Secret Machines program. Tom said, what we need is like a mission statement. We need to talk to these people and show them something that we have these advisors that he was going to talk to. And I said, okay, let me write the first chapter of Secret Machines just from my perspective how we're going to go about it. And I said, it's a cargo cult. What we're talking about is a cargo cult. And what does that mean? Back in the day, long time ago, about 100 years now, in the South Pacific, there were planes landing on remote islands to support. At first, to support archaeologists, explorers, but then later during World War II, to fight the Japanese, or the Japanese were landing the planes to fight the Americans and the British or whatever. So planes would land on these remote islands and there are people living basically Stone Age technology in Papua New guinea, for instance, in places of that nature, they look up and they see something coming out of the sky that they've never seen in their life before, making a hell of a lot of racket and then sailing down like a canoe, but through the air and landing on this airstrip that a bunch of explorers have hacked out of the wilderness. And this thing lands, and out of the back of this plane, it opens up and all this stuff comes out.

[Podcast Host]

Treasures. Treasures beyond imagination.

[Peter Lavenda]

Things these people have never seen that didn't know existed. Forget the plane. They didn't know that existed. They're seeing all of this, and it has this profound effect on people who. It's a consciousness problem, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yes, it was.

[Peter Lavenda]

Not a tech problem. It wasn't. We don't have the tech. It's like we don't know what the hell this is. Is it real? Are we dreaming? So they decide to answer that question. What they have to do is create their own airstrip. So they go back to their villages and say, let's do what they did. Let's make this airstrip. Let's build a tower out of bamboo. Right, Right. They had lights. Let's have. Let's have candles, let's have torches. Let's see if one of these things can land and give us stuff.

[Podcast Host]

The steel gods will come and bestow treasure upon us.

[Peter Lavenda]

It was a religion, sure, wasn't it? I mean, it was a religion based on tech, somebody else's tech, but it Was religion not based on their tech, but based on what they saw, what they perceived. And I said, that's human society. Since the first contact was made, we don't know when that was made. But at some point, we were hunter gatherers. We were happy. We were wandering around, you know, just here and there. 200,000 years of our homo sapiens sapiens wandering around, being perfectly happy to do that. Then at some point, something happens, Something clicks. And we all around the globe, all around the same time, said, oh, no, no, no, no. We got to build cities, we got to build fortresses, we have to build temples, we have to chart the stars.

[Podcast Host]

Why do we need to chart the stars? We were fine.

[Peter Lavenda]

We were fine. We don't need. We don't need no stinking stars. We're out there, we're just wandering off. And we have food. We have everything we need. We follow the herds wherever they go.

[Podcast Host]

But no, we have to track stars for generations. We have to do this.

[Peter Lavenda]

Who does that? You know the thing that I always amazes me? Babylon, right? We consider Sumer to be like the first civilization. Probably not, but that's what we say. Somebody there sat on their back every night for hours, for days, weeks, months and years. They didn't have writing per se. They had cuneiform clay tablets. And they're marking positions of stars. They're staring at that thing, which is nothing but dots of light, and they're saying, no, there's one moving. There's one that's not in the same place that it was five weeks ago. Right? I know it's changed who does that, right? What's the motivation behind that? Who can do that? Who finances that? What society said, okay, your job is to do this. Not just one person, but a lot of people, right? They're doing all this, charting and mapping their star charts from ancient, ancient Sumer. What?

[Podcast Host]

Why are they tracking Venus's eight year cycle?

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

How long did that take? And why are you doing that?

[Peter Lavenda]

Right?

[Podcast Host]

That's bad for agriculture.

[Peter Lavenda]

Unless someone came down and said, you should do this.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, because this will lead to this will lead to this.

[Peter Lavenda]

Someone from there, yes. Came down and said, you should do this.

[Podcast Host]

The sky people, the sky gods.

[Peter Lavenda]

Like that, like that scene in Close Encounters of the Third kind, right? They go to India, where's the sound coming from? Everybody points up that, right? That's the reason that, to me, is where we are now. We are the cargo cult. Our medicine, our science, everything is based on this idea of achieving immortality and going to the stars, getting off Planet.

[Podcast Host]

That's true.

