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THE RIGOROUS INTERVIEW - PART ONE
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A little over two months ago, yer old pal Jerky had the pleasure of spending the better part of an afternoon in a Toronto tavern with Jeff Wells, a Canadian novelist who also authors Rigorous Intuition, one of the Internet's most highly regarded para-political blogs.
Over some brews, ciders, and a big plate of fries, we held a wide-ranging conversation about everything from hidden history and psychedelic drugs to UFOs and Michael Moore. Yer old pal Jerky found Jeff to be a thoughtful and serious fellow, belying the paranoid, froth-lipped media stereotype of the typical "conspiracy nut". As a long-time admirer of his elegant prose and ability to spot thematic synchronicities in seemingly disparate chunks of information, I had expected no less.
The following is a direct, mostly unexpurgated transcription of my recording of our conversation, complete with some rough patches where the drink was starting to get the better of us. Because I switched on my digital recorder in mid-sentence, it starts off a bit abruptly. The entire interview will be published over the next three editions of the Dirt. - YOPJ
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Jerky: (tape begins) …philosophical theology?
Jeff Wells: About twenty-five, thirty years ago, I had a Born Again experience. And so I went through that, and actually my novel (Anxious Gravity) is sort of that story, a comic story about faith and loss of faith. So my interest is longstanding in certain religious matters, and I have sort of a sympathy or maybe an understanding for fundamentalist society and culture and, you know, how to spot fraud. Because I think there's a lot of that, a lot of exploitation, a lot of use of that as a cover.
JLB: Right now, is there any kind of mission for Rigorous Intuition? Or are you just letting it grow organically?
JW: Yeah, it's organic. I have no agenda; it's really just a way for me to educate myself. And that's the thing, you know. I'm sure there will be future posts that contradict earlier things I've written, and that's just, you know… evolution, really. So, yeah, it's organic, and it's helped a lot by the participation of the readers. I'm really surprised by how it's taken off, and that it has such a following. But I think it's because I'm not afraid to ask questions that maybe other people, who have a reputation that they have to worry about, are not asking. Maybe they don't have the same interests, or they aren't making the same connections. I mean, a lot of this stuff just isn't respectable. But obviously, a lot of people have a desire to discuss this stuff in a reasonably intellectual way. And I think you can find a lot of this stuff on the net, you know, in a very fringe way. In a credulous way, you know, like they just accept everything, like they don't have a bullshit filter. And there's a place for that, but there's also so much disinformation in this stuff.
JLB: Absolutely. That's a real danger, I think.
JW: Well, yeah. And the Internet, of course, is a great tool for spreading disinformation. But I think it's interesting to study the disinformation as well. Because obviously if someone cares enough to spread lies about something…
JLB: It's the classic paradigm, isn't it? It's like what happened after the JFK assassination, where the Powers That Be just set up red herring after red herring and let people go chasing rumors and tantalizing little bits of physical evidence that don't really mean anything, and there's no real way to verify it and people end up chasing their own tails. It's misdirection, distraction, the magician saying "look over there!"
JW: Yeah. I've been reading a lot about that in the UFO stuff. In this book by Jacques Vallee (holds up a copy of Revelations) there's a lot of stories about certain people, certain powers going to very elaborate means to create an illusion, you know, not only spouting lies, but actually fabricating events, staging events. He mentions one at a US base, and a really curious one in France. There were two witnesses, friends of the guy who was abducted. He was taken for a week, and he still doesn't know where he was taken, but an associate of Vallee's made contact with someone in the French government who admitted that this had been staged as sort of a sociological experiment. And he said "we didn't take it to the next stage, and it would have been very bad if we'd taken it to the next stage." And around this event, there developed like a cult, a cult of belief. I have some great photos of people all going out into this cornfield, you know, all holding hands.
JLB: And they were all reacting to a fake French military experiment.
JW: Yeah.
JLB: Well, a real abduction. But not by aliens.
JW: Right. And Vallee's associate said, you know, if we report this, what will you do? And they said "We'll just deny." And then I thought -- and Vallee doesn't make this other leap -- but maybe this event was real, and the government is taking credit for it because they might want people to think that they're capable of doing this, even though they can't. Because I think that's happened, too, after the fact.
JLB: Where something happens and the government takes credit for it?
JW: Yeah, when actually they don't know what happened.
JLB: I find it interesting, in the interests that you nurture, there's ritual sexual abuse, which figures strongly, government conspiracies, UFOs, and lately, really heavy drug experiences, like the ubiquitous DMT experience of these little mechanistic intelligences that you meet on the Other Side.
JW: Oh yeah.
