‘Sekret Machines: Gods’ Reiterates: All Religion Is UFO Religion

As the subtitle notes, this second installment in rocker Tom Delonge’s “Sekret Machines” book series continues a boldly public investigation of the UFO phenomenon that he launched in 2016 with Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows. Whereas that first installment led the “fiction” side of the project, Gods, Man & War advances a parallel non-fiction series. The two go hand-in-hand though, as a promo for Chasing Shadows openly suggested that the fictional thriller was largely based around genuine intel from Delonge’s sources in the Deep State and that “read together, the thriller series and the investigation series show what cannot be revealed with one approach alone.” Sekret Machines: Gods, on the other hand, functions like a more academic dive into “Ancient Aliens” territory, also based around intel from Delonge’s “high-level sources”.

It’s not as good a read as Chasing Shadows, but then it would be next to impossible to put together an academic type of investigation that could be the same kind of page-turner as a well-crafted thriller that can take dramatic liberties. Chasing Shadows is akin to a classic story arc along the lines of The X-Files or Steven Spielberg’s Taken miniseries, with multiple protagonists becoming intimately involved in investigations of the UFO phenomenon and learning of a decades-long cover-up to suppress the truth about our visitors and the mindblowing technology they use to reach Earth.

Chasing Shadows utilized protagonists including a journalist, an Air Force pilot, a philanthropic heiress, and a World War II POW to craft a dynamic story that shed intriguing light on several fascinating aspects of “the Phenomenon”. These include the anti-gravity aircraft that the Air Force has reverse engineered from salvaged ET technology and the conspiracy fact of Uncle Sam’s “Operation Paperclip” to bring Nazi scientists over into the American intelligence community to aid research and development efforts. The story offers intriguing insight into what’s really been going on for the past 70 years, whereas Sekret Machines: Gods pulls the scope back to take a much broader look at history. It’s not quite as entertaining, but with DeLonge and co-author Peter Levenda playing “the role of an intellectual Indiana Jones”, it still provides plenty of intriguing intel of another sort.

It’s worth noting how Delonge’s credibility on the Sekret Machines project received a compelling shot in the arm thanks to the Wikileaks release of Democratic Party powerplayer and longtime X-Files fan John Podesta’s emails in 2016. Delonge had claimed to be working with some very high-level governmental/military-industrial complex insiders who were providing him with the intel for his project, and Podesta’s emails proved that this claim was in fact legit. Publications ranging from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal were amongst those to report last fall on the emails revealing that Delonge had been in touch with Podesta several times during the previous year.

“I would like to bring two very ‘important’ people out to meet you in DC,” DeLonge wrote in an October 2015 email. “I think you will find them very interesting, as they were principal leadership relating to our sensitive topic. Both were in charge of most fragile divisions, as it relates to Classified Science and DOD topics. Other words, these are A-Level officials. Worth our time, and as well the investment to bring all the way out to you.” Another email to Podesta in January 2016 referenced former Air Force General Andrew McCasland: “When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago. He not only knows what I’m trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He’s a very important man.”

Other emails revealed two more of Delonge’s advisors: Michael Carey, special assistant to the Commander of US Space Command, and Rob Weiss, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Advanced Development Programs at Lockheed Martin Skunkworks(the military-industrial complex’s leading defense contractor and also long rumored to be involved with reverse engineering of salvaged ET craft.) Further credibility comes from the fact that the new book’s forward is written by legendary scientist and Ufologist Dr. Jacques Vallee, who was the model for the French scientist character played by Francoise Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

“If UFOs and physical reality are incompatible, maybe the time has come to re-negotiate physical reality. Because, as we all know, these impossible UFOs that don’t exist are not going away,” Vallee writes in the forward. “Tom DeLonge and Peter Levenda, who have had privileged access to long-denied information, have re-opened the debate around these two questions.”