[Peter Lavenda]

Everything. That's the motivation behind it all, behind all the technology, behind all of everything, started with people saying, we need to go there and we need to live forever to do that. The DNA, as I mentioned many times, the people are sick of hearing it. The DNA wants us dead. The DNA wants us to reproduce and get out of the way. The DNA wants to reproduce itself constantly without being stopped. So you have to have kids and the kids have to have kids, and the kids have to have kids and you have to die because you're taking up too many resources. Sure. But there's something inside of us that's not happy with that. We're not ready for that. We want to live forever. So part of us is kind of this Promethean instinct to live forever, to constantly be there, because Prometheus basically lived forever, not very happily. And the other part wants to go off planet, wants to go to the stars. Our dead gods, right? Our dead pharaohs become stars. Right? The pharaohs. The famous ceremonies of mummification were designed to enable the pharaoh to take his place among the stars. Not among the people, not among the Earth, not here in Egypt. But he was going to go up there, the afterlife, follow the stars of the dipper to the polestar and sit on the throne and be immortal.

[Podcast Host]

Is that something within us calling us home?

[Peter Lavenda]

Something, Maybe, yes. Something came down and said, wake up.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[Peter Lavenda]

So whether it's calling us home or maybe somebody up there is lonely, I don't know. But they've come down and they said, you're going to go off planet. You're going to achieve immortality, and you're going to do it by starting this way. You're going to learn writing, you're going to learn mathematics, you're going to learn astronomy. Why? No, believe me, you're going to need.

[Podcast Host]

Trust us.

[Peter Lavenda]

Astronomy. Yeah. You're going to need all this stuff. You need to plant stuff. You're going to reap and sow and reap. That's kind of planetary. You're going to have to look up at the planets also. So there's this idea that you're going to have to do all of this. Our medicine is designed to what, to keep us alive forever? That's our mind. To kill illnesses, to keep us alive.

[Podcast Host]

My. I feel like we're going to be able to do it. Am I in the cargo cult? I feel like we're going to be able to get there someday.

[Peter Lavenda]

No. I think so. I think we will be able to get there. I think we're on the way, you know, and we're on the way to the stars as well.

[Podcast Host]

Kind of kinda.

[Peter Lavenda]

Maybe there's a way of getting to the stars that's not the way we're looking at. Maybe that's where the consciousness comes back in.

[Podcast Host]

I think there is last thing for you. And I'm throwing these away now. Now we're just two guys from the Bronx.

[Peter Lavenda]

Two guys from the Bronx.

[Podcast Host]

We ate at the same restaurants. Our cousins were whacked. Hey, that's how it was down in East Stream, on Arthur Avenue. Best bread in the city. Arthur Avenue. During this discussion, which I loved, a couple of times I had to pause and process. I've never had to do that. And the Hitler stuff actually shook me to my core. And I kind of not sure why, but you've spent 30 years in the darkest corners of human psyche. Have you ever been shaken? Are you. Are you a darker person or are you more hopeful? How has this not affected you?

[Peter Lavenda]

That's an interesting question. I don't think I've ever heard it put quite that way. I think, basically, I understand that what we live through is a. A kind of a game. It's a kind of a glass bead game. It's something that. It happens not only here where we can see it, it happens where we can't see it. And once you're kind of sensitive to that understanding that you know that things are happening in both places simultaneously, that what's happening here is kind of a simulacrum of something taking place someplace else, you feel a little bit better about it. Not 100%, because there's a lot of cruelty, a lot of horrible things take place on this planet. Not just recently, always. It's always been that way. People have called this a prison planet. Right? Are we in prison here for some reason? And the famous writer Wilhelm Reich, he once wrote about that, saying that we are in a kind of a prison. The problem is there's a big exit sign. And every time somebody sees the exit sign and they point to it, he gets beaten up by everybody else. So they don't want you to see the exit sign. They feel intimidated by it. There is a way out, and we just have to work to find it and to accept it when we hear it. Right. Most of the plans we have for solving our problems are not that imaginative. Unfortunately, we have small plans to tackle big problems. We don't tackle the big problems where they are. And unfortunately, consciousness is part of that problem. We're dealing with people who feel and think and operate are motivated by different ideas than the rest of us. So everybody's being motivated by something else. So the problems are not really medicine, it's not really science. It's really. It becomes more political. It becomes more people's desire to improve themselves, to save themselves, to save other people around them. And to do that, they feel they must enslave and trap or kill people who are not on their side. And that just balloons. And it balloons. And it balloons. We're frightened of our reality. We're frightened of this planet. We're never at home here 100%.

