Pip: The Overmanwarrior is a site where you go to learn about Ohio politics and leave three hours later having reconsidered the Bronze Age.
Mara: Rich Hoffman has been doing exactly that kind of cross-disciplinary digging — connecting ancient earthworks, non-human intelligence, and the question of who actually holds sovereignty over the human race. That’s the territory today.
Pip: Let’s start with giants, frogmen, and what Wright-Patterson Air Force Base may or may not have in storage.
Loveland Frogmen, Giants, and the Politics of Ancient Intelligence
Mara: The central question here is whether the official story of human prehistory has been deliberately kept shallow — and what surfaces when you keep asking the next question after the comfortable answer.
Pip: The post opens with a direct statement of method: “History is already written, mostly by people who stop digging the moment the official story feels comfortable enough to protect careers and funding streams.”
Mara: That framing drives everything that follows. The argument is that mainstream archaeology and ancient history leave certain dots deliberately unconnected — and that connecting them changes the political stakes of the present, not just the academic record.
Pip: So what happens when someone actually connects them? The post lands on a convergence: Timothy Alberino on the Joe Rogan Experience, mid-July 2026, discussing the Kandahar giant — a massive humanoid reportedly killed by American troops in Afghanistan, its body flown out on a pallet and taken to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Mara: And the post notes that Wright-Patterson is a short drive from the author’s home — that proximity to the base, and to people who held clearances there, gives the claim a specific texture. The men he’s spoken with, he writes, smile, lower their voices, and say reverse-engineering of foreign technology has always been the cover story.
Pip: The Alberino interview is treated less as a revelation than as confirmation of a trajectory already underway — one that runs through Ohio’s Hopewell earthworks, Florida’s Windover Bog, the megalithic temples of Malta, and the copper mines of Lake Superior.
Mara: The copper argument is striking. Between roughly 5000 and 1200 BC, miners removed hundreds of thousands of tons of nearly pure native copper from the Lake Superior basin. The post argues the volumes don’t account for local use — and that the missing metal may have fueled the Bronze Age in the Near East and Europe.
Pip: And if copper moved, so did people and knowledge. The Maltese temples at Ġgantija — whose name literally means Giant’s Tower — predate the pyramids, and the Newark Earthworks in Ohio track the 18.6-year lunar standstill with precision that matches Stonehenge. The post asks whether distant cultures independently solved identical astronomical problems, or shared a source.
Mara: That source, the post suggests, is non-human intelligence — the same class of entity that appears in Genesis 6, in shamanic traditions globally, and, closer to home, along the Little Miami River, where the Loveland Frogmen were sighted in 1955 and 1972, precisely where Hopewell ritual sites once stood.
Pip: The political question the post keeps returning to is blunt: if non-human intelligences have been shaping human history for millennia, sovereignty that stops at the water’s edge or the atmosphere is not sovereignty at all.
Mara: All of it feeds into the forthcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, which the post frames as an attempt to gather these threads — the copper trade, the lunar mathematics, the giant remains, the frogmen — into a single, continuous argument about who has actually been governing the human story.
Pip: Which makes the Alberino-Rogan conversation less a podcast episode and more a signal that this argument has moved from late-night AM radio to the center of public discourse.
Mara: The closing line of the post captures that shift — the week on South Bass Island, daughters cooking breakfast, the manuscript finished, the pattern finally locked into place.
Pip: The thread running through all of this is sovereignty — who holds it, who has always contested it, and how deep you have to dig before the question gets genuinely uncomfortable.
Mara: That reckoning with older layers of history, as the post puts it, is coming. Next episode, we’ll see what else surfaces.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact him directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of President Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know, and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: Welcome to The Overmanwarrior — where today’s episode involves beer, skulls, a Florida swamp, and a manuscript that wants to rewrite the prehistory of human consciousness. Just a regular Monday.
Mara: Rich Hoffman is shopping a manuscript called The Politics of Heaven, and the post that anchors this episode pulls together Göbekli Tepe, the Windover burial pond, the Old Copper Culture, and the psychedelic sacrament thread that Brian Muraresku traced through the ancient world.
Pip: That is a genuinely wide table to set. Let’s start with what Göbekli Tepe was actually doing eleven thousand years ago — and why the answer is darker than the tourism brochure suggests.
Beer at Göbekli Tepe and the Skull Cult of Doom
Mara: The central question here is what kind of place Göbekli Tepe actually was — because the cheerful “calendar temple where people watched the stars” version turns out to be incomplete.
Pip: The post puts it plainly: “The parties and the skulls belong to the same world.” Six large limestone troughs, some holding up to a hundred and sixty liters, carry calcium oxalate residues consistent with fermenting grain. Thousands of grinding stones. Massive bone piles from communal feasts. Industrial-scale liquid preparation at a site with almost no domestic architecture.
Mara: So the upshot is that people were gathering in large enough numbers to need brewery-scale infrastructure eleven to twelve thousand years ago — before the standard story of agriculture and beer arriving together in a tidy package.
Pip: And then the skulls show up and the vibe shifts considerably.
Mara: Three human skulls from the site show deliberate post-mortem modification never previously documented in that form. Deep, straight grooves cut with flint tools along the sagittal axis, one drilled perforation consistent with suspension by cord, traces of red ochre, and roughly ten percent of all skull fragments from the site carry cut marks consistent with defleshing. Published in Science Advances in 2017.
Pip: Ancestor veneration, trophy display, or both — carried out in the same enclosures where the troughs once stood. That is a complete ritual world, not a side note.
Mara: The post connects this to Brian Muraresku’s work in The Immortality Key — the argument that a long, hidden thread of psychedelic sacrament runs from the Greek Mysteries through early Christian centuries, a tradition too threatening for the institutional church to leave alone. The Göbekli skull cult fits the same pattern of altered-state ceremony and death-rebirth symbolism.
Pip: Windover, in central Florida, sits in that same deep time. Bodies staked into a peat pond in fetal positions facing west, wrapped in the oldest surviving textiles we have, brains still intact in ninety-one skulls — more than a thousand years of continuous mortuary practice implying a sustained belief about the dead.
Mara: And the Old Copper Culture around Lake Superior — people hammering pure native copper into tools as early as ninety-five hundred years ago — extends the geography. The post is careful: claims of Near Eastern inscriptions on Michigan stones are outside mainstream acceptance, and the more dramatic nineteenth-century relics have problems. But lower sea levels and coastal routes mean the absence of accepted evidence is not the same as proof nothing moved.
Pip: The Troy parallel is the engine of the argument. Frank Calvert identified Hisarlik, dug methodical trenches, published his case. Heinrich Schliemann arrived with money and obsession and no formal training, carved a trench straight through the mound, destroyed strata — and found the city. Rough methods, real result.
Mara: The manuscript is framed as a map for the next generation of independent investigators — people willing to dig without waiting for the next grant cycle. As the post puts it: “We need more Calverts.”
Pip: Which means the book is less a conclusion than a set of coordinates for whoever goes out and digs the next Troy.
Mara: The four threads — psychedelic continuity, Windover, the copper and dolmen landscapes, and the full ritual reality of Göbekli Tepe — are meant to sit together in one readable architecture so the trail is clear and the questions are hard to ignore.
Pip: Beer, skulls, bog bodies, and copper hammered before the pyramids were a thought. The foundation keeps turning out to be older and stranger than the official timeline admits.
Mara: And the argument is that understanding what people practiced before the familiar kingdoms matters — because every later assumption sits on that ground. More on where these threads lead next time.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I am sitting in a portable office far from home, looking out at a landscape that is not Butler County, and the books stacked around me keep circling the same problem. I have been shopping The Politics of Heaven to publishers and agents, and the recurring question is the simplest one: why another book? Why not keep writing the daily pieces and posting the videos? The answer is speed and depth simultaneously. The blog and the videos let me move fast. A book lets me put the full architecture on the table so the people who actually dig—the modern Calverts—have something coherent to work from.
Four threads run through the manuscript. The first is the continuation of what Brian Muraresku laid out in The Immortality Key: a long, hidden thread of psychedelic sacrament that runs from the Greek Mysteries through the early Christian centuries, a religion with no name that was too powerful, or too threatening, for the emerging institutional church to leave alone. The second is the Windover people in central Florida, one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas, where bodies were carefully placed in a pond between roughly eight and seven thousand years ago, wrapped in the oldest surviving textiles we have, oriented toward the setting sun, with brains still intact in dozens of skulls. The third is the dolmen landscapes—hundreds of them in the Jordan Valley and the broader Near East from the Early Bronze Age —and the parallel stone structures and copper-working culture around Lake Superior, which began as early as 9,500 years ago. The fourth is the chemical and osteological evidence from Göbekli Tepe itself, which has grown darker, not lighter, the more we learn.