While the book focuses more on ancient history, the prologue also builds upon the post-World War II drama of “Operation Paperclip”, noting that German Major-General Walter Dornberger was brought to Wright Field in Ohio in June of 1947 and would wind up as an executive with Bell Aerospace. It won’t appear in any American history textbooks, but the reality is that Nazi leaders were not only brought into Uncle Sam’s scientific research team, they were also allowed to move into the American corporatocracy. Such information is weaved here and there with the book’s primary premise:

“This project is predicated on the understanding — not the belief, the understanding — that the UFO phenomenon is real and that there has been contact between human beings and non-human beings since the beginning of recorded history with results that can be characterized as alternately positive and edifying, and dangerous and terrifying.”

One of the potential theories is Vallee’s conclusion that “the UFO phenomenon” is an artifact of consciousness itself” and that “there is much more to the phenomenon than aliens flying around in spaceships”. Delving into exploration of the origins of religion, shamanism and ceremonial magic, the authors note that “the American military and intelligence organs did not hesitate to probe every type of occultism, parapsychology, mediumship, etc., in the quest to weaponize the psyche and to understand the Phenomenon.” They then go on to conclude that a mystical approach to studying the Phenomenon must inherently be a partner to the materialistic nuts and bolt approach of science, which explains why the scientists of such projects as The SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) haven’t gotten too far.

The existential philosophical and intellectual issues at hand are also addressed, such as in chapter two’s exploration of how the idea of authority and sovereignty evolved from a theocentric model to an anthropocentric one that has made it “virtually impossible for human institutions to come to any kind of agreement on the nature of the Phenomenon.” A 2008 paper by Professor Alexander Wendt from The Ohio State University and partner Raymond Duvall from the University of Minnesota titled ”Sovereignty and the UFO” is cited, wherein the abstract suggests that modern sovereignty “has limits… which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously…” The paper goes on to lay out the case for how the modern state cannot acknowledge the reality of UFOs without inherently undercutting its own authority.

DeLonge and Levenda use this well thought out philosophical quandary to lay out the inherent Catch-22 of “the essential problem at the core of the UFO discussion, which is that our human institutions — having seized authority from the gods — are now incapable of addressing the UFO issue. Since the Phenomenon demonstrates super-human characteristics that show it is not human-based or of human origin, our human institutions cannot say anything meaningful about it… In other words, we will never have disclosure the way we understand it because that would involve our human authorities acknowledging another (higher, potentially more powerful) authority in the world.”

This chapter, “The Gate of the Gods”, concludes by joining Vallee in acknowledging that physical reality must be re-negotiated. “Science cannot explain the Phenomenon so scientists refuse to see it; similarly, there is no space for spirituality in any form within science so scientists consider it a form of mental illness… What may be required then, is a re-engineering of the way we look at reality…” This idea serves as a bridge to chapter three, “Stairway to Heaven” in which the historical context of mysticism is addressed with the belief that at least some humans “are able to travel to the stars themselves” and that “there was an understanding — and this may be critical for a serious comprehension of, and approach to, the Phenomenon — that altered states of consciousness were necessary in order to acquire contact with the ‘sons of God.’”

In chapter four, “The Cult of the Dead Gods”, the authors explore some of the ancient alien theory. “If we accept as a theory that there was an alien intervention in the evolution of the human race… then there should be evidence in the genetic code. As it happens, there may be.” Researchers in Kazakhstan are cited as having claimed to have identified evidence in the code pointing to an off-planet origin, based on mathematics in the genetic structure that have “branded” humanity with an “alien” identity. DeLonge and Levenda go on to join with ancient alien theorists in writing that “There is a growing body of evidence to show that our genetic code came from elsewhere: either from an asteroid strike or some other extraterrestrial event.” But are humans a successful experiment or a failed one? Perhaps both, they conclude.

