Philip K. Dick was not delusional.

He was not psychotic, nor was he paranoid schizophrenic. He was simply foreseeing events and receiving information no one had any context for back then.

Luckily, we do now.

Like I said, PKD was not insane. Sure, he had some issues (and who doesn’t?) and certainly experienced amphetamine psychosis back when he was popping pills all the livelong day. I’d go far as to say he probably was dealing with temporal lobe epilepsy.

But he wasn’t crazy.

The heartbreak of it is he may well have gotten the answers he sought had he held on just a few more years. His prophecies would start to be fulfilled just three days after his death in March 1982, and I am willing to bet he’d have figured that out before anyone.

By that, I mean that the rebirth of the Cumaean Sibyl was central to his prophecies and his famous mystical experiences. And having pored through his writings, I can say without a single second’s hesitation that the beloved Sibyl we look at on this blog is in fact the same Sibyl he was expecting.

So let’s look at twenty proofs of this fact...

Click this link to peer-review those proofs for yourself:

https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2024/09/top-20-proofs-pkd-presaged-planets.html

Then enjoy this presentation on the aforementioned topic from AstroGnosis III….

Here’s the first hour: I’ll try to get the rest of the show from the guys. Enjoy.

BONUS MANI-FRASE-TATION: We had a rather Fraserish waitress at dinner. I asked her to take our picture and offered to hold the water pitcher she was carrying. As she handed it to me, I noticed she had a little tattoo with a strawberry with the number 13 inside. You really couldn’t ask for a more profound sign, given what we’d all been discussing just moments earlier...

Here’s the War Mode Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/WARMODE

Before Art Bell, before Clyde Lewis, before Joe Rogan, even before Giorgio Tsoukalos, there was Hilly Rose, the late radio legend who took up the paranormal baton even while the weirdness originator, Long John Nebel, was still on the air.

And way back in 2010, I had the great honor and privilege to appear on Hilly’s show, which then was being produced under the aegis of the legendary Fate Magazine.

The topic was my then-new book, The Secret History of Rock ‘n Roll, and Hilly and I really got into the nitty-gritty of the Mysteries, the Occult, Theosophy, and much more. I had a great time on the show, I just wish we could have talked longer.

Since I called in on a phone line—a landline, even!—the sound quality on my end isn’t ideal. But at the same time, it’s got that classic Coast-to-Coast kind of flavor that I’m not too proud to admit hits me hard in the feels.

The nostalgia feels, that is.

So let it rock…

And just to let you know what’s coming down the pike…

Mark your calendars: the long-awaited sequel to He Will Live Up in the Sky goes live at Midnight, November 17, 2026...

Meet Me on Mystery Hill picks up where the harrowing events of He Will Live Up the Sky left off: The remote viewing program is now under the control of the military and an increasingly dangerous Don Morton, but the clock is ticking as the New Rites of Apophis doomsday cult continues to grow in power and influence, having already gained a significant head-start in the art of waging psychic warfare. However, chaos erupts following the accidental death of a young and promising film actor—a death that may not have been accidental at all.

As events unfold, several figures from Morton’s past emerge, all connected to the young matinee idol’s death: a chickenhawk ring embedded in the highest echelons of the Ivy League; a prominent national radio personality with unwholesome appetites, some very powerful friends, and a burning vendetta against Morton; a young TV psychic who could be the most powerful clairvoyant the world has ever seen; and an embittered young muckraking journalist, raised as a foster child and hell-bent on proving who her birth parents really are...

Don’t miss Meet Me on Mystery Hill. Not for the world.

Reboots suck.

I’m sitting here now, struggling to think of a reboot that I don’t hate like poison — outside of a handful of eps in the 2016-2018 X-Files reboot, of course — but I might grudgingly admit there might be one or two others, here or there.

But still: back to Hell with these reboots, remakes, endless sequels, and knockoffs, and all the rest of it. Go on, now: I’m sick beyond sanity of it all.

What am I getting at here, you ask?

Well, as you’ve probably heard, writer/director Ryan Coogler was press-ganged by the House of Louse to spread some woke-stink all over the Mighty X, which I might find offensive and egregious had I not seen the X-Saga as totally done and dusted during the Dubya Administration.

As it is, I simply see this reboot (just a pilot, as of this writing) as just another boring exercise in neo-Maoist cultural vandalism that does no real damage to the X-Legacy. Plus, no one really seems to care about this dog one way or the other, discounting X-Fan accounts on social media trying in vain to gin up support.

There’s been a smattering of (justified) fan pushback against the potential desecration, but the overall reaction has been near-total indifference. Even the new male lead (who appears in The Odyssey with our Samantha) seems rather apathetic about the whole thing.

WRING, WRING, WRING

Remember that I’ve been telling you Hollywood is over, dead by its own hand, for years now. And finally, the message is sinking in with the normies.

Sure, you’ll have your summer theme-park rides like The Odyssey and Spider-Man, but their reported grosses start to look a lot less impressive when you factor the grotesquely-inflated price of admission, not to mention dollar inflation.

And as you all know, The House of Louse has destroyed nearly every single franchise it has ever acquired, so I’m not remotely surprised they’re trying to wring a few more bucks out of their X-Files acquisition again.