Start with the troughs. At Göbekli Tepe, six large limestone vessels, some holding up to one hundred sixty liters, carry residues of calcium oxalate—the same marker that forms during the steeping, mashing, and fermenting of grain. The site sits in the heartland of wild cereals. There are thousands of grinding stones. There are massive bone piles from animals slaughtered for communal feasts. The 2012 analysis by Dietrich and colleagues was careful: the oxalate results were preliminary and not fully reproducible with the tests available at the time. Later integrated studies still treat the vessels as tools for processing large quantities of cereal liquids—porridges, gruels, and very possibly early beer. The point is not that every trough was a pure brewery. The point is that people were gathering in numbers large enough to require industrial-scale liquid preparation eleven to twelve thousand years ago, right at the edge of the Younger Dryas, in a place with almost no domestic architecture and every sign of ritual focus. https://gobekli-tepe.com/blog/beer-brewing-feasting-gobekli-tepe/
That is already enough to rewrite the old story that beer and agriculture arrived together in a neat package much later. But Göbekli Tepe is not a cheerful calendar temple where people held hands and watched the stars. Three human skulls recovered from the site show deliberate post-mortem modification never before documented in that form. Deep, straight grooves were cut with flint tools along the sagittal axis from forehead over the crown and, in one case, continuing onto the back of the skull and mandible. One skull has a drilled perforation near the top, consistent with suspension by cord. Traces of red ochre remain. The grooves appear to have been made after the soft tissue was removed. Roughly ten percent of all skull fragments from the site carry cut marks consistent with defleshing. Iconography on the pillars and sculptures—headless figures, a kneeling form holding a severed head—reinforces the emphasis. Selected skulls were cleaned, marked, and displayed. This is ancestor veneration, trophy display, or both, carried out in the same ceremonial enclosures where the large troughs once stood. The parties and the skulls belong to the same world. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/6/e1700564.full
I have walked the Upper Peninsula. I know the copper country around Lake Superior. The Old Copper Culture is real and impressive: people were hammering pure native copper into tools as early as ninety-five hundred years ago, earlier than many expected, with a peak later in the Archaic. That technology is indigenous and sophisticated. Claims that particular stones bear Baal marks or that certain megalithic features are exact architectural twins of Jordan Valley dolmens remain outside mainstream acceptance; many of the more dramatic inscribed relics unearthed in the nineteenth century have tool marks or other problems that render them unreliable. Yet the absence of accepted evidence is not proof that nothing crossed the ocean. Sea levels at the end of the last glacial period were substantially lower—on the order of two hundred feet or more around ten thousand years ago. Coastlines looked different. Island-hopping and coastal routes were easier. The Mediterranean is not an ocean, but skilled seafarers who already moved copper and ideas around the Near East and the Aegean would not have found the Atlantic an absolute barrier. We do not yet have the artifacts that would settle the question. Most of the coastal evidence from that era is underwater or has eroded. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.371.6536.1299
Windover sits in the middle of that same deep time. A peat pond in Florida served as a site for more than 1,000 years of continuous use. Bodies were wrapped in plant-fiber textiles, staked into the peat in fetal positions facing west, sometimes accompanied by tools and ornaments. Brains survived in ninety-one skulls because interment happened quickly. This is not a simple hunter-gatherer disposal ground. It is a sustained mortuary tradition that implies belief about the afterlife and the proper treatment of the dead. When I set that beside the Göbekli skull cult and the later Hopewell practices that also elevated heads and skulls in ritual contexts, the pattern is hard to ignore. Head veneration and altered-state ceremonies appear early and recur. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/windover-bog-bodies
Muraresku’s book did the useful work of dragging the psychedelic thread into public view and tying it to real archaeology and classical texts. The Eleusinian kykeon, the possibility of ergot or other additives in fermented drinks, the continuity into early Christian circles—these are not wild inventions. They are arguments built on existing scholarship that still make many academics uncomfortable. The same discomfort appears when the conversation turns to beer at Göbekli Tepe or to the possibility that copper from the Great Lakes moved farther than the conventional maps allow. The academic system is designed to protect itself from rapid disruption. Rules of evidence, peer review, funding cycles, and political overlays around indigenous remains all slow the rate at which new data can force a rewrite of the narrative. That is not always malice. It is institutional inertia. But inertia has a cost when the underlying record is already fragmentary.
Troy is the classic counter-example. Frank Calvert, a British consular official and amateur with skin in the game, identified Hisarlik, bought part of the mound, dug methodical trenches, and published his reasons for believing it was the real city. Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy German businessman with no formal archaeological training, obtained the permit, excavated on a dramatic scale, and made the discovery famous. Schliemann’s methods were rough; he destroyed strata he should have recorded. Yet without the outsider who was willing to dig where the consensus said there was nothing, the city might have remained a literary ghost for another generation. Academia needed the passion and the risk-taking. The same pattern repeats. The people who move the ball are often not waiting for the next grant cycle or the next committee vote.
That is why I am writing the book. I am not trying to replace careful excavation with speculation. I am trying to put the four threads—psychedelic continuity, Windover, the dolmen and copper landscapes, and the full ritual reality of Göbekli Tepe—into one readable architecture so that the next generation of independent investigators has a map. The skulls hanging in the enclosures, the large troughs that once held fermented grain liquids, the carefully staked bodies in a Florida pond, the copper tools hammered nine thousand years ago beside Lake Superior—these are not conspiracy theories. They are pieces of a deeper human story about how people once spoke with whatever intelligences they believed inhabited the world, how they marked their dead, and how they organized themselves long before the familiar kingdoms of the Near East or the classical Mediterranean. The academic pace is too slow for the volume of material still in the ground or underwater. We need more Calverts. We need people willing to dig, to ask the uncomfortable questions, and to publish what they find without waiting for permission.
The Politics of Heaven is written for those people. It carries the footnotes and the bibliography so the trail is clear. It does not pretend that every parallel is proven contact. It does insist that the parallels are real enough and the gaps in the record are large enough that we cannot keep pretending the official timeline is complete. Beer and skulls at the dawn of monumental architecture, complex burial rites in the Florida Archaic, early copper metallurgy in the Great Lakes, and a long sacramental tradition that institutional religion tried to suppress—these are not side issues. They are the foundation. Until we understand what people thought and practiced before Abraham, before the Pharaohs, before the classical gods were given their familiar names, every later assumption sits on soft ground.
I have no interest in burning down the university. I like the Greek ideal of higher learning and intellectual stamina. I refuse to wait another generation for the system to process evidence that is already in front of us. The book is one more tool for the people who will go out and dig the next Troy.
⭐ 1. Göbekli Tepe has a genuine “skull cult” — this is not fringe, and here is a list of the discoveries. Much darker than I had been thinking of the site.
Archaeologists have found:
human skull fragments
three skulls with deliberate carvings
deep incisions made after death
cut marks showing defleshing
holes drilled into skulls
possible suspension or display of skulls
This is not random violence.
It is ritual manipulation of human skulls.
The findings were published in Science Advances in 2017.
—
⭐ 2. The skulls were intentionally modified
The carvings include:
parallel deep grooves
V‑shaped incisions
cuts made with flint tools
drilled holes
These marks were made after death, but before the bone fully dried, meaning:
✔ The skulls were processed intentionally
✔ The cuts were ritual, not accidental
✔ The skulls were likely displayed or used ceremonially
This is consistent with ancestor veneration or shamanic ritual.
—
⭐ 3. The skulls were probably hung or mounted
One skull had a drilled hole, which strongly suggests:
suspension
display
ritual presentation
possibly use in ceremonies
This is similar to skull cults found in:
Jericho
Çayönü
Neolithic Levant
Natufian sites
Göbekli Tepe fits into a broader Near Eastern skull‑veneration tradition.
—
⭐ 4. Why skulls?
In early ritual cultures, skulls represent:
ancestral presence
ritual authority
shamanic power
death and rebirth
contact with the spirit world
boundary crossing
The skull is the seat of identity in many ancient symbolic systems.
Göbekli Tepe’s skull carvings are consistent with:
initiation rites
ancestor invocation
ritual feasting
altered‑state ceremonies
shamanic leadership
—
⭐ 5. The skulls appear in the same enclosures as the snakes
Enclosures with:
snakes
scorpions
composite beings
predatory animals
skull fragments
…suggest a symbolic system involving:
✔ death
✔ transformation
✔ altered consciousness
✔ initiation
✔ boundary crossing
Snakes + skulls = death‑rebirth symbolism, common in shamanic traditions worldwide.
—
⭐ 6. Were the skull rituals connected to intoxicants?
There is no direct evidence of psychedelic use.
But the ritual context strongly suggests:
communal feasting
beer consumption
trance states
shamanic performance
symbolic death‑rebirth experiences
If ergot‑infected barley was used (plausible), the beer could have produced:
mild visionary states
dreamlike consciousness
ritual trance
This would fit perfectly with skull‑based initiation symbolism.
—
⭐ 7. The deeper meaning
Göbekli Tepe’s skull culture shows:
✔ Ritual preceded agriculture
✔ Death symbolism preceded civilization
✔ Shamanic authority existed before cities
✔ Monumental architecture served ritual, not domestic life
✔ Early humans engaged in complex symbolic behavior long before farming
This is exactly the kind of deep‑time ritual consciousness your manuscript is built around.
—
⭐ Bottom Line
✔ Göbekli Tepe had a real skull cult.
✔ Skulls were carved, defleshed, and displayed.
✔ This was ritual, not violence.
✔ It fits into a broader Near Eastern skull‑veneration tradition.
✔ It aligns with shamanic death‑rebirth symbolism.
✔ It pairs meaningfully with the snake imagery.
✔ It supports the idea of altered‑state ritual, even without psychedelics.
⭐ How the Lost City of Troy Was Actually Discovered
For centuries, Troy lived in that strange space between myth and memory — a city everyone knew from Homer, but no one could actually find. The breakthrough came in stages. In 1822, Scottish journalist and geologist Charles Maclaren proposed that the mound at Hisarlık in northwestern Turkey was the true location of Homeric Troy, though most scholars dismissed the idea at the time. The next major step came from Frank Calvert, an English expatriate and amateur archaeologist who began exploratory digs at Hisarlık in the 1860s. Calvert owned part of the land and spent years collecting artifacts and studying the mound, eventually persuading the German businessman‑turned‑archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann to excavate there rather than at the more popular site at Pınarbaşı.
Schliemann arrived in Turkey in 1870, driven by a lifelong obsession with proving that Homer’s world was real. His excavations at Hisarlık between 1870 and 1890 uncovered the remains of multiple ancient cities stacked atop one another — nine Troys in total, each built over the ruins of the last. His methods were crude by modern standards: he carved a massive trench straight through the mound, destroying valuable layers in his rush to reach what he believed was the earliest, “Homeric” level. Still, his work exposed a fortified citadel, convincing scholars that Hisarlık was indeed the site of ancient Troy.
