Category: Education

The Shaman of Newark: My Introduction to ‘The Politics of Heaven’ What are the politics of Satan? Is he a Democrat, a Republican, or something else

Human history may not merely be the history of humans interacting with one another. It may also be the history of humanity interacting with forms of intelligence that are perceived through altered states, religious experiences, visions, dreams, shamanic practices, meditation, ritual, and perhaps other mechanisms not yet fully understood.

I know, all this sounds pretty crazy, but that’s only because it was designed to be that way to conceal the truth. And that truth is coming fast. I didn’t want to be that guy.   I thought it was a wonderful picture, one my oldest daughter took of me as I sat in front of the Newark Holy Stones in the second story of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.   She is a professional, highly sought-after photographer because she has learned to capture more in an image than many people might otherwise realize.   And she knows me.   She knew it when she snapped the picture. I didn’t want to be that guy to say all this.   As a high-level aerospace executive and political consultant, I could do much more with my life that would be much more profitable.   But as I sat in front of those stones found by the surveyor David Wyrick and considered all the evidence, I realized I had to put forth my efforts to explain everything to everyone in this book, The Politics of Heaven.   And not giving anything away here, because the journey is more exciting than the conclusion, which is pretty exciting, and that is to what degree and how has non human intelligence shaped the human race over a period of many thousands of years, as chronicled by official government UAP releases and evidence based understanding regarding the reports that at least four different alien species have been interacting with the American government, and likely more than that, and that we do not have sovereignty over our own lives, which has been the big secret.   And no government on earth has been able to protect us from them, which is at the heart of the conspiracy.    So which political party would Satan and his conspirators belong to, and what have been their political motivations been since the beginning of human history? And how many planets do they interact with? Those are the kind of questions I am interested in asking and finding answers to. And in that pursuit, no AI program in the world could have written this article or the book that this is the introduction to. It had to come from my very personal perspective and experience.

I really didn’t want to have to be “that guy.”

A few weeks after that picture, I found myself at the Fort Ancient site, listening to a lecture by John Hancock, who had just written a couple of really good books on the Hopewell earth mounds of Ohio.  After leaving the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, I went with my family down to the Newark earthworks and, in the gift shop at the visitor’s center, discovered the newly released book by John Hancock, Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which featured UNESCO’s classification designating 8 sites in Ohio as World Heritage Sites.  Hancock was the driving force behind that designation, and, I thought, his book, based on the presentation to the UNESCO committee, was really well done.  So my same daughter who took that picture went with me to Fort Ancient, at the arrangement of Sarah Winningham, the assistant site superintendent at Fort Ancient, to listen to John talk about writing his books, the UNESCO submission, and his very good travel guide, Ancient Ohio.  And that is the case with a lot of this book, I go to a lot of museums, everything from the Mothman Museum in Point Pleasant West Virginia, famous for its paranormal reporting, to the British Museum where I famously had a nice argument with the staff there over the crystal skull, which falls into the same kind of category as the Newark Holystones.  Are they fake?  And if so, why would anybody go to all the trouble?  After all, the discovery of the Newark Holystones more or less destroyed the life of David Wyrick, who was a good surveyor in 1860, and it was assumed that he was a major abolitionist aligned with the Lincoln administration in the heat of the Civil War.  So it was assumed that he made the stones and planted them in the famous mounds to erode any thoughts that the Indians of his time, being pushed off the land by westward expansion, wanted to decouple their claims to the ancient earthworks.  Or so they say, and they are very explicit about that at the museum. 

I was surprised to notice, just to the south of the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum, a nice David Wyrick drawing of the Newark Great Circle proudly displayed on the wall of the visitors center.  Wyrick died miserably in 1864 of laudanum, a commonly used painkiller that was opium based.  I think it is a reach to attempt to paint David Wyrick politically, which was clearly the case at the museum’s, a very aggressive attempt to attach an indigenous people narrative to the mounds, and Wyrick was trying to spread the word of God and the immorality of slavery, which was the thrust of the Holy Stone exhibit at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.  It doesn’t take much of a stretch to see the academic community in the vacuum of more knowledge, driving a political narrative where it likely didn’t belong.  And as I said, I noticed the fantastic book by John Hancock, newly released and displayed everywhere at Newark, The Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, which I grabbed quickly and read almost before leaving the mound’s site at Newark.  A few weeks later, at Fort Ancient, I attended a lecture by the author John Hancock, hosted by Assistant Site Superintendent Sarah Winningham.  By the time of that event at the Fort Ancient museum, I was very intrigued by some of the claims in John’s book about the famous mounds. 