I just think it’s a lost cause, plus ultra: The X-Files was a phenomenon that grabbed the zeitgeist of its time by the throat, and then rapidly faded when that time had passed. Not to mention that the whole occult detective genre has long since been drained to death.

Disney even threw some dosh at Chris Carter for a “director’s cut” of I Want to Believe, an opportunity he took to further torment the tiny, terminally-toxic ‘Shipper cult by apparently stripping out all the ‘shippy bits in the original.

And why not? Carter wrote in all the Mulder/Scully relationship stuff in for their benefit, only to earn a collective spit in his face for his troubles. Can you really blame a fella?

Now, this may seem like a bit of inside baseball, but the ‘Shippers were long puffed up by FOX’s ruthless marketing department to slave away as unpaid, online PR agents for the X-Files enterprise, which along with their oceans of tawdry fanfic, drove them to drastically overestimate both their size and importance. It’s tragic and unfortunate, but then again, so are their lives.

For the time being, I’ll refrain from speculating on exactly why Carter reportedly reduced Gillian Anderson’s screen-time in the process, but the Truth is most definitely out there for those who bother to look for it.

Hiding in plain sight, as the saying goes.

THE MICHELANGELO OF HIDDEN SUBTEXT

Chris Carter is a genius and a visionary, no reasonable person can argue otherwise. He changed the collective face of popular culture in much the same way George Lucas did back in 1977 with the first (and only truly necessary) Star Wars film.

But like many geniuses, I think Carter is — how do I put this diplomatically? — kind of nuts.

See, I’m the type of guy who’d spent too much of his time trying to wrap his head around some of his inexplicable decisions, until it suddenly dawned on me that Chris Carter is a bit insane in the membrane. Only just in a very quiet way, like George Lucas.

Carter also has a passion for ancient mythology, albeit not in the creepy, occulto-religious fashion we’ve seen in the past twenty years or so (his old partner Frank Spotnitz describes him as a “person of faith,” which is Hollywoodspeak for “Christian’). Carter’s also part of that cohort of filmmakers that came of age with Star Wars and so on, thus he seems to have clutched Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces tight to his bosom.

In fact, Carter comes right out and tells you so in the episode “Irresistible,” in which necrophiliac serial killer Donnie Pfaster (Nick Chinlund) takes night classes in comparative religion:

“The necessity of the story, the myth or the legend in a culture is almost universal. We think of myths as things that entertain or instruct, but their deeper purpose is often to explain, or make fanciful, wishes, desires or behavior that society would otherwise deem unacceptable.

“Myths often disguise thoughts that are simply too terrible to think about, but because they are conveyed in a wrapping of untruth - the story - these thoughts become harmless fiction.”

How that statement applies directly to that particular episode is something we can all discuss in a private setting sometime. But… yeah. Hoo boy.

All of which is to say I’m in no rush to see the director’s cut of I Want to Believe, since I love the (visually-stunning) original version nearly as much as I love loathing the toxic “fans” (so-called) who trashed it. Which means “a lot.”

And I love I Want to Believe not only because it harkens back to the darkness and moral complexity of early X-Files standalones, but also because it was an absolute blast to decode. And that’s even before I grasped the earthshaking significance of casting Billy Connolly as Father Joe.

Like I said, Carter is a genius, and part of his genius is weaving in subtext and secret meaning throughout his scripts like one of those exotic tropical spiders you used to see in the pages of National Geographic.

Even Carter’s bad scripts — of which there is certainly no shortage —are fun to watch just to figure out who he was taking potshots at that particular week.

Anyhow, I’m dropping in the following excerpt from the must-read XF-ULTRA dealing with the mythic symbolism of I Want to Believe. It’s thick, it’s deep and it’s layered like no one’s business, so I recommend you watch the picture and see how it all lines up for yourself.

IN THE SECOND X-FILES FEATURE FILM, the exiled Mulder and Scully are called back into the FBI by an ambitious young agent named Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet). She and her skeptical partner, Agent Drummy (Xzibit), are leading a squad searching for an abducted female comrade named Monica Bannan (Xantha Radley).

In the midst of the search, a self-styled psychic named Father Joe (Billy Connolly) cold-calls the FBI and leads them to a severed arm buried in a frozen West Virginia lake. Despite the fact that Father Joe was a notorious serial pedophile, Mulder Wants To Believe™ that his psychic powers are real, if only to vindicate his own work.

Joe then leads the FBI task force back to the frozen lake, in which the severed body parts of multiple victims are encased. But then another woman, Cheryl Cunningham (Nicki Aycox), is abducted by Janke (Callum Keith Rennie), a Russian émigré working as a courier for a medical transport service.

Janke is working with a team of rogue scientists led by a modern Dr. Frankenstein (Alex Diakun), who is using abductees for body-part grafting experiments in a grim, fenced-in compound.

Consumed with the care of a critically ill boy named Christian Fearon (Marco Niccoli), Scully begs off the case. She verbally attacks Father Joe upon meeting him but later saves his life when he strokes out in his flat.