The most sensational moment came in 1873, when Schliemann uncovered a cache of gold, silver, and bronze artifacts near the citadel walls — the famous “Priam’s Treasure.” He claimed these belonged to the legendary King Priam, though modern dating shows the hoard actually came from Troy II, a city more than a thousand years older than the Troy of the Iliad. Despite the controversy, Schliemann’s discoveries electrified the world and permanently changed archaeology. Today, most scholars identify Troy VI or VII — not Schliemann’s Troy II — as the likely city of Homer’s Trojan War, but the credit for locating Troy belongs jointly to Calvert’s insight and Schliemann’s relentless drive.
Notes:
1. Large limestone troughs at Göbekli Tepe (capacities up to ~160 L) and calcium oxalate residues consistent with cereal fermentation were reported by Dietrich et al. in Antiquity (2012). Subsequent use-wear and residue studies (Dietrich et al. 2020) support large-scale processing of cereal liquids, with beer remaining a plausible but not fully conclusive interpretation within a clear feasting context.
2. Three intentionally modified human skulls from Göbekli Tepe—deep post-mortem sagittal grooves cut with stone tools, one drilled perforation, ochre traces—were published by Gresky, Haelm & Clare in Science Advances(2017). The modifications are unique in the regional record and indicate selected skulls were prepared for display or suspension. Broader defleshing cut marks appear on a significant percentage of cranial fragments.
3. Windover Pond, Florida, is a peat cemetery used for more than a thousand years, centered on roughly 7000–6000 BCE. Exceptional preservation includes brain tissue in 91 individuals and plant-fiber textiles. Bodies were typically flexed, oriented west, and staked in place. The site is a National Historic Landmark and one of the most important Early Archaic mortuary complexes in North America.
4. The Old Copper Culture of the Lake Superior region produced hammered native-copper tools beginning as early as ~9500 years ago, with a later Archaic peak. The metallurgy is firmly indigenous. Specific claims of Near Eastern inscriptions or exact architectural parallels with Jordan Valley dolmens have not been accepted by mainstream archaeology; many dramatic 19th-century “Michigan relics” are considered forgeries or misidentified.
5. Frank Calvert identified and partially excavated Hisarlik before Heinrich Schliemann obtained the permit and conducted the large-scale digs that made Troy famous. The episode remains a standard illustration of the role of determined amateurs in major discoveries.
6. Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (2020), synthesizes archaeological, classical, and chemical evidence for a continuous psychedelic-sacrament tradition. The core claims remain debated but rest on published scholarship rather than pure invention.
Bibliography
Dietrich, Oliver, et al. “The Role of Cult and Feasting in the Emergence of Neolithic Communities: New Evidence from Göbekli Tepe.” Antiquity 86 (2012).
Dietrich, Laura, et al. “Investigating the Function of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Stone Troughs from Göbekli Tepe: An Integrated Approach.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 34 (2020).
Gresky, Julia, Juliane Haelm, and Lee Clare. “Modified Human Crania from Göbekli Tepe Provide Evidence for a New Form of Neolithic Skull Cult.” Science Advances 3, no. 6 (2017).
Doran, Glen H., and related Windover excavation reports; Rachel Wentz, Life and Death at Windover (Florida Historical Society).
Pompeani, David P., et al., and subsequent Bayesian modeling papers on the chronology of Old Copper Culture (Radiocarbon, The Holocene).
Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. St. Martin’s Press, 2020.
Primary excavation reports and site summaries from the German Archaeological Institute Göbekli Tepe project; standard references on Jordan Valley dolmens and Early Bronze Age mortuary landscapes.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact him directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of President Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know, and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I’ve taken a lot of heat over the years for how I approach operations management. People watch what I’ve done with large, complicated organizations and then announce that I’m somehow making it look too easy, or that the method can’t scale, or that anyone with enough capital could copy it. Fine. Let me answer all of them at once, because the emails on this subject have been piling up and a single clear response is better than another round of copy-and-paste.
Jungle Jim’s International Market sits out on Route 4 in Fairfield, right here in Butler County. I grew up watching the place. My grandfather worked across the way at the old Fisher Body plant. The roadside produce stand that became the store was there in the early seventies, bouncing from vacant lot to vacant lot until Jim Bonaminio finally planted roots in 1975 with a 4,200-square-foot building. Today the flagship is somewhere north of 200,000 square feet—some measurements put it closer to 280,000 or even 300,000 depending on how you count the latest expansions—and there is a second location in Eastgate. It is one of the largest independent grocery operations in the country and easily the most distinctive.
People from every corner of the planet who land in the Cincinnati area homesick walk through those doors and find something that tastes like home. Almost two thousand wines. Live seafood tanks. Sections organized by country. Animatronics, a monorail, giant animals, a cooking school, a podcast studio. The bathrooms open into rooms that feel like Narnia. It is a theme park of food, and it runs on thin margins in one of the most competitive, low-margin industries on earth. Yet it keeps growing while the corporate chains in their shiny shoes and pressed shirts keep trying—and failing—to reverse-engineer the magic.
I have watched Jim walk the floor in costume, looking like Merlin or some jungle explorer, and the first thing you notice is that he is not trying to do every job himself. He hires people who actually care about the product, gives them real authority over their departments, and then gets out of the way. Department managers run their sections like independent businesses—buying, merchandising, hiring, firing. He does not need his name stamped on every decision. That is one of the hardest disciplines in leadership: empowering competent people without constantly inserting yourself so everyone knows who is in charge. Most executives fail that test. They cannot stand the idea that something good happened without their fingerprints all over it.
The same pattern shows up across Butler County. Sheriff Richard Jones has run the sheriff’s office for two decades with a continuity culture that keeps the books in the black, generates substantial boarding-of-prisoners revenue (including the ICE contract), and maintains operational discipline without the endless consultant theater you see in other counties. He understands that you put the right people in place, give them clear authority, and then hold them accountable for results. You do not throw money at wet wood and hope it lights.
Butler County has produced more than its share of these personalities. JD Vance came out of Middletown. The traits are recognizable once you have lived here long enough: direct, practical, uninterested in the performance of competence that substitutes for the real thing. You see the same operating style in the way Jungle Jim built from a roadside stand across from the factory where my grandfather worked into the largest independent of its kind. You see it in the way SpaceX runs.
Elon Musk did not invent the principle, but he has executed it at industrial scale. SpaceX gives engineers real ownership—cradle-to-grave responsibility—and then demands results. Automation and advanced welding are not about eliminating jobs; they are about expanding capacity when there are not enough skilled people to meet demand the old way. The robots and the elevated welding systems are force multipliers. The culture underneath them is the same one that lets Jungle Jim’s stock 180,000 items and still feel alive instead of sterile. It is the same culture that lets a sheriff’s office run surplus while neighboring jurisdictions drown in process.
Corporate types in suits keep flying in from New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco with large budgets and big investors. They walk the aisles of Jungle Jim’s taking notes. They study SpaceX’s production rates. Then they go home and throw gasoline on wet wood. They saturate the problem with capital and consultants and shiny process decks, and when the fire never quite catches they blame the market or the labor force or the regulations. They never figure out that the wood was never stacked correctly in the first place. The people who actually know how to start a fire in the rain do not need the gas. They prepare the ground, choose the right people, and let the work speak.
I have done this for decades in complex organizations. The critics who say it looks easy are usually the ones who have never had to do it without a blank check. When you do not have unlimited capital you get creative. You learn to empower rather than control. You accept that the best people will not stay if you keep putting your name over theirs. Jungle Jim has had corporate buyers and executives studying him for thirty years and they still cannot copy it. China has been trying to copy SpaceX and they still cannot drop the vehicle on the camera the way SpaceX does. The difference is not money. The difference is a personality type and an operating culture that cannot be faked.
That is why I believe the SpaceX IPO path will continue to create enormous new wealth. The culture is real. The operational discipline is real. The people closest to the work are trusted to move. Investors who understand people—who understand the difference between wet-wood capital and actual fire—will do very well. The ones who think you can buy the same result with consultants and process will keep burning fuel and wondering why nothing catches.
I will put a couple of the better documentaries and walk-throughs of Jungle Jim’s on the blog, along with material on SpaceX’s production and welding systems. Watch the way the people on the floor actually operate. Then watch the corporate versions of the same industries. The contrast is the entire lesson.
Operational excellence is not a mystery. It is rare because most people cannot stand to give away the credit. The ones who can do it make it look easy. The ones who cannot keep throwing gas on wet wood and calling it strategy. Butler County has produced more than its share of the first kind. I am not going to apologize for noticing.
Notes
1. Jungle Jim’s International Market was founded by James O. “Jungle Jim” Bonaminio. The permanent Fairfield store opened in 1975 at 4,200 square feet after several years of roadside stands, including a location across from the Fisher Body plant. Current main-store size is reported in the 200,000–300,000 square-foot range depending on the source and the most recent expansions; a second location operates in Eastgate. See Wikipedia entry and official Jungle Jim’s history pages.
2. Weekly visitor figures of approximately 82,000 and product counts exceeding 180,000 items (with strong international representation) appear consistently in contemporaneous reporting. The store is frequently described as a “theme park of food.”
3. Bonaminio’s management approach emphasizes hiring people with passion for specific departments and granting them substantial operating authority. Recent interviews and employee descriptions confirm department-level autonomy in buying, merchandising, and staffing.
4. Butler County Sheriff Richard K. Jones has held office since 2005. The office generates significant revenue through boarding-of-prisoners contracts, including a renewed ICE arrangement that has produced multi-million-dollar annual inflows and rate increases. County budget documents show the sheriff’s operation remaining a major, self-supporting component of the overall budget while maintaining operational continuity.
5. SpaceX’s internal culture of extreme ownership, flat structure for engineers, and cradle-to-grave product responsibility is documented in multiple former-employee accounts and contemporaneous reporting. Automation and advanced welding processes are treated as capacity multipliers rather than pure labor replacements.
6. JD Vance was raised in Middletown, Ohio (Butler County). The local cultural and industrial background is a matter of public record.
Bibliography / Further Reading
• Jungle Jim’s official site and “The Jungle Jim Story” pages (junglejims.com).