The book continues to build a case that religion has its origins in the experience of alien contact, with similar stories of such contact from multiple cultures around the world. Chapter five, “Let Us Now Raise Famous Men”, explores “paleocontact” in ancient Egypt and references Erich von Daniken’s 1968 book Chariot of the Gods in which he proposed evidence suggesting that many ancient monuments including the Egyptian pyramids were built by ancient astronauts and that the Book of Ezekiel describes a literal flying saucer. The authors note that much of Sekret Machines: Gods “could be understood as an attempt to revisit that argument from a more mature and reasoned perspective.”

This includes a passage on Robert Temple’s classic 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, in which the Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society laid out compelling evidence of how the Dogon tribe of Africa had impossible astronomical knowledge of the dark star Sirius B. Invisible to the naked eye, Temple made a case that the tribe’s legends tell of receiving this knowledge from alien visitors. The authors here note that officials at NASA became interested in his work, even as Temple ran afoul of some in the Intelligence Community. They build toward the question of which came first in such matters, the myth or the science? “The problem with this chicken-or-egg approach is that it ignores the third possibility: that both the myth and the language developed concurrently which could be the case if an experience with the Phenomenon is what instigated them.”

The book perhaps begins to drag a bit from excessive esoteric historical explorations while the reader eagerly awaits grand conclusions. The authors continue with a ball control offense, but move the ball across midfield and toward the red zone in chapter six, “The Star Walkers”. Here they move back into surveying shamanism, such as the concept of “ecstatic flight” and its presence “in cultures as diverse in time and place as Siberian shamans, Jewish mystics, and the ancient Greeks”. They run ancient astronaut theory trick plays as well, suggesting that “if we take the myths concerning origins, flight, and immortality as evidence of real events… then we must also address the persistent stories of a revolt in heaven and a conflict that involves beings other than humans in a struggle that takes place off-world but which has direct consequences for our own.”

A big connection comes with the comparison of shamanic trances with modern UFO religions and contact experiencers. “The experiencer becomes a shaman, a priest or priestess of the Alien Gods. It is not a new phenomenon, as we have been at pains to demonstrate. It is an old one, as old as humanity’s first contact with things not of this world, and as such actually demonstrates the validity of our argument that — at heart — all religion is UFO religion. Once we come to grips with that, so much else becomes easier to understand.”

Chapter seven, “Kala Chakra / Chakra Vartin” continues in this direction with explorations of Eastern mysticism including Tibetan Buddhism’s Kalacakra Tantra mandala or Wheel of Time, which “imposes order upon chaos”. Existential pondering of the human condition leads to down a revealing path: “Human beings tend to understand the world in terms with which they are already familiar… This is why the question always remains: Why do aliens not land on the White House lawn? From the perspective of a putative alien force, why would they? We attribute human strategies to beings that do not share our evolutionary path on this planet, which is certainly a mistake.”

Further exploration of the Kalacakra Tantra details how these rituals are designed to challenge linear patterns of thought, with Tibetan philosophy ranging from the conventional truth of appearances to the “ultimate truth” that appearances are illusory creations of consciousness that can dissolve during altered states when “emptiness” is perceived. The authors reference Jacques Vallee’s 1975 book The Invisible College, in which he graphs UFO sightings from 1947 to 1962. They note that UFO waves occurred in 1954 and 1956, the first two initiations conducted by the current Dalai Lama involving 100,000 attendees in Lhasa, Tibet.

“This is not to say that the Dalai Lama was in any way ‘creating’ the UFO sightings or was somehow directly responsible for them, but such a concentration of people during an intense ritual experience involving the Kalacakra (the Wheel of Time) may be connected in some way to the UFO events in ways we do not yet comprehend. In other words, as Vallee noted, they may be ‘subtly changing us’”. The authors note several further instances surrounding Dalai Lama rituals in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s and pose the query: “What if our understanding of the mechanisms of both religion and UFOs is so flawed we cannot entertain the possibility that we can take charge of the mechanisms ourselves?”