JLB: Which came first for you? Because they all have a common running thread of altered consciousness and perception. Like people who are victims of ritual sex abuse, it seems like they're taken out of their everyday world and they're brought into a whole other universe where there's cannibalism and sadism on an extreme scale, they're even forced to kill sometimes, and then they wake up and they're back in daycare! And they only remember it many years later. And it's the same thing with abductions, lost time and all that, and the drugs of course. And you've managed to bring government conspiracy into that. Are the Powers That Be taking advantage of things they understand about the way we perceive the world?
JW: Yeah, well… they… it's really… I really don't know.
JLB: That was a really convoluted question, I know. It wasn't really much of a question at all.
JW: No, but one thing I want to get across, and maybe I haven't done that too well, is that I don't even know if they know what they're doing. Certainly not many of them. And, uh… I think, with the UFO stuff and the dimensional portals and all that, I suspect that they're tuned into that stuff, but I don't know that they know much more than we do about it.
JLB: Although it might be a safe to assume that they would know a little bit more, because they have the resources to start exploring, once these things start coming to the fore.
JW: Yeah. But to me, how this has all come together, in the way that it has, um… Like, at first with 9/11, it wasn't immediately clear to me what was happening. Like when I first saw it, it was just the trauma that got through to me. And it wasn't until weeks or months after that a friend of mine, who's a lawyer in Toronto, told me about this case that was really secret that he was working on. He was defending Delmart Vreeland. And so he told me all this stuff, and it was the first time I'd heard any of this. And hearing it from a friend, whom I've known since public school, just gave it that much more weight. And so it was really a rabbit-hole experience. So that contributed to my beginning to question the face value of that event. And over the course of the next few months, I came to realize -- and it was a painful realization -- that it was made to happen.
JLB: Were you very politically conscious about American politics before that?
JW: Yeah, I was. My politics have always been quite Left, I guess, and the Bush election of 2000, that was another event that really made me… well. I knew that they would want to do it, but it surprised me that they got away with it as easily as they did. And immediately after the Supreme Court judgment, you know, everything shut down. The media…
JLB: The media being quiet, just acquiescing to something that seemed so obviously wrong was very shocking to me as well.
JW: Yeah, I guess the election was one of the… one of my things that opened my perceptions to…
JLB: And yet, despite that, when 9/11 happened, it was just like what it seemed to be. America was under attack by terrorists, and you sit there watching it on TV and you think "My God", and you take it for what it seems to be, right?
JW: Yeah. It was certainly like that for me. And I know some people say that they knew right from the beginning that it wasn't. But that wasn't the case for me, and even though I hated Bush and I knew that he'd stolen the election, I didn't know the pieces yet behind the whole Bush machine. You know, years before, I'd read some stuff about the assassination of Kennedy, and I knew that Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy, and broadly who was involved with it, and the same with RFK and Martin Luther King. But it just didn't seem to matter, you know? It didn't figure for me as important until after 9/11, when I realized that they've been doing this for a long time, and the assassinations weren't just one-offs, you know? They got away with… they got away with it. And those guys are still there. And so then, you know, all these pieces started to add up, and I thought it's not just one event. It's the whole tapestry of hidden history. So that was really my Paranoid Shift and sort of got me into the para-politics.
JLB: And finding out about PNAC and their "new Pearl Harbor", also. That caused a lot of people to wake up and start paying attention. And, you know, I'm like you. It took me a couple months to finally come around on 9/11. Before that, I was maybe worried about what they were going to do about it, but thinking they actually did it? It took a while. But of course, there's your famous Coincidence Theorist's Guide to 9/11, which isn't even close to being complete.
JW: No, I've been meaning to update it because I have almost as many more now.
JLB: I'd like to circle back to Vreeland. I know someone who interviewed Vreeland while he was awaiting his extradition trial, and the way his story has unfolded, he seemed to be a very convincing con-man. I was wondering what your thoughts are about his case at this point.
JW: I think, you know… I take this from Gary Sick's book on the October Surprise. He was in the Carter administration when they had the Iran problem. And then, after he was out of power, he didn't believe the October Surprise story. But then he began investigating, and he discovers this whole other netherworld that's linked into power. And they're all these criminal elements, liars, and he talks about the scoundrels who are used by these, uh… he realized that there's this seamy underside that he wasn't aware of, even though he was in the White House. And the people who are the operatives are people like Vreeland, who are practiced liars and who are great at telling stories, exaggerating their own importance, and then who can be cut loose without any links leading higher. Because no one will believe that they could be associated with respectable elements of Washington. So I think Vreeland, as best as I know, was a genuine operative, but I also think he's a liar and a con-man. And a criminal. I do think he was used. And I think that that aspect of his character was used. And I also suspect that he's linked into this whole child sex stuff.