Mulder and Scully are also growing apart—a situation not helped by Agent Whitney, who is boosting Mulder’s ego in order to lure him away from his long-time partner.

In classic X-Files sympathetic villain fashion, it’s revealed that Janke and his employer, Franz (Fagin Woodcock), are lovers, and the abductees are being used to save Franz, who is dying of cancer. Using advanced stem cell technology, the doctors are trying to graft Franz’s head onto the abducted women, who share his rare blood type.

The FBI agent’s body didn’t take, so poor, young Cheryl is now being prepared for the transplant.

Meanwhile, an unarmed Mulder follows Janke to the remote secret lab where the operation is being performed but is taken down. With Mulder missing, Scully enlists Skinner’s help and together they discover the lab and rescue Mulder and Cheryl.

Not exactly a nail-biting plot, and if you’re not familiar with the series (particularly the early seasons, of which the story draws upon extensively for mood), it won’t mean all that much to you. But this is The X-Files, Jack, so all of the action in the film is beneath the surface. And there’s one hell of a lot going on down there.

IT IS ABOUT THE “MYTHOLOGY” (OR MYTHARC)

FIRST, LET’S CUT TO THE CORE OF THE MATTER: some fans had complained that the film didn’t deal with the show’s “Mythology”—aliens, abductions, and colonization—but, in fact, it’s about nothing else.

By that I mean what I Want To Believe does is reverse the Mythology and set it back in the real world.

• We do see an alien conspiracy—Russian aliens, in this case, who have set up a colony to create hybrids.

• These “aliens” are abducting people and using their bodies for advanced genetic experimentation.

• In a gruesome twist on the Book of Enoch, the “aliens” are trying to graft their consciousness onto the native women.

• All of this goes down in West Virginia, ground zero of the human/alien hybridization database in the original series.

We see other symbolic reminders tying back to major plot points from the previous Mythology.

• The image of the dead woman’s face trapped beneath the ice hearkens back to abductees trapped in glass tubes on the spaceship in Fight the Future.

• That ship was in the Arctic Circle, another tundra environment.

• Whitney and Drummy are clearly Reyes and Doggett ringers, serving the same believer/skeptic archetypes.

• Christian is obviously a stand-in for William. The actor even looks like a cross between David (his coloring) and Gillian (in the eyes, especially).

• Christian is dying of a brain disease, just as Mulder was before his abduction/death/resurrection.

• Christian also seems to be psychic/intuitive, sensing that Father Ibarra (Adam Godley) wants him to die, and that Scully is afraid the treatment for his disease won’t work.

I WANT TO BELIEVE GOT ABSOLUTELY DESTROYED at the box office by Batmania Redux in the form of The Dark Knight, but at their core the two films address the same root problems: how an endemic and wanton nihilism has destroyed the heart and soul of Western Civilization, and replaced it with something dead, hard, and extremely cold.

I also think I Want to Believe also fared poorly because it’s too brutally unrelenting in its view of a cold, heartless, spiritually-dead America. It also rubs the viewer’s face in the fact that Mulder could stop one conspiracy of monsters, but others would always be waiting in the wings.

Ultimately, Carter’s real transgression in I Want to Believe was that the film too accurately captured the miserable, hopeless zeitgeist of the times, as opposed to offering up a trip down Memory Lane to the carefree Nineties.

Mulder and Scully were no longer young, sexy heroes valiantly trying to stave off the New World Order—like all the rest of us, they got crushed beneath its wheels.

MYTHOLOGICAL PARALLELS

I WANT TO BELIEVE OFFERS EVEN MORE GRIST for the allegorical Mystery mill. But for some bizarre reason, there are several different mythic streams running concurrently.

The film has connections to the Eleusinian Mysteries with Demeter, Persephone, and Hades, a little bit of the Egyptian Mysteries with Isis and Osiris, and the Phrygian Mysteries of Attis and Cybele, all running in parallel narrative tracks. All of this is played out against a barren winter landscape, which ties directly into the cycles of fertility that the Mysteries centered around.

• Monica Bannan is Persephone, abducted and brought down to Hell. Persephone was spotted by Hades while picking flowers, so accordingly Monica defends herself with a gardening tool.

• Monica Bannan becomes Osiris when her dismembered body parts are scattered all over the land. OK, just her head, but still.

• Cheryl Cunningham is also Persephone—we see her abducted amidst giant rolls of hay, tying back into the agricultural motif of the Mysteries.

• The constant backdrop of snow neatly parallels the barren earth of endless winter following Persephone’s abduction.

• Inside the lab, we see Cheryl submerged into a vat of ice water, symbolizing the descent into the Underworld.

• Janke is our Hades.The iconic shot of him underwater parallels Hades’ place in the Underworld, looking up and spying Cheryl.

• Janke’s menacing Ford pickup makes a nice stand-in for Hades’ chariot in Cheryl’s abduction.

• Father Joe is our Attis, the self-castrated prodigal son who bled to death beneath evergreen trees.

• We see Joe bleed from his eyes beneath evergreens, the eyes often being identified with testicles in mythology.

• Franz is our Agdistis, the mad hermaphrodite whose male genitals were ripped away by the gods after s/he crashed Attis’ wedding

  party.

