The Stargate Conspiracy

by Lynn Picknett

  One does not have to be a rabid fundamentalist or even an overanxious businessperson to suffer from Pre-Millennium Tension. We have seen in recent years — even recent months - an acceleration of global warming and its associated disturbances in weather patterns. Earth has been battered by a series of hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes, and there is a sense that even this is just a curtain-raiser to some much larger natural cataclysm. One is left wondering whatever next? Never before has so much tension, so much vulnerability been felt by so many, and never before has such desire for action been so cynically harnessed on such a scale.

  Not everyone is dreaming, though. In a world of dreamers those who rarely sleep are kings. Where there is vulnerability, there will always be those who cynically seek to exploit it, and where there are those who seek to exploit, they will cynically create the vulnerability in the first place.

  We are undoubtedly approaching the twenty-first century with increasing anxiety, which is the way our puppetmasters want it. The collective mood of heightened expectancy is a breeding ground for precisely the sort of belief system whose emergence we have charted in this book.

  What we call the stargate conspiracy is the fostering of a belief that extraterrestrial ‘gods’ created the human race and presided over its civilisation - and that those gods are about to return. This belief is being promoted in different ways to different groups of people, but the underlying themes are always the same. Once these beliefs have entered into the collective consciousness, it will be relatively easy to use them as the foundation for a new religion. The ultimate aim of every organised religion has always been social control, and this one, we fear, will be no exception.

  Cosmic countdown

  Many groups and individuals are currently exploiting not only Millennium fever but also twenty-first-century anxiety. But of this cynical and often downright pernicious multitude, the activities of one particular type of group present the most thought-provoking and disturbing cautionary tale. These are the relatively new ‘space brother’ or UFO-centred cults. It would be a mistake to underestimate either the sheer numbers involved, or, indeed, the power of their beliefs. For example, the Raelian movement, which believes that all Raelians will be given eternal life by the coming space beings, has 40,000 members, and this is a relatively minor cult.2 Many similar groups promote essentially the same message.

  Against this background we must now set our discoveries about the Egypt — Mars conspiracies and the machinations of various groups. Make no mistake: the Millennium is absolutely central to their secret agenda - although the onset of the year 2000 is likely to mark only the beginning of a process that will reach its climax in the early years of the twenty-first century. James Hurtak, for example, highlights 2003 as a particularly key year.

  Throughout this investigation different subjects, which appear at first to be independent of each other, seem to come together quite naturally. Carrying us along with the apparent logic, these links may seem to be reasonable, so that we are not surprised or disturbed when a coherent picture emerges. As we have seen, its main components are:

  * The belief that the ancient Egyptian monuments are the product of a mysterious civilisation of great antiquity, which may have been in contact with, or even created by, extraterrestrials. Through certain lasting ‘records’ — especially the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx — that civilisation left us messages about our future, specifically about some imminent event of global proportions. This is somehow tied in with the Millennium and the Age of Aquarius.

  * The idea that extraterrestrial beings remembered as the ‘gods’ were responsible for the civilising of mankind, as in Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery.

  * The discovery of what appear to be anomalous features on Mars, which, if proven to be artificial, can only be the product of a civilisation that existed on that planet in the distant past. This, too, has a message for us today.

  * The ongoing communications from the Council of Nine, which have been unfolding since 1952. They claim to be the Great Ennead — the Nine gods of Heliopolis. We have seen that the Council of Nine have increasing influence, not only over the New Age, but also politicians and multimillionaires.

  Each of these major strands is based on a genuine mystery: the mysterious knowledge of the Dogon concerning Sirius; the evidence that the Sphinx is of far greater antiquity than is officially believed; the Viking images of Cydonia that appear to show genuinely unexplained features; and the apparently ‘miraculous’ phenomena surrounding the Council of Nine. These strands appear to be naturally coalescing: apparent connections have been found between the Cydonian monuments and those of Giza. The major raison d’être of Richard Hoagland, this element is now creeping into the works of others, notably Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock.

  Into this developing picture come the Nine. They, too, place much emphasis on the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, even claiming to have built them. And, through the work of James Hurtak, the Martian monuments have been introduced into this increasingly complex web of connections. There is no doubt that Hoagland and Hurtak’s work is directly driven by the Nine, but what of Hancock and Bauval’s? Certainly, because it largely endorses Hoagland’s work, The Mars Mystery is indirectly promoting the Nine - and to a much wider audience.

  The over-riding message is that the gods are back. The Message of Cydonia as promoted by Hoagland is that those monuments were designed to encode information for us today. When this is added to the ideas promoted by Hancock and Bauval that the Egyptian monuments also encode messages for our times, we can see that the two reinforce each other. And communications from the Nine are actually happening now.

  The conclusion seems inescapable: the Nine gods who built not only the Pyramids and the Sphinx but also the structures on Mars are back. These are not just the creators of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, but of the entire human race.

