I know you want me to carry on with the cliffhanger from last week’s newsletter. If you recall, the algorithms that run the internet had just begun to understand human behavior, and social media CEOs were about to unleash this understanding on an unsuspecting world.

But first we need to cut to the 1940s, and a man living under a rock in the California desert.

This was not just any rock. It was a cool rock. This gives me an excuse to link to the June newsletter, “Cool Rock.” This particular cool rock was the well named “Giant Rock.” Giant Rock is what it says it is, a giant rock, a seven story boulder.

In the early 1940s, an eccentric prospector with a penchant for dynamite and an inspiration from tortoise burrows built his home under the rock. Then he furnished his rock with radio equipment and installed an airstrip nearby.

Alas, the Giant Rock denizen, Frank Critzer, died when he blew himself up in his underground home during a stand-off with the police. He did this because the local police were asked to keep an eye on him by the FBI. The FBI thought he might be a German spy, due to his name and the fact that he was operating an underground shelter full of TNT, with radio equipment and an airfield, out near the site where the Army was training people to fly planes.

Before his death, Frank “the Underdweller” Critzer befriended an amateur aviator who took interest in his homemade runway and radio equipment.

The aviator who purchased the Giant Rock and the Giant Rock airfield was named George Van Tassel. After taking up residence in Frank’s underground home, George started holding group meditation sessions under the rock.

One person attending these sessions was an old aerospace industry coworker of George’s, Orfeo Angelucci.

In 1952, Angelucci claimed that he had been driving home from his job at night, when he had been followed by a small blue ball of light that spoke to him with a message from benevolent and highly spiritual aliens.

In 1953, George Van Tassel was meditating under the Giant Rock when an alien from Venus, orbiting in a spacecraft, contacted him telepathically. There is no record of Angelucci being present at the time.

It would later turn out that Van Tassel wasn’t the only person who claimed they had been contacted while underneath Giant Rock.

I apologize for the inconvenient aside about a cool rock. We now return to your scheduled reading about how the Ascended Masters relate to aliens, artificial intelligence and the internet.

You may recall the Theosophy Movement and Ascended Masters from a previous newsletter, or from reading about weirdos some other place. If you have not, I urge you to read it now.

Before you decide for yourself if contactees were recasting the Ascended Masters as aliens, let’s take a look at “contactees.”

Contactees were people who claimed to be contacted by aliens. Sometimes via telepathy, sometimes in the flesh. They had a peak in the 1950s. Usually, the aliens who contacted them looked like humans. We’re not going to unpack the fact that those humans were usually very white, and the “best” ones were blonde and “Nordic,” but they did in fact look like humans.

Contactees often told the same story. The aliens were worried about Earth. Our wars, our nuclear bombs, our crimes and environmental destruction. Can’t blame the aliens, honestly.

The aliens asked them to spread a message of universal love and peace. Sometimes the aliens would take the astral (or physical) forms of said humans on trips around the solar system, or beyond. Orfeo Angelucci, for instance, got to spend an entire week psychically inhabiting the body of a Space Brother named “Neptune,” on an asteroid that was the remains of a destroyed planet.

Inhabited asteroids, and the idea that asteroids were the remains of a destroyed planet, was a common pulp sci-fi trope of the time. The overlap between contactees, UFOlogists, and sci-fi fans is considerable.

Orfeo Angelucci was not the first Californian to receive a visit from aliens. There was also George Adamski, who had been an active member of Californian occult societies in the 1930s like those we discussed back in April. Adamski had made a fortune when his "Royal Order of Tibet" was given a government license to make wine for religious purposes during prohibition.

Adamski was well versed in theosophy, and while it’s unclear if Van Tassel or Angelucci knew much about it, theosophy would have been the most likely place to come across teachers of meditation in the early 1950s.

Adamski and Van Tassel told a story familiar to those who know about Theosophy. They were contacted during meditation by a great and powerful psychic master. But this wasn’t a historic figure. It was an alien.

Adamski’s teachings were more esoteric, and perhaps contributed to future ideas of “seas of consciousness” that would be popular in future California.

But Van Tassel’s story - that aliens had told him to spread a message of peace - would be familiar to anyone who’s seen the 1951 movie “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” was based on a 1940 story called “Farewell to the Master,” published in “Astounding Tales of Super-Science,” a magazine that was part of the milieu of L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Parsons, and other assorted occult and science-fiction scoundrels present in the California desert during World War II and thereafter.

One such writer of sci-fi tales that Hubbard, Parsons, and their compatriots would almost certainly have read was Donald Keyhoe, a military aviator who would become one of the foremost “authorities” on UFOs in the 1950s, with the book “The Flying Saucers are Real” in 1950. The fact that Keyhoe had, in the 20s and 30s, written pulp sci-fi tales of heroic aviators, definitely was part of the conversation around him.