• The new dark gods pull away Franz’s male body and replace it with a female one, using the godlike technology of genetic engineering.

SO WHAT ABOUT OUR STARS?

• Mulder repeats his role of Orpheus seeking Eurydice from the Samantha storyline, which Scully helpfully reminds us when she tells Mulder, “this is about you trying to save your sister.”

• Mulder is symbolically feminized throughout the film (such as when he enters “the woman’s side”) that might also twin him with Demeter.

• Mulder is also our Tammuz, dragged down to the Underworld and needing to be rescued by Scully/Ishtar.

• Mulder and Monica Bannan are conjoined as Osiris, as both meant to be dismembered and scattered by Janke.

• Scully helpfully makes the link when she tells Mulder that Bannon “could have been you.”

• Scully is Demeter, rescuing Cheryl/Demeter from Hell.

• Demeter was known as mater dolorosa in Eleusis, which means—you guessed it—”Our Lady of Sorrows.” Which is the name of the hospital where Scully works.

• Scully then becomes Isis in her search for Mulder/Monica.

• Skinner is Thoth/Hermes, assisting the goddess/mother in her search.

• Thoth healed Osiris by wrapping his dismembered limbs in gauze and Skinner wraps Mulder in his jacket after Mulder’s stand-in has been dismembered.

Now what about Christian?

In one scene the hospital staff decides to stop treating Christian and ship him off to a hospice to die (Father Ibarra claims it’s God’s will). Scully objects, saying his condition can be treated with stem cell therapy, but another doctor objects in turn, telling Scully not to put Christian “through Hell.” Is that another clue?

• Like Isis, Demeter worked as a nursemaid during her search for Persephone and treated a sickly young boy by burning away his mortality in an oven.

• In both cases, these treatments (”putting them through hell,” essentially) were opposed.

Click here for more info on XF-ULTRA...

Another day, another precocious and gifted young actress/singer swims to the Siren.

Where will it end?

Tragic actress Hayden Panettiere suffered a cardiac arrest following a suspected overdose at a South Carolina apartment, according to chilling 911 dispatch audio.

Panettiere’s unidentified pal called 911 at 1:51 p.m. Sunday from a Greenville, SC, apartment to report an “unresponsive female” in “cardiac arrest,” according to dispatch audio obtained by The Post.

Panettiere checked into rehab in 2020 and spent eight months receiving treatment for her alcohol and drug addiction.

She recalled in “This is Me: A Reckoning,” that doctors told her she risked being dead within five years if she didn’t stop drinking.

Hayden Panettiere’s only sibling was her younger brother, Jansen Panettiere, who tragically passed away in February 2023 at the age of 28. He died from cardiomegaly (an enlarged heart) and aortic valve complications.

Yes, I am thinking the same thing you’re thinking.

DEADLY PATTERN

Truly OG Sunners will remember Hayden showing up way back in the very earliest days of the blog, on account of her starring as Claire in the NBC series Heroes. Granted, she dropped off my radar when she went on to other things, but I do believe I’ve been known to use terms like “adorable little cupcake” to describe the diminutive actress.

But as we see all too often with former child actors and (particularly) actresses, Hayden was deeply troubled and lost custody of her only child due to her ongoing substance abuse struggles.

Her career had its ups and downs, but she did have success as a popular character in the Scream franchise and the TV series Nashville. But she seemed to fall into a tailspin after Nashville ended, and appeared in mostly low/no-budget projects until her untimely passing.

READ THE FULL STORY BACK AT THE MOTHERSHIP:

https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2026/08/hayden-panettiere-swims-to-siren.html

Well, I’ve gone and done it: I opened up an account at Letterboxd.

Shocking and audacious move on my part, I realize, but it had to be done. And now I need your help…

I’ve posted my Secret Sun Essentials—films with special meaning to me or to the work—but the next step is the Secret Cinematic Canon.

What’s that all about, you may ask?

It’s about constructing a corpus of films that advance the ultimate goal of the entire Secret Sun project: the re-enchantment of the world.

That process requires reopening the closed and neglected chambers of the deep unconscious and restoring life’s true wonder and natural possibilities. And what I like to call “enchantertainment” can be a powerful part of that process.

So I don’t just want a list of suggestions—I want to hear your testimony about your chosen films: why they matter and what they mean to you.

Make your voice heard:

• What suggestions do you have for a definitive Secret Sun Cinematic Canon?

• Which films do you feel really hit the kinds of bases the films I mentioned do?

• Which films do you feel your fellow students simply have to watch?

Working from that discussion, I’d like us to build a list of films that best suit the Secret Cinema Aesthetic—dreamlike, mystical, surreal to the point of numinosity—not only for our personal watching enjoyment, but also for livestreams and other types of deep dives.

And just so you know, I’d like to stick with feature films for the moment and save TV shows and miniseries for later.

To get the ball rolling, here’s an excerpt from The Endless American Midnight that will give you a sense of what I’m going for…

MY FAVORITE FLOPS

BEFORE LAUNCHING THE SECRET SUN BLOG, I briefly toyed with the idea of a blog centered on metaphysically and spiritually-themed movies and TV shows called ‘Metaphyction’.