[Podcast Host]

But how are you? Not how everybody. How is Peter with this? How do you sit with this? Honestly, this is just so heavy.

[Peter Lavenda]

There are people in this world who make that easier, right?

[Podcast Host]

That's a beautiful answer.

[Peter Lavenda]

Yeah, those are the people that. You find those people and that makes it all easier. That ameliorates the feelings very much. You suddenly realize there's this other person or these other people, they have their consciousness, they're living in the same world I am. And look at them, right? They're happy. Or maybe they're not happy, but they're seeing it differently than you are. They're seeing a way out. Don't make fun of their exit. Right? Don't make fun of the way they, they deal with things that are happening. Right? Learn to learn. Learn to learn to learn from them, you know, because they're the ones that are helping you. They're, they're, they're keeping you on an even keel. Maybe by something they say, some offhand remark. Remember, all these coincidences that are happening, they're happening with personal relationships as well. There are people who are saying the right things at the right time. And that always happens, right? And that always sets you on the right place. Just when you're getting dark, somebody has the right thing to say, the right gesture, the right whatever. And suddenly you're okay, you're okay for the next round, whatever that happens to be.

[Podcast Host]

And you're okay.

[Peter Lavenda]

Oh, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

This is a perfect answer. Perfect way to end it. Peter Lavenda. A joy, a treat. I hope you come back. Thank you so much.

[Peter Lavenda]

Thank you.

[Podcast Host]

We'll have a slice.

[Peter Lavenda]

We'll have a slice. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Goodbye, everybody. Okay, so that was one of my most favorite conversations ever. Peter does a lot of interviews and everybody usually skips right to the Hitler stuff or the UFO stuff, the JFK stuff. But my favorite part of all of that was the story of a fake priest as a 17 year old, dodging the draft and ending up crashing Bobby Kennedy's funeral. I mean, I did a lousy job hosting because I kept bouncing in my chair and I was yelling, you gotta be effing kidding me. So sorry about that. Anyways, analysis. Peter Lavenda is a real researcher. He's not an armchair guy. Unholy alliance came out in 1995. The sinister forces trilogy is a beast. I mean they're like that thick. Three volumes covering the intersection of American politics, intelligence and the occult. He co wrote the Secret Machine series with Tom DeLong through to the Stars. These are published, cited, reviewed, and the man has a huge body of work. Colonia Dignidad was real. A German sect like settlement in Chile run by Paul schaeffer. Founded in 1961. The UN published a report in 1976 linking it to Pinochet's torture apparatus. Amnesty International confirmed this. Schaeffer was eventually arrested in Argentina in 2005 and convicted of child abuse. He died in a chilean prison in 2010. That place existed exactly the way people described it. The Maury island incident. That's surreal. I've covered it. June 1947. Harold Dahl and Fred Chrisman, the two Air Force officers who collected the debris, did die when their B25 crashed. Fred Chrisman was later subpoenaed by Jim garrison during the JFK investigation. Guy Banister's FBI. All the airtales about UFOs, they're in the National Archives. These connections between early UFO incidents and the Kennedy assassination. They're documented. Now whether they mean what Peter thinks they mean is another question. But the threads are there. The Nazi Tibet Expedition of 1938-39 that happened, led by Ernst Schaeffer under Himmler's authority. They brought back a complete edition of the Kangyer, the Tibetan sacred texts. Photographs of SS officers with swastika flags are in Tibet. You can see them. Peter found this material at the National Archives on microfiche, before anyone else was writing about it or taking it seriously. Now the bigger stuff. The nine. In December 1952, Andrea Purich brought an Indian mystic named Dr. D.G. vinod to his Roundtable foundation in Maine. Nine people attended. They included Arthur Young, the inventor of the Bell helicopter, and Alice Bovary, born an Aster. The medium channeled entities that called themselves the Nine. Porich later brought Yuri Geller into the fold. And Geller reportedly channeled the same entities. Ruth Forbes Payne, Young, author's wife, was the mother in law of Ruth Payne, the woman who housed Lee Harvey Oswald's wife and got him the job at the Texas School book depository. That chain of connections is real. I can't tell you what it means, but it's real. The Hitler Indonesia theory. That was crazy. Now, Peter's book, Ratline, traces a documented war criminal named, forgive me, George Anton Kuch, an Austrian doctor wanted by the Allies. He escaped through the rat lines to Indonesia in the early 1950s. His wife, Hella, was a prominent anthropologist who collaborated with Nazi authorities. Peter found the passport, the diary written in Gabelsberger shorthand, and the grave in Surabaya. Whether Puch was connected to something larger, that's the question Peter's still asking. The Indonesians have their own. Own theories. Now, the diary has addresses in it that match known Ratline stations. So I don't have an answer for you in this one either. But again, the documentation is there. That Men in Black story, that took a turn I didn't expect. Now, I can't verify our personal experience, but Peter's not the only one who's reported encounters like that. Timothy Goode, John Keel, Jacques Vallee, they've all documented cases where the phenomenon seems to interact with research researchers directly, not through technology, through something else. But here's what's sticking around. Peter said something near the end that I keep thinking about. He said, we're a cargo cult. All of human civilization. The temples, the star charts, the medicine, the rockets. It's all one long response to something that showed up and said, wake up. Now, I don't know if he's right, but I can't seem to shake it. Now. You can find Peter's books anywhere books are sold. He's got a lot of them.