  However, this conclusion relies on the assumption that these strands began totally independently, that each of the discoveries were made in isolation, with connections between them only becoming apparent as time went on. But this is not the case. The entire picture seems to have been contrived according to a complex, long-term plan. For example, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery was inspired by Arthur M. Young, who was present at the initial contact with the Nine in 1953. Young’s own inspiration came from Harry Smith, a high-ranking member of one of Aleister Crowley’s magickal orders in which extraterrestrial intelligences, Sirius, Mars and ancient Egypt were the great pillars of their beliefs. The Nine’s communications, particularly in the initial stages, seem to continue those of Alice A. Bailey, of which James Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch is essentially an update. Hurtak has been the prime mover in the Face on Mars debate and in the New Egyptology, and The Keys of Enoch comes from the Council of Nine.

  An alien agenda

  Is the picture complete, or are other elements of modern mythology about to be drawn into this complex web? There are already clues: Stuart Holroyd’s ‘biography’ of the Nine, which was commissioned by Lab Nine, gave the subtext of this message away in the title: Briefing for the Landing on Planet Earth. Another, apparently unconnected book, The Secret School by Whitley Strieber, has as its subtitle Preparation for Contact. In fact, this is no coincidence: bestselling author Strieber, most widely known for the tales of personal contact with aliens told in Communion, Transformation, Breakthrough and Confirmation, brings the last major part of the scenario into play.

  Only in 1987 did Communion first catapult the alien abduction phenomenon into public consciousness. In the few years since we have seen such an explosion — virtually an epidemic — of claimed abductions that the image of the Grey alien is now firmly embedded in our minds as, at the very least, a cultural icon. But to many people the Greys are considerably more than semi-cartoon characters: at least 35 per cent of all Americans now believe that these sinister extraterrestrials are repeatedly abducting humans on a vast scale.3 This belief has, virtually overnight, begun
to take on quasireligious overtones. Strieber, in The Secret School, passes on nine lessons given to him by the aliens for all mankind, specifically linking their message to the Face on Mars, which he claims to have been shown by his alien captor/tutors when he was a child, and to the New Egyptology of Hancock, Bauval and West. It is, as we will see, no accident that The Secret School enthusiastically, even incongruously, carries an endorsement by none other than Graham Hancock: ‘Everyone concerned with the awesome mystery of what we are and what we may become should read The Secret School.’ (Perhaps significantly, we have already identified the ‘Secret School’ as an alternative title of the Synarchist ‘Council of Nine’ of the 1930s.)

  Hancock and Strieber may simply admire each other’s books, and the matter may end there. But other, thought-provoking connections lie just under the surface, allowing many of the pieces of the jigsaw to fall finally into place. For example, Strieber had worked with Richard Hoagland, and funded Mark Carlotto’s image enhancement work at Hoagland’s request as early as 1985, two years before his first ‘abduction’ book, Communion, was published. 4

  Strieber was introduced to Richard Hoagland by a mutual friend in the summer of 1984, but he makes some puzzling comments about the Mars research in his account in Breakthrough (1997). In discussing Mark Carlotto’s enhancement of the Viking images, which used the advanced equipment made available to him through the intelligence division of The Analytical Science Corporation, he writes: ‘The fact that the Mars face was reimaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture had been efficiently suppressed.’5 It is difficult to begin to understand how the subject could be described as having been ‘efficiently suppressed’ given that Hoagland has been telling anyone who would listen about the Face — including the United Nations — besides lecturing and selling books and videos on the subject ever since.

  The Secret School, however, reveals the subtext of Strieber’s writings, and adds another piece to our complex jigsaw. This 1997 book describes the recovery, beginning in 1995, of further memories of his lifelong alien abduction experiences, specifically those long suppressed from his Texan childhood in the mid- to late 1950s. He recalls being part of the ‘Secret School’, a group of child abductees who were given lessons by their Grey captors. Although Strieber believes that he ‘attended’ this school for a number of years during his childhood, the memories recovered and lessons presented in the book were those given to him at the age of nine.

  He recalls that, when first shown the image of the Face on Mars by John Gliedman, a scientist friend, he remembered seeing the image before, and later realised that the aliens had shown him that same image during his schooling.6 (This may be nothing but the honest truth, but it is hard to see how the new images of the Face that reveal it to be nothing more than a large rocky outcrop fit into this scenario. Were the aliens playing a cruel joke on him? If so, it would not be the first nor the last time that apparent discarnate entities amused themselves by toying with human gullibility. Remember that Colin Wilson called such beings ‘the crooks and conmen of the spirit world’, while Uri Geller called the Nine ‘a civilization of clowns’.)

  Most significant is Strieber’s attribution of the onset of his recall of the abduction experiences - which led directly to Communion — to being shown the picture of the Face by Gliedman. He writes:

  No matter how I explained it away, seeing the face was still an enormous event in my life, far larger than I could ever have imagined or even - until recently - understood. It may well have been the trigger that caused the close encounter of December 26 1985 [the pivotal event that led to Communion] to take place. The mystery of Mars and the secret school, it would turn out, were deeply bound together.7

  The mortar that binds Strieber’s agenda together lies in his emphasis on the importance of the number nine. As he writes:

  The nine lessons of my ninth summer were structured in three groups of three - a fact that has explained to me one meaning of the mysterious nine knocks that played such an important role in my encounter experience.8

  (This parallels the nine knocks that woke Jack Parsons during a lengthy magickal working on 10 January 1946.9)

  Surely Strieber is virtually inviting us to make connections with the Council of Nine?