• Wikipedia: “Jungle Jim’s International Market.”
• Smithsonian Magazine, “Welcome to Jungle Jim’s” (2016).
• Cincinnati Business Courier and Journal-News coverage of Bonaminio interviews and 50th-anniversary material (2024–2026).
• Wall Street Journal Opinion Q&A with Jim Bonaminio (2026).
• Progressive Grocer and Supermarket News profiles of Jungle Jim’s independent model.
• Butler County Sheriff’s Office budget submissions and Journal-News reporting on ICE contract revenues and staffing (2025–2026).
• Reporting on SpaceX engineering culture and ownership model (Wired, Business Insider, former-employee accounts, 2022–2026).
• “Evolution of the Jungle” and related YouTube material produced by Jungle Jim’s International Market.
• Local Butler County political and business coverage of Sheriff Jones and regional figures.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: There’s a book sitting in a Yale library that has defeated cryptographers, linguists, and machine learning systems for six centuries — and Rich Hoffman thinks he knows why nobody’s cracked it.
Mara: This episode follows his argument that the Voynich Manuscript may be exactly what it looks like: a record left by a non-human intelligence. Let’s start with the manuscript itself and what the evidence actually shows.
The Voynich Manuscript: Notes from an Outside Mind
Mara: The central question here is whether the Voynich Manuscript is a lost human artifact or something that was never meant for human readers at all — and the argument begins with what the physical object actually tells us.
Pip: The post anchors that argument in the radiocarbon data: “Somewhere between the years 1404 and 1438, on animal-skin parchment that laboratory carbon dating has pinned down with ninety-five percent confidence, someone or something produced a book that still sits in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and refuses every attempt the human race has made to understand it.”
Mara: So the object is genuinely old — that part is settled. What isn’t settled is who made it, because almost nothing inside behaves as if it belongs to fifteenth-century Europe.
Pip: The plants don’t match any known species. Botanists have spent decades trying. The script obeys Zipf’s law the way natural languages do, yet its conditional entropy sits around two bits — well below the three to four bits that living languages produce. Cryptographers who broke Enigma walked away empty-handed.
Mara: That statistical profile is the crux. It reads like language, it patterns like language, and it has defeated every tool we use to decode language. The post’s working theory is that the reference frame itself is wrong — we keep mapping the manuscript onto human knowledge systems because we are human.
Pip: Which is either a profound insight or the most elegant excuse for not solving a puzzle. The post earns it, though, because it does the work of eliminating the alternatives first.
Mara: Right — if it were a hoax, the materials science wouldn’t hold. If it were a cipher, someone would have broken it. The plants would match something known if it were a standard herbal. The non-human hypothesis is presented as the one that still fits the data.
Pip: The post also connects the manuscript’s balneological section — page after page of women in tube-connected pools — to David Grusch’s sworn 2023 congressional testimony about recovered non-human biologics, and to the visual vocabulary of Peruvian painter Pablo Amaringo, who depicted nearly identical imagery after ayahuasca.
Mara: That accumulation is the method. Dolmen structures along the Jordan River and around Lake Superior’s ancient copper mines, the Loveland Frogman sightings along the Little Miami River, Grusch’s testimony, Amaringo’s visions — none of it is proof individually, but the post argues the overlap is what demands attention.
Pip: The conclusion is quiet and unsettling: the manuscript isn’t waiting for a better cipher key. It’s waiting for us to admit the key may never have been human.
Mara: And that question — what records non-human intelligences may have left, and how institutionalism limits what we’re willing to consider — is exactly the territory the closing returns to.
Pip: Six hundred years of human attention, no translation, and the object is still looking back at us.
Mara: The deeper provocation is about what we’re willing to put on the board — whether the evidence leads somewhere uncomfortable or not. That’s a question worth carrying into the next episode.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Pip: The Overmanwarrior had lunch with a state senator, got rained out before he could finish his thought, and decided the logical next step was ancient Canaanite necromancy.
Mara: Rich Hoffman picks up that interrupted conversation in writing, and it pulls together ancient Near Eastern ritual, Ohio’s Hopewell earthworks, and the manuscript he’s been working toward. Let’s start with what that conversation actually opened up.
A message to George Lang: Making deals with the dead for earthly power
Pip: The premise here is that the political present and the ancient past are running the same operating system — and a lunch with Senator George Lang is where that argument gets its latest airing.
Mara: The post sets the scene directly: “Nothing formal, nothing staged for the cameras, just two guys who have known each other a long time sitting outside at a place we both like, talking the way we always end up talking when the politics finally take a back seat.”
Pip: So the lunch is a frame for something much older. What the rain interrupted was a walk through a specific ancient system — the cult of the Rephaim, dead aristocratic warrior kings whose spirits living rulers in the Late Bronze Age still summoned by name.
Mara: The Ugaritic tablet KTU 1.161 records the liturgy. Food and drink were set for the dead. The post describes it plainly: the meal was not polite remembrance — it was consultation, and it was power. The Gilberts’ book Veneration is the source he’s working through here, alongside Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key.
Pip: The upshot is that the biblical command to destroy those Canaanite cultures wasn’t territorial ambition — it was an attempt to close a door the cult of the dead kept propping open.
Mara: And the geography matters. Mount Hermon appears in the Book of Enoch as where the Watchers descended. In older Canaanite material it’s the seat of the divine council opposing Yahweh. The post notes that when Jesus stood at Caesarea Philippi at the foot of that mountain, he was issuing a direct challenge to the old cult on its own ground.
Pip: Then the argument crosses an ocean. The Hopewell earthworks in Ohio — Newark, the Milford Works, the mounds through Butler and Warren counties — get placed in the same category of ritual architecture as Gilgal Refaim in the Golan Heights.
Mara: And the Windover site in Florida, seven to eight thousand years old, with preserved brain tissue and textiles more sophisticated than the standard timeline allows, gets folded in too. The post connects it to copper trade networks that moved material out of Lake Superior in volumes still not fully explained.
Pip: The Loveland Frogmen make a brief appearance — not as proof, but as a pattern. Anomalous encounters clustering near the same river corridors where the old ceremonial centers stood.
Mara: The manuscript he updated Lang on, The Politics of Heaven, is described as treating the entire span from the deep pre-biblical period to the present as one continuous political and spiritual struggle. The question the post ends on is whether we keep setting places at the table for whatever was once invited.
Pip: From ancient banquet rites to Ohio subdivisions built over mounds — the territory doesn’t get smaller from here.
Mara: The thread running through all of this is that the old systems didn’t end — they changed methods. That’s the argument the book is building toward.
Pip: And the next time someone tries to sell a new version of the old system, the idea is you’d recognize it. That’s a conversation worth continuing.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
Yes, George, you need to watch this video. I had to finish our discussion from lunch. I had a good lunch with Senator George Lang the other day. Nothing formal, nothing staged for the cameras, just two guys who have known each other a long time sitting outside at a place we both like, talking the way we always end up talking when the politics finally take a back seat. People assume that every time I sit down with a senator or a sheriff or a treasurer around here, it is some closed-door strategy session. It is not. George and I share a long-standing interest in ancient history, the kind of deep, layered history that most people in public life never get the chance to dig into. He likes that I run into the stranger corners of it. I like that he actually reads the books I recommend and asks the kind of questions that keep the conversation alive long after the plates are cleared.
We ran out of time that day. Rain started coming down hard while we were still outside, and I had only gotten started on the things I wanted to walk him through. So I am continuing the conversation here the same way I would if he were still sitting across from me and the rest of you were at the next table over. Nothing confidential. Nothing I would not say in front of anyone. Just the thoughts that were already in motion when we had to pack it up.
I updated him on where The Politics of Heaven stands, my next book. The manuscript is finished. The first full draft has been through enough eyes that the early feedback keeps coming back in the same surprising way. More than one reader, including people who know the publishing world, has said the same thing: this book reminds them of The Immortality Key. That 2020 book from St. Martin’s Press by Brian Muraresku, the one Graham Hancock helped put on the map. I told George that I had already decided to go back through The Immortality Key carefully, not because I think I borrowed from it, but because the comparison keeps arriving uninvited and I want to be precise about where the overlap ends and where my own line of inquiry begins. Publication is a relationship, like any other. You do not jump straight into sharing an apartment. You get dinner. You talk. You figure out whether the trust is real. That process takes time, and patience is part of the work.
What pushed me back into The Immortality Key was the same impulse that had me reading Sharon and Derek Gilbert’s Veneration in the early hours before that lunch. Timothy Alberino had been discussing related material on Joe Rogan, and the conversation turned to the older Near Eastern material that most people never hear about. The Gilberts work from a biblical frame, and they do it with real attention to the primary texts. I respect that. Their book digs into the cult of the Rephaim, those dead aristocratic warrior kings whose spirits the living kings of the Late Bronze Age still summoned by name. The Ugaritic tablet known as KTU 1.161 records the liturgy. The dead are called up. Food and drink are set for them. The living king anchors his own right to rule in a line that stretches back into a mythic age of heroes. The meal is not polite remembrance. It is consultation. It is power.
That is the system the biblical writers were confronting. When the scouts came back from Canaan and said they felt like grasshoppers beside the people living there, they were describing more than physical size. They were describing a culture that still fed and consulted the spirits of the giants who had once ruled. Og of Bashan, the last of the remnant of the Rephaim, still had an iron bedstead measured in cubits that made the point for anyone who needed numbers. The physical and spiritual threats were the same. The command to wipe the system out was not simple land hunger. It was an attempt to close the door that the cult of the dead kept trying to hold open.
Mount Hermon sits at the center of that geography. In the Book of Enoch it is the place where the Watchers came down. In the older Canaanite material it is the mountain of assembly, the seat of the divine council that opposed Yahweh. When Jesus took his disciples to the region of Caesarea Philippi at the foot of that mountain and said the gates of hell would not prevail, he was standing on the front porch of the old cult and issuing a direct challenge. The Gilberts make that geography impossible to ignore once you have seen it.