[Peter Lavenda]

Buckle up.

[Podcast Host]

They're thick. They're worth it, but they're. They're intimidating. Unholy alliance, the Sinister forces trilogy. The 20th anniversary edition of that is out right now. Ratline, the Secret Machines with Tom delong. He's also on Substack and active on social media if you want a Y Files take on some of Peter's stories. I've covered some of them. There's the Maury Island Incident, the CIA Men in Black, and the plot to take out jfk. That was weird because. Because I hadn't stumbled across Peter's research yet. So this is inside baseball. I'm off script. When the Mori island incident came up in. In our, like, our story pitch meetings, I didn't want to do it because it sounded stupid. It sounded silly. You know, the slag and the dead dog. It just sounded too weird. But I looked into the characters, you know, started pulling the threads And I came across Fred Christman and that led me to Guy Bannister. And I was like, I know that guy. And that led me to jfk. And then I told the team, this is not a UFO story. This is a JFK story. So when I came across Peter later and saw he made the same connections, oh, it was so satisfying. And his books have so much more detail. I wish I got his research when I was working on the episode. It would have been helpful. But his books, they're amazing. Back on script if you like the Hitler escape stuff, I did Operation Eagle Flight, the escape from Berlin to Bariloche. Now, I didn't make the Indonesia connection. I didn't even see that coming. Mine goes to Argentina and Central America, where everybody else does. It's still a fun episode. If the occult stuff is interesting to you. I have an episode called Symbols of Power. But good luck finding it. It's so demonetized and buried, but it is there. It's about occult organizations and the intelligence community. I wonder why I can't find it. Until next time, be safe, be kind and know that you are appreciated.

[Peter Lavenda]

A secret code inside the Bible says

[Podcast Host]

that I was

[Peter Lavenda]

I love my UFOs and paranormal fun as well as music so I'm singing like I should but then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends and it never ends no, it never end. I feel the crap cat and got stuck inside Mel's home with MKOTRU I'm being only 2 aware Dude Stanley Kubrick face the moon landing alone on a

[Podcast Host]

film set or were the shadow people

[Peter Lavenda]

there aliens Just f the smiling man I'm told and his name was cold But I can't believe I'm dancing with the fishes Hand to fish on Thursday nights Wednesday J2 and W. Through the night. The math man sightings and the solar

[Podcast Host]

storm still come to a God the

[Peter Lavenda]

secret city underground mysterious number stations planet circle to project Stargate and what the dark watchers found. Fish head fish on Thursday next week they J2 and the weapons. When I ever wanted was to the. Dance your k love to dance on the dance floor because she is a camel and camels love to dance when the feeling is right Always in time. Sa.