Keyhoe’s “The Flying Saucers are Real,” and its sequel, “Flying Saucers from Outer Space'' are classics in the genre that would become “UFOlogy.” Unlike contactees, UFOlogists looked at spaceships and aliens from a mostly pseduoscientific perspective, trying to get proof of their existence, favoring dry reports and “credible” witnesses, many of whom were aviators. They rarely featured contactees.

Contactees are innately different from “abductees.” Contactee encounters were nice, hopeful, the aliens were essentially human and angelic, and the contactees were willing to meet them, some were even seeking them out.

In later decades, the experiences of many who encountered aliens would become dark, sinister, downright demonic. These “abductees” would be unwilling, tormented, and unable to do anything to prevent the experience. Otherwordly Men in Black would cover up the sightings and evidence, and sinister government conspiracies were imagined to be responsible for the lack of proof and the fact that most of the public didn’t take contactees - or UFOlogists - very seriously.

Keyhoe’s writing itself would reflect this change. In 1955, he wrote “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy,” which established many of the tropes that would dominate the next 40 years of UFO lore. Betty Hill - the prototypical abductee, who claimed to have been abducted in 1961, read “The Flying Saucer Conspiracy” in the days before her abduction.

But back to 1953. Two years after “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” One year after a peak UFO incident, the Washington DC incident of 1952. Van Tassel was contacted while doing a group meditation in the rooms underneath giant rock. Then, he named the alien who contacted him.

Ashtar.

While Van Tassel’s original concept of Ashtar was somewhat different, Ashtar became a popular esoteric and occult figure in later decades.

There are a handful of gods, goddesses, and magical beings with similar names, many of which were familiar “masters” in theosophic corners.

Extraterrestrial Ascended Masters were not unheard of, either, in earlier Theosophic works, but Ashtar was much more popular, and long-lived, than Van Tassel’s UFO religion, The Ministry of Universal Wisdom, which never really caught on.

Today, Van Tassel is perhaps more famous for his “Integreton,” a large domed room built in the desert, mostly funded by Howard Hughes, who would at times employ Van Tassel, Orfeo Angelucci, and another key figure in aeronautics and occultism in California, Jack Parsons.

Van Tassel claimed that a person inside the Integreton would be “rejuvenated” by powerful electromagnetic waves. This unique structure is still in Landers California, near the Big Rock.

Another famous contactee, Daniel Fry, worked in Pasadena at Aerojet, which had been founded by Jack Parsons and his friend in science fiction and the OTO, Ed Foreman, thought the two had left by the time Fry arrived. Aerojet was a key competitor to the aforementioned Hughes Aircraft Company in the field of rocketry, and the two existed very close to one another.

Obviously, the Ashtar Movement was not the only strain of theosophy involving extraterrestrials evolving in southern California in the 1950s. But they all preached a similar message to the one Van Tassel put forth in 1953: Humanity was self-destructing, and our peaceful alien friends were here to help, if we could only start spreading love and open our minds.

This message was about to become popular. But you may wonder: other than the integreton, what were these techniques of mind and alternative technology that the aliens were begging us to use?

To know that, we must go on another tangent.

Of course. Let’s talk about mesmerism and the mind cure.

Mesmerism and the mind cure arose around the same time that theosophy did, and have a lot of shared vocabulary and ideas. They were products of a time when popular knowledge of esoteric topics was exploding. Theosophy focused on spiritual and religious concepts alien to most of the Europeans encountering them for the first time - things they may have misunderstood, like meditation, magic, or Buddhism.

Mesmerism and the mind cure would perform a similar alchemy, taking poorly understood ideas in newly developing fields like physics, psychology, and medicine, and turning them into a semi-religious remix that offered healing and personal improvement, not just for the self, but for society.

Entire books have been devoted to mesmerism and its downstream pseudosciences, and the way they neatly intersect with occult societies and theosophy offshoots. But alas. You can see hints of what became known as “new thought,” to this day. Things like energy healing, using “waves,” telepathy, “mind over matter,” healing thoughts, vibrations, crystals, and the like.

These were the techniques that the developing UFO religions would claim as psychic gifts from aliens - a way to move past modern medicine, energy, and politics, into a brave new age - the one the aliens wanted us to have.

Mesmerism was mostly a European phenomenon, but the idea of healing and transforming oneself with nothing but the mind was very popular in America, especially in California.

As we’ve seen, the giant rock area was home to aeronautical engineering, jet propulsion labs, and Hollywood. But to the north, near San Francisco, the UFO religions that had sprung up in the fertile soil of the California occult would run into a counterculture movement ready for alien vibrations.