But I soon realized something telling about the films I wanted to write about; most of them were flops.

Granted, a lot of them went on to enjoy cult status on video, but that didn’t help them any at the box office.

The point of all this is that films that delve into metaphysical themes (‘metaphysical’ being a blanket term for most of the stuff we look at here) usually don’t seem to do well with the multiplex crowd who make or break films these days, but often do much better with the shut-ins like myself who prefer to consume their entertainment in their own homes.

So, here are my favorite flops in chronological order. Which, barring a few outliers, comprise the list of my favorite films.

THE WICKER MAN (1973)

PRODUCTION BUDGET £500,000
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $58,341

TO SAY THE WICKER MAN WAS A FLOP on its release is to reduce the term ‘flop’ to a trifle. This was a film that its studio hated so much that not only did they go out of their way to figuratively bury it in the theaters, they actually took the negative of the film and literally buried it (as landfill for a highway project).

If it weren’t for low-budget maestro Roger Corman, the film might have been forgotten. Always looking for product, Corman worked up a truncated cut of the film in the second-run/drive-in circuit, where it built up a devoted cult following.

As with many of these films, I prefer the theatrical cut to the extended version. Corman’s old-school instincts served the film well, and cut out a lot of extraneous exposition that slowed down the action. The film draws heavily on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough for historical accuracy and may also draw on the equally-unappreciated British film Eye of the Devil.

The Wicker Man is (obviously) deeply pagan, while most of my other favorite flops are Gnostic, but the humor, the sex and the subversion (as well as the songs) have made this one of my all-time favorites. And I’m certainly not alone. And I must say that the ending was genuinely shocking to me the first time I saw it, way back in the pre-Internet, VCR-powered Stone Age.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $28M
BOX OFFICE (USA) $27M

THE FIRST OF MANY BIG-BUDGET PHILIP K. DICK ADAPTATIONS, Blade Runner was hampered by a downbeat vibe and an overly competitive release calendar (this was the summer of ET, Poltergeist, Tron, The Road Warrior, etc). I had no idea at the time, since this was before our pathological obsession with box office grosses turned us into soul-dead bean-counters instead of film fans. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d seen since the first Star Wars.

Of course, it’s “weighed down” with Gnostic pessimism and metaphysical ruminations about what it means to be human, and a lot of critics chafed at the voiceover (which I loved, and still prefer), but it’s still a master class in big-budget moviemaking. The sparkly Vangelis soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

I miss the days before non-executives spent their Monday mornings brooding over grosses. Blade Runner is still an important movie that people still want to see for the first time, and it’s still a movie that rewards repeat viewings. Can you say that about Van Helsing or Transformers 3? I think not.

THE HUNGER (1983)

PRODUCTION BUDGET: $10M
BOX OFFICE (USA): $6M

THIS MOVIE IS GROSSLY MISUNDERSTOOD, mostly because of that scene (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean). But it’s a downright startling prophecy of the AIDS crisis, which was still in its early days when the film was being made.

It’s also a powerful meditation on obsession and addiction, as well as a condemnation of the shallow, youth-centric culture that has only gotten crazy worse since the Eighties.

The movie was savaged, partly because of that scene but also because David Bowie was seen as a dilettante playing at acting. The fact that director Tony Scott (brother of Ridley) made his bones doing commercials in the UK didn’t endear him to the wags, either.

None of that fazed me. I loved this movie back in the day and I still love it. This is the modern-day vampire story Anne Rice wishes she wrote.

JACOB’S LADDER (1990)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $25M
BOX OFFICE (USA) $26M

THIS MOVIE SPOKE TO ME ON SO MANY LEVELS — many of which are very painful — that it became one of the first movies that I obsessed over. I’ve watched it more times than I could count. As with Blade Runner, it’s an object lesson in big-screen directing. And having read the original script I can say it’s as much — if not more — an Adrian Lyne film as a Bruce Joel Rubin film.

Lyne used the opportunity to stoke his own William Friedkin obsession, something my fellow children of the Seventies will appreciate. But he also went out of his way to avoid horror cliché, creating a new visual vocabulary for demons and monsters that is still in use to this day.

Balancing out the existential terror is the abject heartbreak of a young working-class father who loses a child (played by a young Macaulay Culkin, for whom my first son was an absolute ringer for at the time) before being sent to the killing fields of Southeast Asia.

Plus, Elizabeth Peña smolders with carnality, and several actors who went on to bigger things put in A-plus performances.

DARK CITY (1998)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $27M
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $27M

WHILE THIS SCI-FI NOIR HAS GROWN IN STATURE on DVD, it was a flop upon release. Again, I was oblivious because I was sold on Dark City as soon as I saw the trailer. Even then I saw it took the retro-noir vibe of the first Batman movie and actually wrote a real story to place it in.

Of course, a little indie art picture called The Matrix came along a year later and stole Dark City’s premise and its thunder. Plus, its actual sets.

Some have been disappointed with writer/director Alex Proyas’ career path since (I actually like Knowing quite a bit), but that’s Hollywood for you. Multimillion budgets are not meant to be used to make quirky statements based in Gnostic cosmology; they’re meant to rake in multi-million dollar profits in return.