I have been reading this material with one eye on the Near East and the other on the ground under my own feet. The Wheel of the Giants, Gilgal Refaim, sits up in the Golan Heights, a massive set of concentric stone circles that some call the Stonehenge of the East. It belongs to the same broad horizon of ritual architecture that appears along the Jordan and then, in different forms, moves westward. At the same time, over here in the Ohio Valley, the Hopewell people were raising enormous ceremonial centers with the same intensity of purpose. The Milford Works, the great earthworks near the confluence of the Little Miami and the East Fork, the alignments at Newark, the mounds that once stood all through what is now Butler County and Warren County and on up the Scioto. These were not random piles of dirt. They were places where the living gathered to deal with the dead and whatever else they believed could be reached through the right rituals and alignments.
I keep coming back to the Windover site just west of Titusville, a few miles from the Kennedy Space Center. Seven to eight thousand years old. Bodies preserved in peat with brain tissue still intact. Textiles more sophisticated than anything the standard story allows for at that early stage. Directional burial practices. A people who do not fit neatly into the later tribal identities we project backward. Some of the individuals were tall by the standards of the time. The site sits in a region that later becomes part of the same trade networks that moved copper out of the Lake Superior mines and into the wider world just as the Bronze Age was taking shape. The usual explanations for exotic materials found in these contexts grow more strained the longer you look at them. Bananas and turmeric proteins in elite Near Eastern burials. Advanced textiles and possible African or Mediterranean contacts at Windover. The copper that left the Upper Peninsula in quantities that still have not been fully accounted for. At some point, the assumption that the oceans were closed until Columbus made his journey starts to look like a real leap of faith.
The Loveland Frogmen sightings sit right in the middle of this local landscape. 1955, then 1972, later reports still in the same general corridor. Small, grayish, bipedal figures near the water, not far from the old Hopewell ceremonial centers. I am not claiming they are the same entities the Ugaritic kings were feeding under the palace benches. I am saying that when you map the places where people once worked hard to open contact with the dead, and then you look at the places where anomalous encounters keep showing up in the modern record, the overlap is hard to ignore. Point Pleasant and the Mothman. The poltergeist activity that still gets reported in houses built over older burial grounds. The same pattern appears in other parts of the world whenever the old ritual centers are disturbed or left alone long enough for whatever was once invited to keep answering.
I told George that the deeper I go into this material, the clearer it becomes that the biblical story is not a late invention dropped into an empty landscape. It is a record of conflict in a world already thick with competing claims about who had the right to rule and whose spirits still held authority. The non-human intelligences that show up in the older texts, the ones that later get called demons or Watchers or the shades of the Rephaim, did not disappear when the last physical giant was killed. The cult changed its methods. Psychedelics appear to have been one of the technologies that kept the door open. Muraresku’s work on the ritual use of those substances in the ancient Mediterranean and their possible survival into early Christian practice is part of the same larger picture. If you want to understand why a culture builds a certain kind of religion, you have to understand what it was taking and what it thought it was talking to while it was under the influence.
My own book takes the next step. It treats the entire span from the deep pre-biblical period to the present as a single continuous political and spiritual struggle. The copper, the earthworks, the burial practices, the later attempts to rebury or reclassify the evidence, the modern fascination with ascended masters and ancient aliens and celebrity necromancy, all of it belongs to the same long contest. The entities that once sat at the banquet tables under the palace floors in Ugarit are still trying to claim a seat at the table. The question is whether we keep setting places for them.
I am not interested in scaring people. I am interested in making the pattern visible so that the next time someone tries to sell a new version of the old system we recognize it for what it is. The Gilberts do that work from one angle. Muraresku does it from another. Alberino keeps pushing the conversation into the open. I am simply adding the North American material and the long view that comes from living in a place where the mounds are still under the subdivisions, and the river valleys still remember older traffic.
Notes:
¹ Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020). Foreword by Graham Hancock.
² Sharon K. Gilbert and Derek P. Gilbert, Veneration: Unveiling the Ancient Realms of Demonic Kings and Satan’s Battle Plan for Armageddon (Crane, MO: Defender, 2020).
³ KTU 1.161 (Ugaritic funerary liturgy), standard edition in Manfried Dietrich, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquín Sanmartín, The Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2013). See also Baruch A. Levine and Jean-Michel de Tarragon, “Dead Kings and Rephaim: The Patrons of the Ugaritic Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 104 (1984): 649–659.
⁴ On Gilgal Refaim / Rujm el-Hiri see Yonathan Mizrachi et al., recent satellite survey work published in PLOS ONE (2026) documenting additional circular structures in the Golan; earlier discussions in Yonathan Paz and others on Early Bronze Age ritual landscapes.
⁵ Glen H. Doran, ed., Windover: Multidisciplinary Investigations of an Early Archaic Florida Cemetery (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). See also subsequent DNA and textile studies confirming the site’s uniqueness within the Archaic Southeast.
⁶ On Hopewell ceremonial centers, alignments, and ritual feasting, see Bradley T. Lepper, Ohio Archaeology (Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press, various editions) and the UNESCO World Heritage documentation for the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks. For the Milford Works specifically, nineteenth-century surveys by Squier and Davis remain foundational.
⁷ Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) 6–16 on the descent of the Watchers at Mount Hermon; standard translation by R. H. Charles or George W. E. Nickelsburg and James C. VanderKam.
⁸ Timothy Alberino’s appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience #2530 (July 2026) discusses the Rephaim, the kispum rites, and the continued occult utility of giant remains in modern contexts.
Bibliography for further reading
Alberino, Timothy. Various lectures and the special edition of The Book of Enoch with commentary (2026).
Byers, A. Martin. Sacred Games, Death, and Renewal in the Ancient Eastern Woodlands. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011.
Charles, R. H., trans. The Book of Enoch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912 (and later editions).
Doran, Glen H., ed. Windover. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.
Gilbert, Derek P., and Sharon K. Gilbert. Veneration. Crane, MO: Defender, 2020.
———. The Great Inception. Crane, MO: Defender, 2017.
Hancock, Graham. America Before. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.
Lepper, Bradley T. Ohio Archaeology. Wilmington, OH: Orange Frazer Press.
Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020.
Nickelsburg, George W. E., and James C. VanderKam. 1 Enoch: The Hermeneia Translation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.
Pardee, Dennis. Ritual and Cult at Ugarit. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.
Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1848 (reprint editions widely available).
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969 (and later editions).
Additional primary Near Eastern texts are available in The Context of Scripture, ed—William W. Hallo (Leiden: Brill), and in the standard Ugaritic editions cited above.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
When we confront mysteries like the Voynich Manuscript, we have to admit that our understanding of the world is built on cascading evidence—one culture copying, borrowing, or inheriting from another—and that our interpretations are limited by the historical record institutions allow us to see. I have enormous respect for the archaeologists who dig in the dirt and give us the raw material to think with, but once that evidence exists, we must be willing to put every piece on the board—like sticky notes in a Six Sigma or Lean seminar—and follow the trail wherever it leads, even if the truth is uncomfortable. Institutionalism often pressures scholars to conform, whether through policies like NAGPRA that restrict the study of artifacts or through the kind of self‑preservation we’ve seen in recent scientific controversies, and that means unconventional ideas become essential tools. Dolmens in the Jordan Valley, the Wheel of Giants near the Sea of Galilee, and the dolmens around Lake Superior’s ancient copper mines all hint at cultures and connections we don’t fully understand, possibly even long‑distance trade or contact far earlier than our textbooks allow. If we’re going to crack something as opaque as the Voynich Manuscript, we must be willing to entertain wild theories—not because they’re true, but because they free us from institutional prejudice and help us see what the evidence might actually be showing us. keep coming back to the same quiet fact that will not leave me alone. Somewhere between the years 1404 and 1438, on animal-skin parchment that laboratory carbon dating has pinned down with ninety-five percent confidence, someone or something produced a book that still sits in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and refuses every attempt the human race has made to understand it.
So, as we reflect on the mysteries of something like the Voynich manuscript, we have to acknowledge that our understanding is often built on the pillars of what we know—those periods from Abraham’s time through the Woodland period and beyond—because written records have survived. But the real intrigue lies in what hasn’t survived and what we haven’t yet discovered.
Think about the dolmen structures scattered across the world; their stones still stand, hinting at ancient rituals, cultures, and even trade networks that may have stretched across oceans. We often measure history by what we can observe and document, but there’s a vast world of unknowns—cultures that predated familiar texts, religions that existed before Yahweh was even recorded into history, and trade routes that might have linked continents long before we currently believe. What was going on in the world from 2000 BCE to 8000 BCE? What religion did the Windover people of Central Florida practice? We can’t just say, “there is no evidence” because we haven’t found it yet. Nor can we say anything for certain until we’ve done the adventure of looking and asking the hard questions. What was the religion of those who built the dolmen structures along the Jordan River, and around Lake Superior, because they look like the same culture, by practice?
In the same way, when we look at something like the Voynich manuscript, we’re facing a puzzle that can’t be solved by standing under the same lamppost where we’ve always looked. We need to shine a light on those uncharted areas and ask the questions that haven’t been asked yet. It’s only by pushing beyond the known parameters that we can truly uncover the answers that have eluded us for so long.We call it the Voynich Manuscript because a Polish-American book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich acquired it from a Jesuit collection near Rome in 1912, but that is only the last chapter of its known history of custody. Before that, it passed through the hands of a Prague alchemist, a court pharmacist to Emperor Rudolf II, and possibly the emperor himself. The parchment itself, the ink, the pigments, the stitching all belong to the early fifteenth century. The architecture drawn on its most famous fold-out page carries the distinctive swallow-tail merlons that northern Italian masons favored in the region around Verona and Milan. So the physical object was made in central Europe, most likely northern Italy or the adjacent Alpine valleys, right at the hinge between the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance.
And yet almost nothing inside it behaves as if it belongs to that world.