Then, all of it would encounter the legacy of a blimp.

In October of 1929 when nothing else of note was beginning, the United States military decided to build the largest helium-filled airships in history, to use as flying aircraft carriers. It needed a place near the naval bases of San Francisco, where the navy was experimenting with new technologies for radio communication.

So they built Moffett Airfield in the valley southeast of San Francisco, in a big valley full of prime farmland, the largest fruit-producing region in the world, known as the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Both blimps crashed, and the idea of using a large aircraft to launch a small aircraft became unfashionable. But the massive hangars were of interest to the aeronautic industry.

In the meantime, scientists and engineers from the east coast were moving here, either for the climate, for experiments being done by the navy around the docks in San Francisco, for Stanford University, or to be near the growing aerospace industry, or the transistor industry, or NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor to NASA.

Many people in the area who were interested in aeronautics, spaceflight, aliens, and science fiction, would travel a few hours south to attend George Van Tassel’s annual "Giant Rock Spacecraft Convention," naturally held at the Giant Rock.

One person who Van Tassel met at this time was Marjorie Cameron, the ex wife of Jack Parsons. Cameron had participated in sex magic rituals called the Babylon Working in 1946. The ritual was designed by Parsons off of notes by Crowley and others, it was designed to summon a “moonchild,” a spirit that would usher in a new age. The “scribe” who witnessed and recorded this momentous event was none other than L. Ron Hubbard.

Cameron would meet Van Tassel in 1952, just before his contact with Ashtar. Cameron herself would become an occult and counterculture figure, she created her own moonchild-creating cult, though she remained tangentially involved in UFO beliefs.

In 1959, Van Tassel’s convention reached its peak attendance, approximately 10 thousand people. Also that year, someone just outside of San Francisco invented a silicon board that could perform all the calculations normally done by a closet sized collection of transistors.

Three things that were unique about the California environment led to the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” becoming what we now know it as: “Silicon Valley.”

First was the density of operations. The government buildup on the west coast had exploded during World War II. After the war, the area was full of engineers, technicians and scientists. The other unique quirk was that California law did not favor non-compete clauses, and in most cases they were unenforceable. That meant that if you learned something in one company you could take your expertise elsewhere.

Finally, the government of California had made attainable higher education a goal, funding an extensive public college system that would attract and keep young people from around the world.

Most of the men in this computer world were not very interesting. They were bright, perhaps, or wealthy, or both. They had technical skill and may now have books written about them, but for us weirdos, only a few stand out in the early 60s computing industry.

One such man is Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, or JCR Licklider. Licklider had originally been interested in psychoacoustics, the process by which the brain perceives sound. He had also been a part of NORAD’s project to create a network of radar stations over the entire United States, which required a system to turn all of that data into something useful. That system was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a building-sized computing complex that ran off of banks of vacuum tubes, and later, transistors. It received information from all over the continent and processed it into something human beings could use to make potentially apocalyptic decisions. Licklider was involved in what we would now call “UX” (User eXperience) design, dealing with ways to make the “human factor” understand, interact, and work in the giant mechanism.

SAGE went online in 1958, and Licklider’s experience with the computers there introduced him to the idea of timesharing, where users at a distant “terminal” would write programs or queries that would then be run on a massive “mainframe” and their data returned. As the compiling and computation could, even in the 1960s, be done faster than the writing of the code and queries, the computer would otherwise sit idle, wasted.

Licklider had other far out ideas, which he outlined in a 1960 paper called “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” He imagined connecting mainframes, connecting all kinds of computers, so that someone at a terminal anywhere could write a program or query and have it run on the appropriate computer. He called this idea, rather grandiosely, “The Intergalactic Computer Network.” He proposed this in 1963, when the first issue of Iron Man came out. Some other stuff happened as well, I’m sure.

There was ONE other important event in 1963. The FDA raided a California UFO church belonging to one L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, who had been a big name in the post war California occult and science-fiction circuits, had started an odd little church by this time, and he would not take this offense lying down.

It’s hard to overstate how much NORAD, with the SAGE at its core, had Americans looking to the skies. And with so many people looking to the skies, be they amateurs, astronomers, pilots or radar operators, someone was bound to see something.

There were too many UFO religions, movements, and cults in California to go over each one individually, but they tended to be creations of the contactee sort, claiming that benevolent alien civilizations were reaching out to humanity with a message for peace, environmental stewardship, warnings about nuclear weapons, and a concern for capitalistic excess.

To aid humanity in these goals, the extraterrestrials equipped their contactees with a wide array of new ideas: Open mindedness, meditation, psychic powers, solar power, psychedelics, alternative medicine, geodesic domes and macrobiotic living. Then, they tasked us humans with finding ways to share these new ideas.