The Shaman of Newwark

First of all, if not for John, there is no way the Ohio mounds would have been designated UNESCO World Heritage sites, which is a very good thing because they are every bit as important as other World Heritage Sites, such as the Great Pyramids and Machu Picchu.  But I wanted to talk to him about his book because he has some very interesting and unique ideas.  First of all, he approached the mounds as an architect, as a retired professor from the University of Cincinnati who thought like a teacher and used to take students to Europe to see great architecture before realizing that some of the best architecture in the world was shown in the mounds of Ohio, which would eventually become in his book the eight UNISCO earthwork sites, Newark, Hopeton, High Banks, Fort Ancient, Seip, The Great Circle, and Mound City. 

To say I was a little excited is an understatement as I went through their shelves at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum.  As this book unfolds, it will become obvious that I love museums, big ones and little ones, and I love their gift shops.  I have found many wonderful treasures in museum gift shops.  The Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum is famous for its replica relics of the Holy Stones.  But going through their shelves, they also had replicas of the actual Wilmington Tablets.  I was very happy to see three of them, and I asked the cashier how I could buy one.  They thought they were coasters.  Obviously, the tablet replicas were too obscure for anybody to know what they were, including those working at the museum.  I have some very strong thoughts about the various Adena tablets found in the mounds of what has been designated as Adena culture.  There is a Cincinnati Tablet that has at times been displayed at the Cincinnati Museum Center.  And of course, the Wilmington Tablet was found in Wilmington, Ohio.  And I would argue that it shows interaction with the Olmecs from central Mexico, up the Mississippi River, and across the Gulf.  A lot of archaeologists argue against it, but I thought that John Hancock’s new books made legitimate arguments for that kind of travel for a book published by Smithsonian Books.  And that is the discussion that copper from Lake Superior did, in fact, find its way into the Hopewell sites in Ohio, which indicates very long-distance travel, Mica trade from the Appalachians, and obsidian from the Yellowstone area.  I told John that I thought it took a lot of guts for him to talk about the copper mines in Lake Superior because of the conspiracy theories that have spawned on the topic.  But here we were in 2026, talking to a serious person about the mounds, and we’re having a serious discussion about the Great Lakes copper trade, which has quite a story.  Something called the Newberry Tablet, occasionally on display in St. Ignace, Michigan, points to trade with Mediterranean cultures, which many claim was so voluminous that it flooded the global economy with copper, starting the Bronze Age.   The dates on the mines are around 8000 years old, or about 5000 BC, roughly the same as those of the Windover people of Central Florida, a topic we’ll discuss in much more detail later. 

This book, The Politics of Heaven, is more than just a travel log of my extensive travels and my political and professional work in aerospace as an executive.  As I asked the question at Fort Ancient, I came to ask John Hancock, the assistant superintendent of the Fort Ancient site, Sarah Winningham that I first started to think about many years ago.  I really didn’t want to be that guy.  At my age, I had been looking forward to a kind of retirement where I could attend events like the one where John Hancock would write great books and put a new spin on an old archaeological idea.  John, being a professor of architecture, did have a fresh perspective that I always enjoyed in my youth as the Vice President of the Dan Beard Council.

As a young man, I was very happily involved in a High Adventure Explorer Post, where I became Vice President of the Dan Beard Council after a special election at the GE Evendale plant, where I gave a speech that led to my election.  Later in this book, I tell the tragic story of a death that took place later in the night of that same election day, when I was scheduled to fight three guys from my school at that same time, and one of them turned up dead, and the rest of them were telling stories about me to the police that were not favorable.  The events of that night led to my separation from the Dan Beard Council, and at that time, I enjoyed my exposure to those kinds of people, including academics like John Hancock and museum personalities like Sarah Winningham from the Fort Ancient complex.  I have been hoping since that time that at some point I could get back into that kind of life, the High Adventure Explorer Post life I enjoyed so much in my youth.  This book tells that story as I continued to travel a lot and utilize the skills I started in those explorer post experiences.  Even though many of the people who volunteered for and supported Explorer Post activities were politically liberal, I hoped that someday I might be able to return to those innocent days. 