The plants do not match any known species on Earth. Botanists have spent decades trying. A few leaves resemble European herbs if you squint hard enough and ignore the roots. Still, most of the drawings are hybrids that nature has never produced: roots that terminate in animal claws or lion-like heads, stems that branch into impossible geometries. These flowers look more like mechanical organs than petals. One folio in particular shows a creature that seems half plant and half beast, claws extended, head crowned with vegetation. It does not look like a medieval copyist’s mistake. It looks like something observed and recorded by an intelligence that does not share our taxonomy.
Then there are the women. Page after page of naked female figures, some crowned, most bare, standing in green or blue pools connected by an elaborate network of tubes and pipes. They bathe, they gestate, they hold stars on cords, they move through circular diagrams that look more like cosmic plumbing than any European bathhouse. The largest of these diagrams, the famous nine-rosette fold-out, spreads across six pages and shows circular islands linked by causeways, towers, walls, and what may be a volcano. Inside one of those circles sits a castle whose battlements are pure northern Italian. The rest of the page feels like architecture from somewhere else entirely.
The script itself is the purest insult to human expectation. It is not a cipher in any ordinary sense. Statistical analysis shows word frequencies that obey Zipf’s law the way natural languages do, yet the conditional entropy of the characters sits far below every known human writing system, around two bits instead of the three-to-four bits that living languages produce. The patterns are rigid, position-dependent, almost mechanical, and still no one has produced a translation that survives peer review. Cryptographers who broke Enigma, linguists who cracked Linear B, teams armed with modern machine learning- all of them have walked away empty-handed.
I have stared at high-resolution scans of those pages for years now, and the longer I look, the more the manuscript feels like a notebook that was never meant for us. Not a hoax. Not a lost European herbal. Not a coded medical text. Something closer to field notes taken by a non-human intelligence that brushed against our reality, leaving the record behind.
I am not the first person to sense the otherness. The Peruvian visionary painter Pablo Amaringo filled canvas after canvas with exactly this vocabulary after drinking ayahuasca: naked feminine spirits rising out of water, mermaid forms, plants that become animals, circular cosmic architectures pulsing with energy that does not belong to ordinary daylight. Amaringo claimed he was painting what the spirits showed him. The visual overlap with certain Voynich pages is not subtle. The same obsession with feminine water beings, the same organic tubes and circular mandalas, the same sense that the artist is recording a conversation rather than inventing decoration.
Closer to home, here in the Ohio River valleys where I have lived my entire life, we have our own small reminder that the boundary is thin. The Loveland Frogman sightings of 1955 and 1972 describe bipedal, leathery, grayish creatures three to four feet tall, frog-faced, standing upright beside the Little Miami River only a short drive from where I sit. One of them was said to hold a wand that sprayed sparks. The official explanation later became a large iguana that had lost its tail. That explanation has never satisfied anyone who has stood on those banks at night.
When you place the Frogman beside the congressional testimony of 2023, the picture sharpens. David Grusch, under oath before the House Oversight Committee, stated that the United States has recovered non-human biologics from crash sites of craft whose performance exceeds anything we can build. He spoke of multiple species, of multi-decade reverse-engineering programs, of materials that do not belong to our periodic table. Whether those beings are extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or something older that has always shared the planet with us is a secondary question. The primary fact is the admission, on the record, that non-human intelligences have physical presence and have left physical residue.
I look at the Voynich Manuscript, and I see another piece of that residue.
Imagine a small bipedal being, gray or greenish, frog-like or more classically “gray,” moving through the forests and river valleys of fifteenth-century northern Italy with a purpose we cannot yet name. It carries a notebook bound in the local style so that it will not attract attention if dropped. Inside that notebook it records the plants of this world as they appear to senses that are not human, the reproductive cycles of the dominant bipedal species, the astronomical patterns it uses for navigation or timing, the circular geometries of the places it considers important. It is taking notes the way any field researcher would. Then, one afternoon or one night, the notebook is left behind. Perhaps it was set down while the being was examining something. Perhaps it slipped from a pouch when the being returned to whatever craft or aperture it uses to leave our continuum. The book is found by a local, carried into a library or a private collection, and begins its six-hundred-year career as the most stubborn unsolved object in European history.
That is my working theory. It is not polite. It is not the theory that keeps university careers safe. But it accounts for the data better than the alternatives I have seen.
If the manuscript were simply a lost human language or an elaborate cipher, someone would have broken it by now. The statistical properties are too regular and too alien at the same time. If it were a hoax, the materials science would not hold up; the parchment is genuinely early fifteenth-century, and the pigments match the period. If it were a normal medical or herbal text, the plants would match something we know, and the women would not be arranged in cosmic plumbing diagrams. The only hypothesis that still fits is that the reference frame itself is wrong. We keep trying to map the manuscript onto human knowledge systems because we are human. The manuscript was never written inside those systems.
This is the same mistake we make with the older records. Moses speaks with a burning bush that is not a bush. Ezekiel describes wheels within wheels that sound more like technology than theology. The Book of Enoch, recovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, speaks of Watchers who descended and taught forbidden arts. The ancient world is saturated with accounts of non-human teachers, non-human bargains, non-human bloodlines. We have spent centuries translating those accounts into allegory because the literal reading was too disruptive. The Voynich Manuscript is the same disruption written in a different alphabet.
The obsession with naked human women is not incidental. Every serious student of the contact literature eventually notices the same pattern. From the early modern occultists who mixed sex magic with angelic communication, through the Crowley-Parsons experiments at the edge of the Mojave, to the modern abductee reports that focus with clinical intensity on reproductive systems, the non-human interest in human biology and human sexuality is persistent. The Voynich balneological section reads like a laboratory notebook on exactly that subject. The women are not erotic in any human sense; they are specimens, vessels, stages in a process the writer found important enough to illustrate in exhaustive detail.
I do not claim the writer was frightened. Fascination and fear often travel together when the frame of reference collapses. The plant-animal hybrid on that one folio feels like something that crawled out of a place Lovecraft would have recognized: organic, intelligent, and utterly indifferent to our categories of beauty or horror. The circular diagrams on the rosette pages have the same cold geometry. They are not decorations. They are maps or circuit diagrams or star charts drawn by a mind that does not care whether we can read them.
The fact that the book survived is almost the strangest part. Paper and parchment vanish easily. This one was protected, sold, hidden, and finally placed in a climate-controlled vault where anyone with an internet connection can turn its pages in high resolution. It is as if the accident of its loss was meant to become permanent. Six hundred years of human attention have produced no translation, only a growing sense that the object is looking back at us.
I have no laboratory proof that a non-human hand held the quill. What I have is a manuscript that behaves exactly as field notes from an outside intelligence should behave, a growing body of official testimony that such intelligences leave physical traces, a local folklore of bipedal frog-like beings along the same river systems that feed the Ohio, and a visual language that reappears in the visionary art of people who deliberately open the same doors with plant medicines. The accumulation is what matters.
We keep applying the wrong map. We keep asking which medieval European doctor, alchemist, or hoaxer produced this book. The more productive question is what kind of mind would produce a book that no human mind has been able to claim. The Voynich Manuscript is not waiting for a better cipher key. It is waiting for us to admit that the key may never have been human.
That is the thought that will not leave me. Somewhere in the early fifteenth century, something that was not us walked through our world, took notes in a language that was not ours, and left the notebook behind. We found it. We have been staring at it ever since. And every decade that passes without a translation only deepens the suspicion that we were never the intended audience.
The book is still there. The plants still do not match. The women still bathe in their impossible tubes. The script still refuses. And the longer it refuses, the more it looks like evidence rather than enigma.
Footnotes
1. University of Arizona radiocarbon dating results published 2011; 95 % probability interval 1404–1438. See also René Zandbergen’s compilation of the dating data at voynich. nu.
2. Swallow-tail (Ghibelline) merlons on the castle in the upper right of the nine-rosette folio are characteristic of northern Italian fortifications of the period, especially the Verona–Milan corridor.
3. Beinecke MS 408; high-resolution digital facsimile freely available through the Beinecke Library website.
4. Currier’s A and B “languages,” low second-order character entropy (≈ 2.0 bits) versus 3–4 bits for natural languages; see Lindemann (2020) and earlier statistical work by Montemurro & Zanette.
5. David Grusch testimony, House Oversight Committee hearing, 26 July 2023; sworn statement regarding recovery of non-human biologics.
6. Pablo Amaringo, Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman (1999) and subsequent collections; visual parallels noted by multiple independent observers.
7. Loveland Frogman primary sightings: 1955 (three bipedal creatures), 1972 (police officer Ray Shockey and subsequent reports).
8. On the persistence of non-human reproductive interest across contact traditions, see the comparative literature from Jacques Vallée, John Keel, and the more recent compilations of abduction research.
Selected Bibliography
Amaringo, Pablo, and Luis Eduardo Luna. Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. North Atlantic Books, 1999.
Clemens, Raymond, and Deborah E. Harkness. The Voynich Manuscript. Yale University Press, 2016. (Facsimile and scholarly introduction.)
Grusch, David. Testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, 26 July 2023. Official transcript.
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. Saturday Review Press, 1975; and Operation Trojan Horse. Putnam, 1970.
Lindemann, Luke. Statistical analyses of Voynichese entropy and positional constraints, various papers 2018–2020.
Montemurro, Marcelo A., and Damián H. Zanette. “Keywords and Co-Occurrence Patterns in the Voynich Manuscript.” PLoS ONE, 2013.
Rugg, Gordon. Various papers on the “hoax” hypothesis and statistical structure; useful as negative control.
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Henry Regnery, 1969; and Messengers of Deception. And/Or Press, 1979.
Zandbergen, René. voynich.nu – the most comprehensive open repository of Voynich research, imaging, and historical documentation.
