Strangely, this is not a conspiracy theory story.
Strangely, this story is one of the roots of the Pandemic, but that's going to take some time and several articles to fully explain.
The world seems pretty crazy just now. Exceptionally crazy, really, unless you're just not paying attention. But all that craziness had roots. There are many debated roots of the current problems of the world, including
The Inception of the Federal Reserve System
World Wars
The Cold War
The end of the gold standard
The inceptions of ideological organizations interested in shaping world governance such as the World Economic Forum, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Club of Rome, etc., particularly during the 1970s.
The truly inexplicable popularity of Oprah
Runaway regulatory capture
I could probably add to this list all day before debating out which are truly roots of the Tree of Modern History, but readers can feel free to offer their own suggestions. However, I'm going to offer up one that might be unexpected to most people: the Stargate Project.
Strangely, this is not a conspiracy theory story. In fact, what I would like to do is nip a lot of false public information about the Stargate Project in the bud. Much of the public image of the Stargate Project has already grown out of control. As I said, this is going to take a few articles.
Getting Paid for Cosplay
Imagine that you're a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. After two tours leading troops in Vietnam, you're invited into a military think tank called Task Force Delta. You are tasked with thinking things up.
Military personnel and veterans may already be a little confused by that think tank's name since Task Force [Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,...] is already a generalized and repeated term for various operation-specific mission-focused military teams. Also, Delta Force is a well-known Special Forces unit. Of course, all of this makes internet searches a little more difficult. Don't let it bug you. Let's move on with the story…
So, you have this wonderful and far less risky job of thinking things up. And it's your turn to present a powerpoint to other thinkers in the tank. For whatever reason, you start to think about what kinds of superpowers would be cool for soldiers.
Of course, you understand that this is the military. You're surrounded by serious people with serious responsibilities who don't want to waste their time with serious bullshit. So, you skip over comic book tropes like laser eyes.
Instead, you use your experience leading troops through the jungle to burn down Vietnamese villages to imagine superpowers that are extensions of genuine military action.
You reimagine intuition and situational awareness expanded into "psi awareness".
You reimagine psychological operations as "mind control".
You reimagine forward intelligence as psychic remote viewing.
You reimagine stealth maneuvers as "invisibility".
You invent the idea of "bursting clouds with your mind" completely out of thin air (pardon the pun).
ESP is still ESP, so long as you can fast talk your way through it while continually shifting focus to the things soldiers already do.
You justify it as achievable through meditation.
On the "out there" end of the scale, you toss in (1) staring at goats until they die and (2) walking through walls as stretch goals because they certainly sound like things that help defeat combative enemies.
There is absolutely no way anyone could get away with this absurd story at a military think tank.
Apparently, if you present it with full confidence, enthusiasm, and with a straight face, all while highlighting the fear that the Soviets might do it first, it happens. It gets funded to the tune of $20M, eventually expanded to $50M, and it gets pushed by the general tasked with reinventing the Army's entire intelligence structure. Seriously.
This has to be some kind of joke.
It's not. Well, it might have been at first, really. Who's to say? But it did actually happen. Behold:
(Apologies for the wrong link to the above video initially)
That's not a video of an asylum inmate. This man in that video was Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon and Commander of something called the First Earth Battalion.
Didn't I mention that this is not a conspiracy theory tale?
Does it creep anyone else out that Joss Whedon's Avengers story involves a villain who kills half the people in the universe?
Just asking.
The Utopian Futurist Jim Channon: Saving the World
You might wonder whether or not Channon believed in the superpowers he thought up, and where he took his spontaneously imagined philosophy. Channon spent two years in the late 70s reading the "counterculture magazine" Whole Earth Catalog and studying New Age culture on the Army's dime, primarily in California. Probably not a bad gig if you can get it. His notion of Super Soldier (or "warrior monk" as he called them) powers were the collection of claims and notions of New Age gurus that were eventually codified as the Human Potential Movement.