But as much as I wanted to, my life had taken me into the very political world of consulting, and with high-level personalities, which made it impossible for me to sit in that Fort Ancient lecture and put my brain away.   Because, like John Hancock, who approached the really good archaeology of Bradley Lepper, and others with an architectural background, I have years of experience as an aerospace executive dealing with very smart, PhD-level engineers and professionals who can be very manipulative and deceitful in root cause analysis.  My wife and I had plans, and what will become clear in this book is that I have a very high regard for the archaeological publication Biblical Archaeology Review, and I really want to spend these years of my life taking their cruises on luxury liners and having archaeological discussions.  And that my happiest place on earth at the moment is at the Museum of the Bible, for which my wife and I are members.  I love places very passionately where scholarship and discovery come together, so believe me, I didn’t want to be that guy.  I wanted to be the guy who read the books of people like John Hancock, Bradley Lepper, and Francis Pryror, and enjoyed the buffets on the cruise ships, and read lots of books.  Because more than anything, my number one hobby, which started for me during those Explore Post years, was reading books.  Lots and lots of books, some of my favorite which is reflected in this literary effort, are James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and for me, it is the joy of adventure in going down rabbit holes and bringing Alice back from its hidden depths that is the most fun.  And professionally, as I have thought for a long time because of my love of The Golden Bough, I think archaeology does not go far enough as a spinoff of the creation of anthropology, scientifically, and all the hard lessons I have learned through years of political work gave me extensive experience.  I really wanted to attend John Hancock’s lecture for the pure enjoyment of it, because I love people like him and Sarah Winningham.  Why, because I learned to really love academics in a non-political way during my very formative years of High Adventure Explorer Post membership.  I had made up my mind to get all over the world, which is what this book is about.  I didn’t learn what I did by just sitting at home, but by going to many places and applying the same skills that worked very well for me professionally, to some really obscure ideas.  So I came to the lecture with a question I had thought of while reading John Hancock’s marvelous books. 

I thought John’s lecture on the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks was fantastic, very well researched, and extremely well put together.  No wonder UNESCO moved to designate the 8 earthworks sites as World Heritage Sites officially.  And even if the UNESCO people are extremely liberal, politically, and were very much against the United States during the first Trump presidential term, which I know a lot about.  I finish this book with a visit to the White House.  I tend to really enjoy all efforts that seek to preserve the past, regardless of politics.  In the pages to come, I am glowingly supportive of organizations like English Heritage and the fantastic efforts of The Ohio History Connection, whose headquarters is at the Ohio History Center in Columbus, where I first visited on an Explorer Post field trip many years ago.  The main purpose of Explorer Post membership is to expose young people to high-adventure career opportunities.  Which was the subject of my speech at GE to the other explorer groups of Cincinnati and big personalities such as Lee Iacocca and Jack Welch, and how they elected me, even as a very young person, to Vice President of the Dan Beard Council.   So, since I had my question ready for John’s lecture, I decided to enjoy the event and the educational publications from The Ohio History Connection.  I remember that day with the Explorer Post visiting the museum that would become The Ohio History Connection. I got the feeling that everyone was encouraging me to grow up and become the troublemaker who would challenge their assumptions.  After all, why have a High Adventure Explorer Post in any way but to raise young people to go out into the world to challenge everything, if not for gaining wealth and notoriety, but for the spirit of adventure itself. 

This is the kind of thing I’d rather be doing in life. My idea of a good time.

I was always the rebel of the group, and even if I was naturally very talented, my spirit of adventure got me and everyone who followed me into a lot of trouble.  And sometimes people did lose their lives, which is why my time as Vice President of the Dan Beard Council was short-lived.    But I got that office at a very young age because a lot of people were hoping I would be the guy who would shake things up in ways they instinctively knew needed to happen.  And as I held up my hand at the end of John’s lecture, I asked my question about the relic on display at the Ohio History Center: the Shaman of Newark.  In his big book, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks, John very cleverly found a way to show the relic as a digital replica illustrated by Talon Silverhorn of the Eastern Shawnee.  But in his travel guide, Ancient Ohio, he says that he could talk about the famous Hopewell relic but not show it so as not to disrespect Indian tribes, which set up another question I had about NAGPRA in general, which I directed at Sarah, who was in the back of the room, regarding compliance with that 1990 Democrat proposal to return to all the Indian tribes of North America the relics of their ancestors.  They are running a nice museum at Fort Ancient, and John had been very clever in getting Indian tribes to contribute artwork and replicas for his books in very respectful ways, which is unusual for these kinds of projects. Before going to the Fort Ancient lecture, my wife and I had just returned from the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and I had a great time there.  A lot of the kind of people I like these days have very little trust in the Smithsonian and the much-talked-about cover-up of the ancient giants who were reported to have been found in these very Ohio Mounds.  John’s book does not address those, but he and I did talk about the controversies. I told him I thought it was remarkable that he even mentioned the copper mines of Lake Superior in his book, because, as the story goes, those copper mines dating to 5000 BC were so prolific that they caused a global economic boom and were shipped to Europe by the Minoans of Crete. That proof of that trading exchange is on what they call the Newberry tablet, which can be found sometimes in St. Ignace, in Upper Michigan.  As I said to John, this conspiracy stuff is a tough line to walk.  And as I said it, I looked back at the audience, and almost everyone had a grin on their face because I was saying the stuff that is supposed to be unsaid, but they all wanted to say it. 