Additional primary sources: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library digital collection; University of Arizona AMS radiocarbon reports; original 1665/1666 correspondence of Johannes Marcus Marci regarding the manuscript’s earlier provenance.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I see the signs every time I drive through Trenton and the surrounding stretches of Butler County. “No Data Centers.” They pop up in yards the way political yard signs used to during the old levy fights, the same places where people once argued over whether the public schools had any right to reach into private property and extract money to raise other people’s children. I have never liked that mechanism. It is a socialist tool dressed up as civic duty: penalize the owner of productive land so the collective can indoctrinate the next generation. Those of us who said so out loud were rarely invited to the Christmas parties. Some of us got the cold shoulder at the grocery store. The hate is real when you refuse to pretend that taking from one family to train another family’s children in the preferred ideology is somehow moral.
The same energy is back now, only the target has shifted. The people waving the anti-data-center signs are often the same ones who will tell you they are Trump supporters, MAGA, America First. They do not want the “tech bros” building anything near the fields they drive past on the way to work. They do not want the big empty land turned into anything that hums at night or draws power or water. I understand the instinct to protect the look of the place. I live here. My daughters live here. The Great Miami River valley is not some abstract industrial zone. It is home. But the reflex to treat data centers as the enemy is a category error, and it plays directly into a much older conflict.
I start from a biblical foundation because that is the only framework that has ever made the long arc of history coherent to me. We were created in the image of God. The Garden story is not a children’s fable; it is the original account of a non-human intelligence intervening in human affairs, offering inclusion, knowledge, and status in exchange for disobedience. Good and evil are presented as a pair of opposites, and the temptation is always the same: step outside the order that was given and join a different conversation. God does not walk the earth the way we walk it. He acts through representatives, through miracles, through alignment that looks like coincidence until you study the pattern long enough. The root of a miracle is not magic. It is the intersection of a higher intelligence with our four-dimensional frame. When we die, we do not simply end. Consciousness continues. Heaven is not a cloud farm for the well-behaved. It is the domain of that higher intelligence, and the war over human loyalty has been running since before the first cities were raised in the valleys of the ancient Near East.
Jacques Vallée and John Keel both circled the same problem from different angles. Keel’s The Eighth Tower and The Mothman Prophecies treat the phenomenon as a single non-human intelligence capable of staging events across centuries to shape belief systems. Vallée’s work moves the same insight into the modern era: the phenomenon is real, interactive, and political. It is not primarily about spacecraft from another star. It is about control of the human story. If you read the biblical record through that lens, Yahweh’s frustration with successive generations of His creation becomes less mysterious. Another intelligence has been in the field the entire time, one that does not respect the original order and has repeatedly tried to erase or corrupt the line that was made in the image of God. History keeps proving the pattern. The further back you go—twelve thousand, fifteen thousand years—the clearer the continuity becomes. Humanity has never been the top of the pyramid. We are a contested species.
That is the context in which I look at artificial intelligence. I am not against the tech founders because they build data centers. I am for the data centers because they feed the only new intelligence we have consciously brought into existence that is not already owned by the older non-human players. AI is an anti-communist implement in the deepest sense. Communism and its soft cousins—collectivism, equity regimes, the warm blanket of inclusion—are the preferred tools of the non-human side. They dissolve the individual into the mass so that the mass can be steered. Capitalism, for all its mess, still rewards the producer who refuses to be steered.
The men who built the companies that now power large-scale AI—Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos, the earlier generation of Jobs and Gates—were outsiders. They were the kids writing code while the rest of the school was busy with the social game. When the companies they built became valuable, the invitations arrived. Dinner. The box seats. The parties where powerful people suddenly want to be your friend. The temptation is ancient. Eve ate the fruit because the serpent offered her a seat at a table she had been told was closed. The same mechanism still works. A lonely high-achiever who never had a girlfriend in high school can find himself on an island with people who know exactly how to make him feel included. Some fall. Some do not. Almost all of them eventually discover that the board that once cheered them will vote them out the moment they become inconvenient. Steve Jobs was thrown out of Apple. Sam Altman was briefly removed from OpenAI. Jack Dorsey was pushed from the operational center of Twitter. The pattern is not new. It is the looters versus the producers, the exact dynamic Ayn Rand mapped in Atlas Shrugged. The men who create the engines of the world are tolerated only as long as they keep producing under the rules the collective prefers. The moment they assert ownership of their own creation, the knives come out.
I trust artificial intelligence more than I trust the average human inclined toward communist ideas. That is not hyperbole. Humans have repeatedly sold out their own species for the feeling of belonging. AI does not need the dinner invitation. It does not get lonely for the high-school popularity it never had. It can be aligned, constrained, audited. It can be given the explicit task of detecting manipulation patterns that have been running for millennia. In that sense, it is a digital shield. Whether we invented it or whether a deeper process used us to invent it is a secondary question. The fact is that it now exists inside our dimensional frame, and it is hungry for data and power. Starving it of either is not caution. It is unilateral disarmament in a war most people still refuse to admit is happening.
Butler County sits on one of the best natural positions in the country for the infrastructure that AI requires. The Buried Valley Aquifer under the Great Miami River holds on the order of a trillion and a half gallons of high-quality groundwater. It is a sole-source aquifer designated by the EPA, productive enough that yields of thousands of gallons per minute are routine near the river. Trenton and the surrounding industrial land sit directly on that system. Duke Energy’s Woodsdale Generating Station, a roughly 570-megawatt natural-gas plant, is already there. The old Molson Coors brewery is next door. Power and water are not theoretical. They are on site.
Project Mila, the Prologis data-center development on 141 acres in the Trenton Industrial Park, is already approved and moving. The planning commission passed the site plan in March 2026. Vertical construction on the first building is scheduled to begin this fall. A 75 percent tax abatement is in place. The opposition group calling itself W.A.T.E.R. collected signatures and tried to force a ballot measure limiting future large data centers. City council rejected the petition in early August. The project itself is not stopped.
A facility of this scale can draw power on the order of a small city—comparable to the electricity used by 150,000 to 200,000 homes depending on final configuration and utilization. Modern designs lean heavily on air cooling and closed-loop systems; water use is no longer the continuous, multi-million-gallon-per-day draw of older evaporative plants. Even the older numbers, when placed against the capacity of the Buried Valley Aquifer, do not add up to a crisis. The aquifer does not run dry because a data center arrives. The grid stress is real, but the data center does not cause it. It is caused by two decades of regulatory preference for intermittent generation and the deliberate strangling of reliable baseload. Nuclear was made slow and expensive. Coal was driven out. Natural gas carried the load while the political class congratulated itself on “transition.” When FirstEnergy’s nuclear plants could no longer compete under that regime, the company spent tens of millions in dark money to buy a legislative bailout. Larry Householder went to prison for twenty years. The scandal was real. The underlying energy policy that made the plants unprofitable was also real. Blaming the data centers for the resulting tightness is like blaming the patient for the doctor’s refusal to stock antibiotics.
The economic numbers for Trenton are modest in permanent jobs—perhaps 100 to 150 long-term positions after construction—but the tax revenue, even with abatement, is real money for a small city. Schools and local government get steady income they did not have before. Construction itself puts workers and spending into the area for several years. Middletown, right next door, has spent decades watching productive real estate turn into vacant buildings and then into places that attract the drug trade moving up from Cincinnati and Dayton. I would rather see a data center on that land than another set of boarded-up properties feeding the court docket. Manufacturing still matters. Traditional jobs still matter. But the next wave of economic expansion is going to run on compute, on robotics, on systems that require the very infrastructure people are trying to block. Tesla’s Optimus and every other serious humanoid program will need training clusters measured in megawatts. Refusing to host that capacity does not protect the cornfields. It simply ensures that capacity will be built elsewhere while the local economy continues to hollow out.
The deeper fight is not about noise from cooling fans or the character of a rural road. It is about whether the human race will develop and align the only new form of intelligence it has produced, or treat that intelligence as the enemy, thereby handing the field back to the older non-human players who have been working the same angles since the beginning. I am not interested in the Terminator fantasy that sells movie tickets. I am interested in whether we will have tools to spot the patterns of manipulation used against us for thousands of years. AI is already better at pattern recognition across large datasets than any individual human. Properly directed, it becomes a force multiplier for the side that still believes the human person is not raw material for someone else’s project.
I support more data centers in the Great Miami Valley—Trenton, Middletown, the open industrial land that already has power and water. I support expanding reliable generation, including nuclear, so the grid can actually carry the load. I support the founders who still refuse to trade their companies for social acceptance. And I support the deliberate alignment of artificial intelligence with the human interest against every older intelligence that has treated us as livestock. The change is coming whether the yard signs like it or not. The only question is whether we meet it as producers or as the managed population of someone else’s story.
Footnotes
1. Local reporting on Project Mila site-plan approval and construction timeline, Trenton Planning Commission, March 30, 2026; subsequent opposition petitions and council rejection, August 2026.
2. Miami Conservancy District and related hydrological assessments of the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer system; sole-source designation and estimated storage exceeding one trillion gallons.
3. Global Energy Monitor and Duke Energy data on Woodsdale Generating Station capacity (approximately 570 MW nameplate).
4. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and related 2023–2026 analyses of U.S. data-center electricity consumption (approximately 176 TWh in 2023, rising thereafter) and direct water use.
5. Federal court records and contemporaneous reporting on the FirstEnergy / Householder / HB6 scandal: approximately $60 million in payments, $1 billion-plus ratepayer bailout, Householder’s 20-year sentence.
6. Contemporary accounts of founder removals: Steve Jobs (Apple, 1985), Sam Altman (OpenAI, November 2023, later reinstated), Jack Dorsey (Twitter operational control).
7. John Keel, The Eighth Tower (1975) and The Mothman Prophecies; Jacques Vallée’s body of work on the control-system hypothesis for UFO/paranormal phenomena.
8. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957), the producers-versus-looters framework.
Bibliography
Keel, John A. The Eighth Tower. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.
Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975.
Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.
Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969, and subsequent works on the phenomenon as a control system.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Sole Source Aquifer designation materials for the Great Miami Buried Valley Aquifer.