JLB: Well, he has been arrested for…
JW: Yeah, yeah. So he's got that going for him, and I've heard and read things from his family where, you know, they've disowned him and they say, you know, this guy's a pedophile. And also I heard from someone else who told me that he'd spoken with Vreeland at length, and that he got the impression that he might be one of the Omaha, you know…
JLB: Really.
JW: Yeah, that something like that had been in his background. And you know, that's part of the whole intelligence stuff too. So I wouldn't take Vreeland's word for anything. But, you know, he was picked up just before the election, and he was telling this story, so we had to pay attention to it. Even if it was disinformation, it was important. When I was spending a lot of time on Democratic Underground, there was a lot of Vreeland stuff going on there, and people would say: "But he's a criminal! He's a liar!" And I said: "Well, yeah! What kind of people do you think intelligence agencies use?" You know? There's perfect deniability, and they're great at lying and deceiving others. And for dirty work, that's the kind of stuff they'd want.
JLB: Yeah, but I think with Vreeland, it wasn't so much that he was a criminal or a liar. It was the fact that he'd used these excuses with pre-written documents in other cases. He'd pulled this trick before, you know, the whole sealed envelope trick. And I was also intrigued with Vreeland for a couple months, but in the end I found myself thinking that he was more, if anything, a disinformation viral spreader.
JW: Yeah, and I think that's interesting, because the story he was spreading wasn't American foreknowledge, it was Russian and Iraqi foreknowledge. So this was just my suspicion that, you know, I think these agencies, they like throwing a lot of shit out.
JLB: Mm-hm. To muddy the waters with shit.
JW: So I think Vreeland was part of that. So if Vreeland caught on, you know, and his whole story was about communication between the Russians and Iraqis which is, you know… preposterous. And so that's why I think he made a great, um…
JLB: Attention magnet, for people who might otherwise be occupied by looking at more "real" things.
JW: Yeah, and also he was good for similar reasons for the intelligence agencies, because he was disreputable, for one thing. So when people latched onto the foreknowledge story, just a cursory look at his record and people would say this guy was full of shit. But then, for those who would go further, and look at what he was actually saying, you know, that the Russians and the Iraqis were behind it. And so, do you go all the way with Vreeland? Do you believe he was telling us the truth? And if you do, then you're playing into the hands of those who were feeding him a line. So yeah, it's interesting to study for sure. And I keep trying to see what's going on with him now.
JLB: He's in custody now. I think he's in Michigan… or Wisconsin?
JW: Yeah. Sander Hicks did a really good piece on, um… I forget the name of the guy now. The guy who worked in the Reagan White House and helped crash the Russian economy. Anyway, that was one of the things that Hicks said, he mentioned Vreeland, and this guy corroborated a lot of what Vreeland said; that he knew certain codes and other things that would indicate that he was really part of Naval intelligence. So, you know, that might just be another part of the whole bullshit thing, but it just corroborated for me that Vreeland was more than just a simple con-man. So I wouldn't just write him off.
JLB: I agree that there's more going on there than, uh… it's like the Hunt the Boeing website that popped up on a French server shortly after 9/11. And, you know, to me, that reeked of disinformation, that reeked of official disinformation. It looked like a government pamphlet, the layout of it. It was just too good, you know? And then, as the weeks wore on, I found that the government seemed all too eager to help promulgate that story by confiscating all the videos and…
JW: That's a really good point. People say, "why did they confiscate all the videos?" And I think it's probably because they were happy to have people believe that story.
JLB: Yep, so that eventually, you can release the videos and say: "Ha-ha! See?" And everybody who ever said that there was something to this story, well, you've just discredited everything else they've ever said. And everyone who ever believed it, now they don't know what to believe, or if they can believe anything other than the official story. Classic disinformation. But let me ask you -- and this isn't an accusation -- but how much of what you do on Rigorous Intuition is like a dry run for future fiction writing?
JW: That's an interesting question. I haven't considered it that way at all. I am sort of working on a novel that sort of, um… it's set about ten or twelve years from now in Canada where there's sort of, well, an event that triggers a grab for Canadian water. And I've got a Vreeland-like character in that. But there have been things where my thoughts have taken a turn that might contribute to the direction of the novel, but it's not the reason for the blog's existence.
JLB: Have you ever taken DMT?
JW: No, I haven't, but I sure am curious about it though. Have you ever taken that?
JLB: I've never taken DMT, but I've known people who've done DMT. Um… and the people I've known who've taken DMT haven't mentioned metalic elves that talk in machine language. But maybe they weren't looking for that. There's a legal substance, salvia divinorum, or Diviner's Sage, that you can get in head shops or marijuana culture shops, and it is a real… it lasts five minutes, you smoke it and the experience lasts five minutes. And depending on how much you do, there's five levels, distinct levels, and it's a real perception… um… it's hard to explain. I can get you some if you want.