Like a lot of Californians, many of the occultists and UFO worshippers moved to San Francisco. Or, if they were going to school, across the bay in Berkeley. In Berkeley, they might see (or work at) the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, funded by the Department of Energy. Or the Graduate Theological Union, located nearby. Or perhaps Stanford.

This is a classic California mix; government and industry funding research, with students working on it, and weirdos and religious types all around. This was the sort of milieu that brought men like George Van Tassel into contact with Frank Critzer. Critzer’s airfield was outside a place where Howard Hughes was building secret projects and flying them in the desert at night. This environment sprouted the Aetherius Society, the Urantia Movement, Unarius (not to be confused with Urantia), and the One World Family Commune.

The One World Family Commune was founded by Allen Noonan, who claimed that he met aliens in person at Giant Rock, in 1954, a year after George Van Tassel did the same thing, in the same place. The message the aliens gave to Noonan was remarkably similar. Noonan went to San Francisco in 1967 to start a commune and a vegetarian cafe.

The One World Family Commune would have a brief stint in the spotlight after a 26 year old Oakland Raider from Winona, Mississippi - Chip Oliver - became a member, and wrote a scathing and prescient book about the way the NFL mistreated players.

To people in the bay area, UFO religions were about as common as communes and yoga, which was to say: not that common. But there were more of them, and their adherents, than popular conceptions of the era let on.

One main thread of part one of this series was how the mystics and new religious figures of the 19th century were driven by people’s interaction with new forms of fiction, as the printing industry began to become affordable and mass media grew out of newspapers and pulp magazines and remixes of old and new fiction made their way into earnest belief.

This didn’t stop when the first television signal transmitted. It kept up. When the military finally released the documents they had compiled listing UFO sightings over the decades, investigators compared them to the collections of reports by groups such as MUFON. MUFON is the Mutual UFO Network, a collection of local UFO sighting groups started in 1969. A startling, if not surprising, trend was revealed: People saw more UFOs and reported more abductions in the months following television or theatrical releases that featured aliens and spaceships.

Nor did the mystic masonic magical lodges and churches vanish. The lodge that gave us Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard split into schismatic factions that surged in the late 60s, some of which rebranded as outright satanism, such as Anton LaVey’s “Church of Satan,” and other Crowley-esque groups featuring sex magic and easy initiation. These groups found themselves unpopular after the Manson murders.

The Ordo Templi Orientis had successes, as well. It heavily influenced famed artist and music collector Harry Smith, who would later become the “advisor” for Alan Ginsberg and The Fugs when they attempted to levitate the pentagon in 1967. Smith arrived in San Francisco at the end of the war, influencing newcomers with his art and shamanism.

As the decade came to a close, a young ecologically-minded entrepreneur parked a truck in Menlo Park. The truck had been driven around California in 1968, selling tools of interest to people who wanted more “natural” living. But THE most popular item he sold was not a tool. Instead, it was the catalog he had printed that told the reader where they could buy all of the tools and instructions themselves.

To name this catalog, he recalled his campaign from a few years back, when, while on LSD in North Beach, San Francisco, he decided to campaign NASA to release pictures of the whole earth from space. Buckminster Fuller, whose intersections with Weird America could have an entire book, helped him with the project, and would help him with future projects.

The campaign consisted of buttons and other merchandise asking the question "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" While in 2023, that would no doubt be interpreted as flat-earth conspiracism, in 1968, it worked, and NASA released the photos. So that entrepreneur, Stewart Brand, called his 1968 catalog “The Whole Earth Catalog.” He put NASAs picture of the Earth on the cover.

The next year, in 1969, Brand would help another Silicon Valley legend of the day, Douglas Engelbart, set up a demonstration of cutting edge computer technology, known as “The Mother of All Demos.” In 1969, Engelbart and his team demonstrated video calling, collaborative editing of a text document online, using a mouse, using a visual “window” based operating system, and lots of other things we take for granted now.

If the 1960s had seen the spread of UFO religions, the 70s saw the peak. Most of the popular conception of things that made up “hippie culture of the 1960s” were actually part of the early 70s. And just as the transition from friendly contactee to sinister abductee had begun to take hold, after the 1966 book and 1975 TV movie about Barney and Betty Hill, dark stories about satanism, communism, and free love run awry had soured some on California counterculture as well.

The 60s were over. In 1970, a physicist and scientologist, who had achieved OT level 7, which according to scientology, is high enough to “remote view” objects, started a project at SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, located in the same town where Brand parked his Whole Earth Truck.

Soon, the tech industry would find out something that secret societies have always known: spies are everywhere. And the hippies, faced with the fact that they could not change the world, would begin to look for ways to create a world that they could change.