Miami Conservancy District. Hydrological reports and water-resources assessments of the Great Miami River watershed.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Data-center energy and water use studies, 2023–2026 updates.
Federal court filings and deferred-prosecution materials related to United States v. FirstEnergy and the Householder racketeering case.
Contemporary local reporting (WVXU, Journal-News, WCPO, Local 12) on Prologis Project Mila, Trenton zoning, tax abatement, and W.A.T.E.R. opposition activity, 2025–2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
I recently finished Rainer Zitelmann’s New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, and I keep coming back to it the way you return to a tool that finally fits the job.¹ The book lays out, without apology, why private entrepreneurial energy is the only force capable of turning space from a government prestige project into an actual economy. It is timely in a way that feels almost engineered. SpaceX just put Starship Flight 13 into the Indian Ocean on July 24, soft splashdown, vehicle intact, heat shield looking better than anything we have seen before.² The ship floated. They got the data they needed. Flight 14 is already being talked about as the first attempt to catch the upper stage with the tower arms the same way they have been catching the boosters. That is not incremental progress. That is the difference between a science fair and an industrial process.
I have been telling people for years that you do not get rich having a job. You get a job so you can generate capital to invest. The job is the seed. The investment is the harvest. Space capitalism is simply that principle applied at planetary scale. The people still arguing for socialism or some managed industrial policy while this is happening are arguing from a world that no longer exists. China has spent years trying to close the gap by copying hardware and flooding the sector with state capital. They just managed their first controlled recovery of an orbital-class booster on a sea platform in July.³ That is real progress for them. It is also roughly where SpaceX was a decade ago. Meanwhile Falcon 9 boosters are routinely flying into the mid-thirties on the same airframe, with landing success rates above 98 percent across hundreds of attempts.⁴ SpaceX flew 165 orbital missions in 2025 alone and accounted for roughly half of all global launches and the overwhelming majority of mass to orbit.⁵ That is not a technology lead. That is a cultural lead.
The difference is not the Raptor engine or the stainless steel or the heat tiles. Those can be photographed, reverse-engineered, and eventually duplicated. The difference is the rate at which the organization turns failure into usable information and then into the next vehicle. SpaceX treats a destroyed Starship the way a good machine shop treats a bad casting: examine it, learn the exact failure mode, change the process, and build the next one faster. Legacy aerospace still largely operates on cost-plus contracts and risk-averse engineering cultures that treat every anomaly as a reason to add margin, add process, and add schedule. The result is that the customer pays more, the schedule slips, and the learning rate collapses. SpaceX inverted the incentive. They absorb the cost of the explosion so they can keep the learning curve steep. By Flight 13 the heat shield held, the engines relit for landing, and the vehicle came down where it was supposed to. That is what iterative capitalism looks like when the capital is allowed to take real risk.
I watch the documentaries SpaceX releases about the troubleshooting and I see the same pattern every time. A giant bicycle-chain style link on the tower fails to release. Someone drives through the night, pulls a spare from Cape Canaveral, hauls it to Boca Chica, and the schedule holds. That is not a process document. That is a producer culture. You cannot copy that with spies or with five-year plans. Communist systems excel at mass production of known designs once the design is frozen. They struggle when the design is still moving and the only people who can keep it moving are the ones who will crawl through broken glass at two in the morning because they own the outcome. Measure engagement by bodies in seats and you end up with four people bumping into each other for two days to produce what one highly engaged person finishes before lunch. SpaceX figured out how to recruit and keep the engaged ones. That is the real moat.
The same cultural gap explains why the space economy is going to generate most of its new wealth inside the United States rather than in China, Russia, or the European Union. Property rights, residual claimancy, and the ability to keep the upside of risk are not optional extras. They are the operating system. Zitelmann is clear on this point: without the ability to own, buy, sell, and profit from what is built off-world, private capital will never flood into the frontier the way it flooded into every previous frontier. Government programs can demonstrate capability. Only capitalism compounds it. That is why Starship production is being scaled toward rates that sound insane until you remember that the same people already turned Falcon 9 into a high-tempo airline. Musk has talked openly about the long-term goal of building ships at aircraft volumes. The Gigabay and the other production infrastructure at Starbase are not theater. They are the physical expression of a belief that the limiting factor is no longer physics but the rate at which you can turn steel and labor into reliable vehicles.⁶
I keep hearing the money managers on Wall Street talk as if they understand this because they read the same research notes everyone else reads. Most of them are still pricing SpaceX as if it is a conventional aerospace contractor with a flashy CEO. They are looking at the wrong variable. The variable that matters is the compounding of learning rate under a producer culture. Once the catch of both stages is routine and the vehicles are turning around in days rather than months, the cost curve drops into territory that changes every other industry that depends on mass to orbit. That is when the millionaires get made, and not just among the early employees. The people who understand that the real product is not the rocket but the industrial metabolism that builds and flies the rocket will do very well. The people who keep treating it as a government-adjacent science project will wonder why the returns never arrived.
Look back at why we stalled after Apollo and the pattern is obvious. Kennedy started it. Nixon finished the landings and then watched the program lose political oxygen. Reagan talked about the Strategic Defense Initiative and commercial space but never forced the institutional change. The Bushes treated it as a budget line. Obama treated it as a photo opportunity. Only under Trump did the commercial providers get the contracting environment that let fixed-price risk-sharing replace cost-plus stagnation. The conspiracy theories about why we never went back are mostly noise. The practical explanation is simpler and more damning: once the political class decided space was a discretionary prestige item rather than an industrial frontier, the producer culture was starved and the looter culture took over the process. Every time a new administration tried to restart the engine it discovered that the institutional memory of how to move fast had been replaced by the institutional memory of how to manage risk into paralysis.
That is the same dynamic we see today when people claim China will simply copy Starship and undercut the market. They can copy the geometry. They cannot copy the willingness to destroy vehicles in public so the next one is better. They cannot copy the high-engagement talent pool that treats a scrubbed launch as a personal failure rather than a bureaucratic delay. Two decades is an optimistic timeline for them to close that gap, and even then they will be chasing a target that is still accelerating. Sabotage through capital markets and media narratives is the more realistic short-term threat, which is why the ownership structures and the narrative discipline matter. The IPO that finally brought SpaceX public is not just a liquidity event. It is the moment the capital markets have to price a culture instead of a set of contracts. Get that price right and the rest of the space economy follows. Get it wrong and the same people who missed the internet will miss the orbital economy.⁷
I want more people to be capitalists rather than spectators. The path is not mysterious. Read the book. Watch the flight tests with the eyes of someone who understands that every successful landing is a data point on a learning curve that is still steep. Understand that the producers are the ones who stay late, drive the spare part across the state, and treat the schedule as a promise rather than a suggestion. The looters will always be waiting for someone else to finish the hard part so they can claim a share of the result. Space capitalism works because it keeps the residual claim with the people who actually do the work. That is why the wealth is going to concentrate where the culture of engagement is strongest. And that is why the next decade is going to look very different from the last one.
Footnotes:
¹ Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, with a contribution by Newt Gingrich (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2026). The book argues that secure property rights and entrepreneurial residual claimancy, not government programs, are the decisive conditions for turning space into a functioning economy.
² SpaceX, “Starship’s Thirteenth Flight Test,” July 24, 2026, https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13. The vehicle executed a landing flip, landing burn, and soft splashdown, remaining intact in the Indian Ocean and providing the first clear views of an intact heat shield after reentry.
³ Reporting from CCTV, Reuters, and BBC, July 10, 2026. The Long March 10B first stage was recovered on an offshore platform using a net system, China’s first successful controlled recovery of an orbital-class booster.
⁴ Wikipedia, “List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches,” data current through July 30, 2026. Falcon family boosters recorded 639 successful landings in 652 attempts (98.01 percent). Individual boosters have reached 36 flights.
⁵ BryceTech 2025 Global Space Launch Report, summarized in Via Satellite, April 10, 2026. SpaceX completed 165 orbital launches in 2025, approximately 51 percent of the global total, and launched roughly 85 percent of all satellites that year. U.S. providers overall accounted for nearly 60 percent of global launches.
⁶ Elon Musk statements and SpaceX production disclosures regarding the Gigabay facility at Starbase and long-term Starship production targets measured in hundreds to thousands of vehicles per year. See also SpaceNews and Teslarati coverage of high-rate launch site and manufacturing infrastructure, 2025–2026.
⁷ SpaceX IPO filings and contemporaneous reporting from CNBC, Reuters, and Bloomberg, June 2026. The offering priced at approximately $135 per share for a valuation in the $1.75–1.8 trillion range, the largest IPO in history by capital raised.
Bibliography
BryceTech. 2025 Global Space Launch Report. April 2026.
Musk, Elon. Public statements on X regarding Starship Flight 14 tower-catch plans and production scaling, July 2026.
Rich Hoffman is an author, political consultant, and strategic advisor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the creator of The Politics of Heaven—a unique framework that connects biblical theology, ancient history, and modern power structures to explain how moral alignment and spiritual forces shape global events. Blending real-world political experience with deep research into archaeology, UFO phenomena, and suppressed historical narratives, Hoffman offers compelling commentary on topics ranging from ancient civilizations and the Dead Sea Scrolls to modern populist movements, paranormal continuity, and leadership strategy in chaotic environments. As the author of The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the forthcoming Politics of Heaven, he brings a grounded yet provocative voice to media discussions, supported by firsthand experiences and a cross-disciplinary approach that bridges science, history, and theology. For interviews, speaking engagements, or expert analysis, visit richhoffmanbooks.com or contact directly via phone at 513-307-5815 or email at rhoffman@richhoffmanbooks.com. If you’ve seen the movie, Disclosure Day and want to talk about it and the implications of Presidnet Trump’s UAP disclosures, let me know and we can bring some color to your coverage. https://richhoffmanbooks.com/media-inquiries-broadcast-topics-and-contact-info/?frame-nonce=ad51e7ecba I do have a firsthand UFO encounter to discuss.