  The Secret School described the nine lessons he was given from childhood in three triads, but he adds a tenth, a new lesson given to him by the ‘visitors’ on 12 November 1995: a vision of the future in 2036 (in which the United States has become a military dictatorship after terrorists have destroyed Washington with an atomic bomb). It is, by now, a familiar pattern: there are ten significant numbers, but the tenth is only there to complete and make sense of the other nine, and also to provide continuity to the next sequence.

  The first lesson began with a dream in which he flew above the surface of Mars, looking down on a gigantic, sculpted face and pyramids. (He also records that, at the same age, suddenly, for no reason he can remember, he became intensely interested in ancient Egypt.10)

  The eighth lesson of The Secret School relates the great monuments of Egypt and other early civilisations to forthcoming changes in the world. As in Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby’s The Mars Mystery, they were built to encode the memory of global catastrophes and to serve as a warning to future generations that such cataclysms might well come again. Strieber writes:

  We have also created a sort of mechanism that exists in our genes, that will come to light when the equinox is opposite to its current position and when the world is again threatened. This device is the secret school, and the time for which it was created is when Pisces moves into Aquarius.11

  Clues suggest who really runs the Secret School. Tellingly, Strieber also introduces the work of Robert Bauval and the erosion of the Sphinx, fully accepting the argument that the geological evidence and the astronomical correlations of the Sphinx and the pyramids pinpoint the date of ... that familiar year 10,500 BCE. Not surprisingly, he also dates the beginning of the Age of Aquarius as shortly after the year 2000. Perhaps that is why The Secret School is endorsed by Graham Hancock.

  The point of Strieber’s lessons is that they show a way out of the nightmare scenarios of the future, through the shift in consciousness that comes with being a Chosen One, this time as a repeated abductee who accepts the alleged meaning of the Martian monuments, the Sphinx and the pyramids as well as the reality of the ‘visitors’. He writes, with real endtimes fervour:

  God ... is about to enter the ordinary world, and the destiny of our souls as companions to the creator is to be enacted at last.12

  So what is Whitley Strieber’s part, consciously or unwittingly, in the conspiracy to insidiously create a new religion and prepare us for some imminent takeover by its adherents? An integral part of the new belief system is the blending and exploitation of all the most potent modem myths, and surely there are few more powerful than the alien abduction scenario. Here we see one of the most successful icons of our times — the Grey alien - brought together with the Face on Mars and the ubiquitous emphasis on the 10,500 BCE dating of the Giza monuments. This is all linked to the imminent Age of Aquarius and, one way or another, to the return of the space gods, or of a quasi-Christian god who will save us from all evil - especially from ourselves — if we believe in him.

  The reality or otherwise of the abduction experience has been much debated, and goes beyond the scope of this book. One other little known connection should give us pause for thought. When American veteran journalist Ed Conroy set out to investigate objectively the story behind Whitley Strieber’s Communion in the late 1980s, he explored all the possible connections, including parallels with such matters as folklore and the occult. He writes in Report on Communion (1989) that according to Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley claimed, in 1919, to have contacted an extraterrestrial being named Lam connected with the Sirius and Andromeda star systems. Conroy continues:

  Grant goes on to assert that other OTO members have su
bsequently contacted Lam, making use of his image as painted prior to 1945 by Crowley. If there can be any legitimacy granted to coincidences of the imagination, it is quite interesting that Crowley’s painting ‘Lam’ depicts an egg-headed face characterized by a vestigial nose and mouth and two eyes in narrow, elongated slits. Its resemblance to the image on the cover of Communion is remarkable, save for the dimensions and qualities of the eyes.13

  In the previous paragraph before this extract, Conroy had been drawing parallels between Crowley’s magickal invocation of angelic beings and the cosmic scheme outlined in Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch.

  We believe that genuine mysteries, real unanswered questions are, ironically, being obscured by the half-truths and inventions of this new ‘religion’. The Giza monuments present huge problems for orthodox Egyptology. Even the case for the Martian monuments - especially the pyramids — retains some merit. We have no argument with real intellectual curiosity challenging these subjects. What concerns us is the presence of a campaign to impose a meaning on all these disparate subjects, to create synthetic answers that build all too easily into a new belief system that also appears to offer glib solutions to mankind’s present problems, pointing the way to the future. Yet the message is always the same, and the inherent dangers are incalculable.

  Whitley Strieber and Richard Hoagland played a considerable part in spreading the belief that there was something anomalous trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.14 One result of this belief was the suicides of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who were convinced that a spaceship had come to collect their souls and take them to a better life. This was an extreme scenario, and their deaths cannot be blamed on the likes of Hoagland, Strieber or Courtney Brown, but surely the cult’s madness is even more tragic because they died for nothing - to go to a nonexistent spaceship.