It occurs to me that naming a group of paranormal abilities both inside the military and outside in counterculture America has a weird way of normalizing and lending credibility to their existence or pursuit. Moving on…
Channon eventually left the military, but remained in touch with the top brass while other military leaders headed units that studied his proposed techniques. Outside of the military, Channon remolded his identity into that of a Futurist. Thinking about the future is a noble task, of course. Each of us does it daily, if we're thinking responsibly. But there is a sort of caste of thought leaders who famously think about the future—and make a living doing it whether or not their claims ever manifest or make sense.
Now, let's listen to some of Channon's predictions of the near future:
Here is what Channon has to say in that video about what might happen in the near future of the Earth (emphasis mine):
This could be a time when the oceans rise and we have to go to the high ground. Now, is that something we can't recover from? I don't think so. In fact, what it does is marginalizes all of those big cities along the coast where the market forces are trying to tell all the rest of us how to behave. And they're keeping us out of our contract with nature. So this is maybe not a bad catastrophe.
What happens if the poles shift? Well, it would mean that a large number of the populated countries—the most populated countries would then end up in a very colder…colder climate. Well that [would?] create their industry that would tighten up their focus on their resources that would cause them to have fewer children and spend more time collecting fuel. So, maybe that's not such a bad catastrophe.
Go Planet!
While I don't necessarily mind hippie veterans opining about the future, Channon's vision almost borders on the sorts of things that ecoterrorists have to say, if you only strip out the part about the shifting of the poles necessitating the changes.
If you're wondering where the part about the Earth's (magnetic) poles shifting comes from, I have the specific answer for you: it came from supposed psychic and Father of Holistic Medicine Edgar Cayce. Among the New Age organizations Channon researched was the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E), which studies and promotes Cayce's teachings and visions. I know this because I grew up in the A.R.E. and even met some of the military personnel involved in the Super Soldiers program. In fact—and this gets weird—I was told that I was being trained as one, but that's a story for another day.
From the A.R.E.'s website:
With the news reports from NASA researchers that the recent earthquake in Chile has shifted the Earth's axis and shortened the day, many people are wondering just what Edgar Cayce had to say about the possibility of a pole shift.
When asked "What great change or the beginning of what change, if any, is to take place in the Earth in the year 2000 to 2001 A.D.?" Cayce answered: "When there is the shifting of the poles; or a new cycle begins." The Maya also saw a new era beginning in the first years of the new millennium but, according to their artifacts, it begins when the present age of "Movement" ends on December 21, 2012 A.D.
Growing up, I was taught that the world was going to "end" approximately a few years ago, which would lead to a new era. In fact, sometime around 1983 (I was young, so the memory is fuzzy and I could have the exact year wrong) I listened to Channon confidant and U.S. Army General Albert Stubblebine (commanding general of INSCOM) explain a "Satanic" plan for genocide that would precede the pole shift.
Stubblebine's later wife Dr. Rima Laibow (who has appeared in a variety of conspiracy theory-esque documentaries) gave an interview to Jesse Ventura in 2009 saying that a female Head of State told her such a genocide would take place through vaccination. Stubblebine and Laibow also appeared in at least one interview with Alex Jones with the vaccine genocide story.
Did you hear the part about using soldiers as guinea pigs?
The couple built an organization called the Natural Solutions Foundation, which got into trouble during the pandemic for selling a nano silver based product for the treatment of COVID-19.
Personally, I suspect that vaccine genocide story came directly from Stubblebine (how many female Heads of State are there, and how many fly to Panama to be seen by an expatriate American doctor?). If so, it is a very interesting question: where on Earth did the commanding general of INSCOM come up with such an idea?
Where is Jim Channon?
Channon passed away in 2017, as did Stubblebine. Prior to his passing, Channon lived in Hawaii on a sort of social commune he established. Here he is talking about a fictionalized version of himself, Bill Django, played by The Dude (a.k.a. Jeff Bridges) in the [substantially less than stellar] movie The Men Who Stare at Goats (2009).
How's that for a final Utopia? Retiring in Hawaii sounds nice, truly. And it's a lot nicer than much of the rest of his story, which we will continue at a future date.
Yikes. A long while ago I read heavily in science fiction. So much of it seemed weird and implausible. Until 40-50 years into the future it becomes reality.
“Does it creep anyone else out that Joss Whedon's Avengers story involves a villain who kills half the people in the universe?”
Yup.