In the final chapter, “Planet Earth: The Hot LZ”, DeLonge and Levenda criss-cross history again and dip into the philosophy of Gnosticism, the idea that consciousness is trapped within the human body and not thrilled about it. This is where speculation gets increasingly subjective in the quest to quantify what the Phenomenon is really about, with questions like “to what extent do the gods involve themselves in human affairs, directly or indirectly?” The authors note that humans gradually took responsibility for their own affairs, with the role of divine and demonic forces being relegated to spiritual matters. But DeLonge and Levenda go on to suggest that such otherworldly forces may indeed be responsible for the modern era of UFOs, that “God would become irritated with this cavalier treatment and would decide to remind the civil authorities… that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in the pages of the Congressional Record.” They go on to compare the modern UFO wave of the past 70 years to the ancient likes of the Egyptian plagues, the destruction of Sodom and the sinking of Atlantis.

“They would fly over the world’s capitals. They would zigzag over nuclear plants and missile silos… they would joy-ride through the skies over the southwestern United States like sailors on shore-leave… their rented T-Birds careening madly through saucer stop-signs and interstellar intersections, whistling at the girls, knocking down mailboxes and howling at the Moon… and once in awhile… they would crash. And when they did, when those little alien bodies flew out the windshield, their sekret machine ripped apart by gravity and hard-baked sand, it suddenly was not so easy to ignore the Hand of God in the world. God, alien, ghost, vampire, whatever supernatural agency one prefers, it was suddenly there: part of the real world, intruding into the weltanschuung of the armed forces, of newspaper editors and the six o’clock news.”

And then the penultimate conclusion: “They have it wrong, the ancient astronaut theorists and the experiencers and the abductees. Ezekiel’s Chariot was not a flying saucer. That’s projecting our current experience backwards into time… Flying saucers, triangular craft, cigar-shaped craft… lights in the sky… they are Ezekiel’s Chariot projected forward into the present.”

This leads into a whirlwind discussion touching on the underreported war in Heaven (relative to the rest of biblical lore) and the Greek mythology of Prometheus, one of the Titans that opposed the regime of the Olympic gods and who is credited with the creation of humanity. The authors note that this myth rises again with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and that “such literary creations insist on a paradigm that the modern Ufologists generally ignore: the possibility that human beings are active participants in the ‘hybrid program’… to unlock the secrets of life and to decode the mystery of human existence…”

Then they drop the hammer, suggesting that Earth is a “hot landing zone… under fire from the enemy. Aliens, gods, spirits, ghosts… they are taking their lives into their hands landing here. Or is it part of the original plan, to keep us at each other’s throats… If you are wondering why the saucers haven’t landed on the White House lawn… isn’t it because they are waiting for us to do all the heavy lifting first? When the dust and smoke clears, when the last bodies have been burned or buried, then they will show up and when they do it will go unnoticed and uncelebrated.”

This negative conclusion about the intentions of Earth’s visitors is where DeLonge and his Sekret Machines project have encountered strong dissidence from many in the Ufology community. Rarely can anything in the world of Ufology be categorized as black or white, when there are so many nebulous shades of grey (and Greys). If advanced beings can traverse the cosmos to get here, Vulcan logic dictates they could have taken over the Earth long ago if conquest was their motivation. Whether Delonge is receiving the whole truth and nothing but the truth from his sources is debatable. Yet he has succeeded in getting high-level officials to work with him and he has laid out many worthy points of consideration for those investigating the topic, particularly regarding the need to consider the role of consciousness and metaphysics.

Sekret Machines:Gods delivers some compelling explorations of what the big cosmic picture looks like and the project lays out a detailed roadmap for exploring important historical aspects of the Phenomenon. What the intergalactic puzzle really looks like when all the pieces are in place remains the great mystery of our time, and the motivations of DeLonge’s advisors should be held up to the same scrutiny as the motivations of Earth’s visitors. But the project is at least helping to push the discussion forward, an action that is long overdue from the American powers that be.