JW: That's okay.
JLB: I have a friend who grows it. And when you're on it, time ceases to mean much. And at the higher levels, it's kind of like a psilocybin or magic mushroom experience. But only for five minutes.
JW: Well, you know, the DMT stuff, for me, it was a shock reading all that stuff, because I'm really not a druggie at all. You know, beer is, like, pretty much it for me. And the DMT, reading about it, was really interesting. But of course I'm not saying that this is absolutely, you know... sometimes it's just, like, throwing shit out there. It's not meant to necessarily be a permanent thing or the position I hold now or forever. But it's just for consideration, you know? So, the DMT experience was one of those things, because reading Terrence McKenna…
JLB: McKenna's influence seems to be increasing now, after his death.
JW: Yeah. Well, you know, I, um…
JLB: And I think there's something to it. I definitely do believe that there are altered states of consciousness that you can enter into where you can see the foundation and scaffolding that holds things together in terms of our perception, where we can see the things that we gloss over in our normal, everyday consciousness. You've read Robert Anton Wilson, right?
JW: No, I haven't.
JLB: Oh? I thought you name-checked him a couple times.
JW: I've read some things online, but I haven't gone to the library and picked any of it up. But you know, sometimes you don't know who to trust, and I don't really know that I can trust him very much, because he has an OTO connection.
JLB: So anybody who's in the OTO is immediately suspect?
JW: Well, yeah. Kind of. Not necessarily, you know, all… because I've read a couple of books by…
JLB: Crowley?
JW: No. I can't remember his name now…
JLB: Israel Regardie?
JW: No, but he's another one that I should read. Um… anyway, he's an OTO guy, but he's written a few books on Enochian magic and Crowley, Crowley's goetica, and he's really a great writer and he's very informative. But still, he's in the OTO, and quite high up, and I don't totally open myself up to everything he has to say. But then on the other hand, I know that the OTO itself is a pretty small organization. So it's not like, they're not like the, uh… C.H.A.O.S. or S.P.E.C.T.R.E., you know?
JLB: Right now, there's a group in Australia, and they call themselves "the real OTO", and they're involved in child abductions and a couple of murder cases right now. It's kind of a local story down there.
JW: I haven't read about that specifically, but I've been following some of the Australian stories, and they're… it's pretty amazing. And I think that, like you say, they're often local stories, so they don't have sort of the global focus.
JLB: Like that Louisiana church, where probably a few years ago, we never would have found out about that.
JW: Yeah. It's sort of like the 'as above, so below' kind of thing, where, you know, there's something in us that's sort of subterranean in a way, that is called in sometimes. And I think it happened there, and I think it happens at higher levels in the hierarchy. But it doesn't mean that they're not all in it together, or part of a larger network. I think that there is an international network.
JLB: That leads to a very conservative point, ironically, in terms of human nature being basically fucked up, to the point where, you know, if we all had our druthers, we'd all be buggering animals and children, you know? And so these taboos, it seems, leads to obsessions that occasionally break through the cultural dam. It's a very Christian, even Lutheran view of human nature.
JW: Well, I'm not saying that it's inevitable, or that it's what we'd all do. But I think that sort of stuff has been with us for millennia. And so why should we think that the last few decades of secular modernity have done away with all this? Those impulses and all that stuff is still there. And it's what we do with it. You know, some people, it's the whole "left hand path" thing, where it's not about finding knowledge or finding God or the universal or whatever… it's about gaining power. And those in our culture who have accrued power want more of it.
JLB: Have you read Morning of the Magicians?
JW: It's on my wish-list.
JLB: I think you'll enjoy it. It's really up your alley in terms of examining kind of the substrate of information, the foundational elements of understanding, you know, language as a virus, etc.
JW: I've been reading Techgnosis by Eric Davis. Do you know that book?
JLB: No.
JW: It gets into some of that, too, how technology changes our way of knowing. If the computer had been invented before graph paper, we'd have a different theory of knowledge. The way we associate things wouldn't be the same.
JLB: Yeah, well, our perception of reality is definitely molded by our language, because we're really just apes with big brains, you know. So…
JW: Yeah, you know, I think that's so. And the hubris of people who think all this stuff is just magical thinking, you know, that there's nothing beyond the material, it seems laughable to me now.
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Well, that's it for Part One. Hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll join us again tomorrow for Part Two of the Rigorous Interview, when we will examine the hidden rationales behind certain otherwise inexplicable global developments, and dive deep into the dark waters of Satanic Ritual Abuse. Be there! - YOPJ
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