That they so often don’t shows that nobody in show business knows what the hell they’re doing, since it’s impossible to say what will happen in the culture and the world during the several years you’re working on your film.

DAGON (2001)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $4,800,000
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) €212,699

STUART GORDON’S ADAPTATION of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” is a deeply divisive movie, even among Lovecraft fans (hell, especially among Lovecraft fans), but I think it’s a masterpiece. Because I am a natural-born contrarian.

On the surface level, Dagon is just another B-movie gorefest, but as the credit sequence tells us, it’s below the surface where all the real action is.

Lovecraft’s paganophobia was simply a stand-in for his revulsion toward the immigrant hordes descending on the Northeast, but Gordon takes an opposite tack: the Mystery cult initiation we see unfold is a revelation to a deeper gnosis.

Our hero Paul Marsh is systematically stripped of all of the yuppie comforts he took as a birthright, only to find a much deeper and more powerful birthright he had no idea existed.

The creepy medieval Spanish village is a nice stand-in for Lovecraft’s Cape Ann (which is a yuppie hellhole nowadays) and Gordon’s use of sex and violence is less juvenile than his other pictures. And the actress who portrays Uxia so brilliantly encapsulates the whole powder-keg of emotions of a woman who’s found the love of her life.

MULHOLLAND DR. (2001)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $15M
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $20M

INLAND EMPIRE IS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME FILM (though much, much grimmer and much more insane) but Mulholland Dr. gets the nod for all the sumptuous color and cinematography that the bigger budget allowed. David Lynch has always been the poet laureate of dissociation and dream logic, and for my money, Mulholland is his masterpiece.

Naomi Watts would go on to star in the remake of Ringu, but this is a much scarier film because it’s real. It’s about how Hollywood takes everything away from the naive and the dreamers (her character is Canadian, appropriately) and gives them nothing but cold concrete and a bullet to the head in return.

I’m not surprised Lynch has quit making movies, since Mulholland and Inland stripped away all of the lies and bullshit that Hollywood sells, and showed us the disease-riddled, reanimated corpse that hides behind the curtain, pulling all of our strings.

SOLARIS (2002)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $47M
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $30M

I WAS LATE TO THE SOLARIS PARTY, since I didn’t happen to catch it until it was on cable. I made up for lost time.

Steven Soderbergh came of age at a time when Hollywood was on fire, and the storytelling tics of all the late Sixties and Seventies auteurs are all over his work. His anti-linear approach sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. It definitely works here. Artistically, at least.

I can only explain this film’s very existence by the fact that it’s essentially a James Cameron project, with Soderbergh hired on to supply the poetry. If all of Hollywood didn’t live in mortal terror of Cameron, there’s no way this brooding, atmospheric Astro-Gnostic meditation on death and loss would have been green-lit. Clooney might have helped seal the deal, and it’s always great to see Natascha McElhone, even if she’s weirdly lit in a lot of this.

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE (2008)

PRODUCTION BUDGET $30M
BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $68 M

GIVEN THE UNJUST DRUBBING THIS FILM TOOK, it’s the only film on this list to ostensibly turn a profit at the box office. This film was a victim of bad timing, given that The Dark Knight (released the previous week) worked so hard to dredge up the 9/11 vibe that pulled the rug out from underneath the original series.

Its time will come. and people will come to appreciate how perfectly Carter captured the bleak vibe of the late Bush years, not to mention how brilliantly directed and filmed it all is.

THE NINES (2007)

BOX OFFICE (INT’L) $130,000

I DON’T THINK THE INDESCRIBABLE COMEDY-DRAMA masterwork, The Nines, was ever released outside the festival circuit, so don’t be scared off by its paltry gross.

The performances by Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy are spotless, not to mention some stunning work by the precocious Elle Fanning.

The critics saw this as John August’s Charlie Kaufman move, but it’s much more interesting than that. It’s also Gnostic as hell, but not in a stupid Matrix kind of way. Don’t let that scare you off: unlike most so-called “Gnostically-themed” movies, The Nines is a hell of a lot of fun. •

Since that writing, Under the Silver Lake has been added to my must-see movie list. There’s also Mandy (of course), A Dark Song, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Michael Clayton, Donnie Darko, Code 46, Annihilation, The Rapture, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Blue Velvet, Radio Free Albemuth, Knowing, Earthling, Midnight Special, and tons of others not coming to mind at the moment.

Now let’s hear yours…

*I literally just coined the term “enchantertainment.”

When I first interviewed Nick Redfern fifteen years ago, I was rather skeptical of the so-called “Collins Elite.” I hadn’t read much John Keel yet, so I had the same mental image of demons that a lot of people do—the grotesque chimeras of medieval tapestries.

It wouldn’t be until I’d read Operation Trojan Horse (and similar works) that I’d see what the Collins Elite—if in fact they actually exist—were fumbling after.

It reminded me in a weird way of Jacob’s Ladder—Bruce Joel Rubin’s script originally called for your usual Hollywood demons, which in turn are modeled after medieval monsters.

