Terence Mckenna was the Timothy Leary of the 80s and 90s that no one heard about until the DMT campaign began. He was a psychedelics advocate who also talked about ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and alchemy and magick; ie: shamanism. He tried to address this gap between traditional shamanism and our spiritless existential void called modern life by repackaging and repurposing the drug culture as gnosticism and alchemy. He tried to describe the psychedelic experience as a modern day shamanism in the wester gnostic alchemical tradition of self-understanding and an embrace of antiauthoritarianism and counterculture. He often discussed Jung and James Joyce.
In other words, he was a magnet for people who are so wildly into high strangeness, psychedelia and magick such that his CIA job was essentially 'tryptonaut babysitter', he was a shepherd of would-be goats or a transmogrifier of sheep into goats while weaving them philosophically inspiring sweaters of their own wool.
His brother Dennis has multiple phDs in various science fields, I think botany, chemistry and ethnopharmacology and is a maven of psychopharmacological ethnobotanical agents.
Miles Mathis: 1967 was when the Feds were infiltrating Haight-Ashbury (and many other “liberal” centers) in force. For instance, that is when Roger Smith and David Smith opened their fake clinic there, gathering around them all the actors that would be the Manson family players.
It is also when the Tussman Experimental College was in full swing at Berkeley. This was actually an Intelligence project at Berkeley from 1965 to 1969, run by Joseph Tussman. Tussman served in army intelligence in the 1940's, and this is admitted by the mainstream. I assume Tussman was still serving in Intelligence in the 1960's. One of those who came in on the ground level of this experiment was Terence McKenna, who was recruited for the Tussman Experimental College in its first year, 1965. He was still there in 1967 when Kaczynski arrived at Berkeley. You may know that McKenna later became a new-age guru and LSD pusher, in the mold of Tim Leary or Ram Dass. You may also be interested to know that McKenna later admitted he was an Intelligence asset. Last year (2013), Gnostic Media uncovered and published audio of a December 1994 lecture by McKenna at Esalen. Here is what he said,
"And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then they recruited me and said, you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization. And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present."
Good to know. But McKenna is still hedging there, since we can put his recruitment back to 1965. Being under Tussman means he was already a recruit then. McKenna was the main pusher of psychedelics in the decades between Tim Leary and Pinchbeck. McKenna predicted the end of the world in 2012 based on “novelty reading” of fractal patterns he claimed to have discovered in the I Ching. He was led to this discovery by his prophetic voice Logos. In this vein, Pinchbeck has claimed a foundation for his theories by telling us he receives prophecy directly from an entity that identifies itself as the MesoAmerican deity Quetzalcoatl.
McKenna: "In 1947, the Rainer lights appeared and that was the first big modern flying saucer sighting and set off the whole modern flying saucer phenomenon. Well, cast your mind back to the ambiance of 1947. The atom bomb was in 1945, the defeat of Germany, the H-bomb was under development, Einstein was advising Truman. People were on the brink of things they could not understand. Nobody knew what the H-bomb really meant. What does it mean that we can do this? They said, we don’t know, maybe the universe is monitored and what we’re doing is so outrageous that maybe it will bring those who do the monitoring. Then they began to get these reports of these things in the sky. My god this must be it. There were very high-level government – secret, secret, secret commissions that were setup and they began to study the flying saucers furiously."
"They penetrated all those groups and they penetrated the flying saucer thing from one end to the other and I’m talking 1947 to 1954. They studied it and they studied it and Carl Jung was brought in, and all kinds of people were brought in, and at the end of that period, they concluded that what it was. They actually understood it. They concluded that it was the cosmic giggle. They concluded that it was that un-reducible nub of nuttiness that haunts reality and that it was not a threat to the security of North American air defenses. That was their question. Is this a military problem for us? By '54 or so, they had decided whatever this is – a linguistic virus, a mass hallucination, whatever it is – it is not a problem for the military defense of North America."
"But they had spent millions infiltrating and completely taking over the weirdest group of screwballs you can imagine, the flying saucer, hardcore cultists. They said, these people will believe anything. We know that because we’ve been to their meetings. We’ve read their publications. What should we do with them? Should we just withdraw all our agents and let them go back to whatever they are doing and the answer was no. These people will become a pool for experiments in manipulation of information, control of belief systems and response to propaganda. A whole bunch of black box, psychological, programming and informational kinds of research will be done on this pool of people because they’re so weird, if they start telling their relatives that they’re hearing voices in the head or something like that, their relatives and friends are just going to say what else is new. You’ve been talking like this for years. I think it was kept like that right up until the present moment."
"I think it’s very low budget. This is not high priority for the CIA. They’re sending, as I’ve said, semi-retired guys in scuffed brown shoes who are definitely over the hill. But they shepherd the group along and as you said, they release these outlandish documents and then they pull them back. Some guy comes forward and says it’s all a fraud and I know because I was on the inside and I was the one paid to tell you all these things and then somebody else comes forward and says no – he’s a walk in and has an implant and it wasn’t that way at all. It’s sort of like the JFK assassination. There is no bedrock there. There is no ground zero and I find these things sort of spooky. I think it’s bad mental hygiene to spend too much time with squirrels."