Adrian Lyne quite rightly pointed out that those monsters had long since been rendered ridiculous, and no one would take them seriously. Instead, Lyne drew on the kinds of entities that people have experienced during bad drug trips, which, of course, the film itself is hinged on.

As you know, I believe these are often actual entities that exist outside of the human imagination: specifically “ultraterrestrials,” who interface with humans through various means. That is at the core of my thesis about Roswell and Lucifer’s Technologies.

There are others who believe the Roswell event was real but don’t believe it had anything to do with extraterrestrials from another star. The Collins Elite have an entirely novel take on the crash.

From Nick’s old Final Events blog:

Beyond any shadow of doubt at all, the strangest belief of the Collins Elite was that relative to the Roswell affair of July 1947. In what is certainly a unique fashion, they came to believe that nothing—extraterrestrial or otherwise—crashed at Roswell.

Rather, the group concluded that the event was “staged”—a “Trojan Horse”-type event provoked by demons trying to deceive us into accepting the idea that vulnerable ETs had crashed at Roswell and were responsible for the wave of Flying Saucer encounters that gripped the nation in the summer of 1947.

For the Collins Elite, the “alien debris” and “memory metal” said to have been recovered at the crash site on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico (which is shown above, in a photo I took in February 2011), were nothing less than the result of diabolical “demonic alchemy.”

In other words, the group formed an opinion that these strange entities “wove” the materials, then had them manifest on the Foster Ranch, thus creating the image of a crash of something exotic from the skies.

But what of the bodies said to have been found at the site? Well, the Collins Elite had an answer to that issue too.

Their members claimed to have read reports suggesting that no literal bodies were ever found at Roswell—at all. Rather, they maintained that certain “biological materials” were recovered.

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Stop the presses!

The horrible truth about the dark and deadly Synchro-Underground has finally been told!

Yes, this absolute genius of a YouTuber risks life and limb to uncover the most insidious plot ever devised!

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It never fails. As soon as you stumble upon a mystery no one else was looking for, you invariably get hit with synchronicities that send you even further down the rabbit hole.

What on Earth am I going on about now, I hear you say?

Well, a ways back I had hopped in the car right after decoding the Eye-in-Triangle meme/gesture as a signifier of Algol worshi…

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Trevor Wilson, best known to the world as “Jeremy” in the award-winning music video directed by Mark Pellington for grunge superstars Pearl Jam, drowned while swimming at a Puerto Rican beach notorious for its dangerous riptides, ten years ago today.

The graves are filled with Generation X icons, aren’t they? Is anyone keeping a tally out there, or is th…

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There’s an old saying that “Millionaires don’t believe in Astrology, but billionaires do.”

I think that needs to be updated, given how many billionaires are running around out there these days. Try this:

“Millionaires don’t obsess to the point of madness over UFOs, secret societies, and occult symbolism, but billionaires do.”

“Also, millionaires.”

You see, it occurred to me that so many people out there still have no idea how weird today’s Titans of Industry really are, or how the technology that rules our lives owes just as much to the occult as it does to math or science. Actually, much more so.

But even if you don’t think aliens or interdimensional entities had anything to do with the creation of the transistor and other breakthroughs, you can’t discount the fact that UFOs, cults, remote viewing, and other emanations of High Weirdness were an integral, inseparable part of Silicon Valley’s glory days, when everything we now take for granted was created out of whole cloth.

So what does this mean?

Let’s start with our new lord and master, the almighty Algorithm. Where does this term come from?

The word ‘algorithm’ has its roots in Latinizing the nisba, indicating his geographic origin, of the name of Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi to algorismus. Al-Khwārizmī (c. 780–850) was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, whose name means ‘the native of Khwarazm’, a region that was part of Greater Iran and is now in Uzbekistan.

About 825, al-Khwarizmi wrote an Arabic language treatise on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which was translated into Latin during the 12th century. The manuscript starts with the phrase Dixit Algorizmi (’Thus spake Al-Khwarizmi’), where “Algorizmi” was the translator’s Latinization of Al-Khwarizmi’s name. Al-Khwarizmi was the most widely read mathematician in Europe in the late Middle Ages, primarily through another of his books, the Algebra.

OK, that’s all a bunch of lies. Not on Wikipedia’s part, but almost certainly on the translator’s part or whomever came along and changed “Al-Khwarizmi” to Algorithm.

Why do I say this with such certainty?

Well, I think algorithm really comes from the “Demon’s Head,” AKAK “the Father of Terrors,” better known to us today as…

…Algol (also known as the Demon Star) is quite possibly the most interesting star in the fall and winter skies, if they know when to look for its brightness changes.

It is a famous prototype variable star, though it is not intrinsically one; in other words, it does not fluctuate in brightness on its own. Rather, its light changes result from the eclipse of one binary-star component by another, because the two companion stars’ orbital plane lies nearly in our line of sight.

“Binary,” they say.

You with me here, folks?

Algol is derived from the Arabic “raʾs al-ghūl,” (yes, it’s the same name) which makes the algorithm translation even sillier.

But the Ancient Egyptians had another name for it: “The Eye of Horus.”

Algol seems to represent Horus, an Egyptian god with ties to the Sun and embodied by the living pharaoh, and its period is connected to lucky days on the calendar. That sets Egypt apart from most other ancient cultures, which usually saw Algol as a harbinger of evil.

To the ancient Greeks, the variable star was the “Head of Gorgon.”

Why? Perhaps for the same reason that Algol so unsettled astronomers from other cultures: its habit of seeming to disappear and reappear. That cycle would have mirrored Horus’s cycle of death and rebirth, making the association pretty obvious.

So, how does this connect to the real origin of “algorithm?”

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“The fundamental difference that separates the Gnostics from their contemporaries is that, for them, their native `soil’ is not the earth, but that lost heaven which they keep vividly alive in their memories: they are the autochthons of another world.

“Hence their feeling of having fallen onto our earth like inhabitants from a distant planet, of having s…

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I was actually going through my Anne Heche materials for my next video and found this project, which I started three years ago.

I didn’t get very far back then, but was hit with a flash of inspiration to finish it up. Maybe because the world has only gotten more clownish in the interim, but maybe also because Twin Peaks: The Return has been on my mind lately. Well, more than usual, let’s just say.

All of which is to say this is kind of my response to “Episode Eight,” but also the most Lynchian thing I’ve done yet. I say “yet” on account of the Master’s influence seems to be welling up in my soul, on the daily. What other response is appropriate to these times, really?

I’m sure this video will inspire plenty of discussion and debate, but do be advised it’s a bit intense. Nothing graphic or anything like that, but just steel yourself before watching.

What year is this?

The reason I ask is that the Disclosure cult’s traveling clown-show shows no sign of pulling up stakes, and the once-fringe “UFO=Demons” theme is now headline fodder for the mainstream media.

As someone who was covering all of these topics some two decades back, I have to say what we are really looking at is the UFO/ET issue being used in attempts to prop up various agendas, whether political or religious, or simple self-interest.

But since I’ve been spending a lot of time this MercRet trying to organize and catalog over twenty years of Secret Sun materials—text, video, audio, etc.—I thought it was the perfect time to bring this 2012 interview to your attention.

In it, Nick Redfern and I discuss his best-seller Final Events, which explores a group that may or may not exist called the Collins Elite, a group of Evangelicals who believe that aliens are literal demons as described in the Bible.

Here’s Nick explaining the basic thesis of the book from a 2010 interview with The Secret Sun:

Basically speaking, Final Events is a study of a think tank group comprised of personnel from within the U.S. Government, military, and intelligence community that has existed in stealth for a surprisingly long time. The group believes that while the UFO issue is a very real one, they do not believe it has anything to do with literal extraterrestrials.

Rather, the group—which calls itself the Collins Elite—concludes that the “aliens” are, in reality, literal demonic entities that are trying to seduce us with a false lure of supposed alien technology and to—quite literally—steal and farm our souls.

The group claims to have discovered evidence that these demonic entities—that seem to utilize a weird combination of advanced technology and archaic rite and ritual—derive a form of “energy sustenance” from the human soul or life force.

In other words, they don’t want to land on the White House lawn and help us, nor do they want to destroy us. Rather, they want to maintain the herd, and upon our physical deaths, extract the human life-force as sustenance.

The Collins Elite believes this has been going on since the dawning of civilization and that the ET motif is the latest in a long line of deceptive images they have used, and that in the past have included gods, angels, Jinns, fairies, goblins, etc.

Now, my thinking on UFOs (and any number of issues) has evolved since this was recorded. In fact, a series of sightings my family and I had back during the bleakest, blackest days of my life cured me of wanting any engagement with the UFO topic, and certainly in any belief or hope that whatever is behind the phenomenon is in any way beneficent; never mind the salvational hope that the cultists project seem to project upon it.

In the past few years, I’ve come to see the theories of Dr. Carl Raschke, particularly his paper titled “Ultraterrestrials as Agents of Cultural Deconstruction,” as the most plausible (or at least reasonable) explanation of the phenomenon. Raschke is a conservative Christian theologian, but his analysis is far more nuanced and insightful than anything that Nick was told that the Collins Elite believe.

In that regard, I believe it’s also far more effective in constructing a response to cultists on either side of an issue that shows no signs of going away.

Thursday the 16th is the tenth anniversary of the first Stranger Things series, a landmark date sadly forever contaminated by the dumpster-fire sequels and a truly loathsome and cringe-inducing finale.

I’m currently at work on a video presentation explaining how the franchise was so thoroughly infantilized and sabotaged by Netflix, and this piece will h…

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Dreaming has always been a major part of my life and a central concern of The Secret Sun.

As you probably remember, the name itself comes from a recurring dream I’d had since I was a kid, where the sun comes out in the middle of the night, but only a select few realize it. And I personally define Synchromysticism as the art of using the tools and techni…

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Listen, I know it’s the weekend and you’ve probably got other plans, so let me just quickly drop a couple hot links for ya…

The latest post on The Secret History of Rock ‘n Roll has alt.rock playlists for 1987 (which I covered here recently), ‘88 and ‘89. The late Eighties were the peak of, well, pretty much everything, but especially so for alternative …

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