The Relic of the Shaman of Newark, I think, is a remarkable admission, which I will expand on during the grand adventure for which this book is, a journey around the world and across vast spans of time with conclusive evidence at the level of speculation awaiting the hard evidence of good archaeology.  The relic itself depicts a shaman in the process of turning into a bear and is holding in his lap the severed head of a long-haired human.  I knew about the relic because it was on display at the Columbus Museum, as was the Wilmington Tablet.  So, as the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum operators have done a great job getting into the business of making relics of controversial artifacts, like the Newark Holystones, but seeing that copy of the Wilmington Tablet reminded me of the Shaman of Newark, as that topic had been on my mind regarding the Newark Earthworks.  And this was the cause of my anxiety, which my daughter captured so well as I was distraught over what it all led to. 

I asked the question: why were the Indian tribes reclaiming all the artifacts that archaeologists had found, and even destroying them by burying them again?  And as John explained, he had just spent a lot of time speaking with various Indian tribes to coordinate with them in writing his great book on how to show who the Hopewell people were by replicating them, without the magic of their actual image tainting them with haunted reverence.  So here is the problem. Two things can’t both be true, here we had a political movement pushed by NAGPRA, which said that we had to give back all the evidence of our discovery because the relics of the Indigenous people were magical and had power that had to be returned to the ground, but at the same time we were supposed to study these Indigenous people with evidence to understand them.  So I turned around from my seat and addressed the back of the room. I asked, “Was the NAGPRA pressure political or coming from the tribes themselves?”  Because I will talk about this extensively in this book, the 8,000-year-old, well-preserved people of Windover, buried in bogs in Florida, are genetically dated as older than any known North American Indian Tribe and were actually around during the period of the copper mines of Lake Superior.  So how can we study this history and properly respect it if NAGPRA said we had to empty all the museums of Indian relics and give them back to tribes we were calling Indigenous people by Democrat legislation that was making a claim that America should have never been settled or turned into a country because it happened at the expense of these miraculous Indigenous people? 

And here’s the problem: the Shaman of Newark shows clearly the extent of the belief of those people of their period, which, to my eyes, were mimicking the beliefs of the Canaanite gods that Yahweh was so enraged about.  And the political statement by Yahweh to destroy all the gods of Canaan and destroy the people of that land, emphatically.  The beliefs of the people of Newark and the other Hopewell sites needed to be studied much more so that evidence could drive our conclusions.  Like the situation in Cahokia, just outside St Louis, here we had an Indian relic in the Shaman of Newark that had a decapitated head in his lap, showing the typical ritual sacrifice of life for the benefit of communicating with spiritual entities.  And with that, under NAGPRA, which bless her heart, young Sarah Winningham was preparing the Fort Ancient museum to be fully compliant with.  The evidence was right there, begging us to ask the next layer of questions with really great minds and researchers, like John Hancock and great archaeologists like Bradley Lepper, who should be applying great science to these magnificent archaeological monuments.  Instead, we are getting rid of the evidence and then telling the world that everything is a conspiracy theory because there is no evidence to support it.  This book is about the evidence discovered through vast and sometimes dangerous expeditions observed over my lifetime. 

In these pages, there is extensive study of the impact of shamans on a culture over time and of their common role as vehicles of spirit-world interaction.  I was very impressed that John Hancock put an image of the Shaman of Newark in  Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks.  But he did not include the same image in his Ancient Ohio traveler’s guide, even though he did talk about it.  The reason is tribal acceptance and a NAGPRA compliance issue, and I think it’s the key to the whole enterprise.  My question is, what made Yahweh listen to Satan to punish Job, and why wouldn’t Satan work through many shamans over time and space to whisper bad things for their own political needs to gullible recipients, whether that be Job or God himself as head of the Divine Council? Just because the Bible recorded an occurrence, why wouldn’t there be many more undocumented occurrences just as bad or worse than what happened to Job?   The presence of shaman activity among the Hopewell people, complete with a severed head in its lap, does not point to peaceful indigenous people being used by a modern 1619 Project into claiming them as vehicles of destruction, invalidating the creation of the United States in the first place.  Yes, I think David Wyrick may have planted the stones for all the reasons he was accused of.  But it destroyed him socially, and it looks like the work of the opium present in his painkillers, giving his mind access to similar satans as those that tempted God in the Book of Job.  I think there is another layer to the story, and it centers on how we perceive consciousness.

In the chapters ahead, I explore the nature of remote viewing as we have come to know it and test some assumptions on the known psychics Dolores Cannon and Edgar Cayce, and even deeper into the MK Ultra Program, so well known around the Charlie Manson murders.  And why wouldn’t we pay attention to that kind of psychic reporting when so many biblical characters were telling of occurrences where they directly communicated with gods and would sacrifice to them?  And here in Newark, Ohio, we have an Indian relic of a Newark shaman that depicts a severed head and a shamanic transformation from human to bear, and we are supposed to, under the NAGPRA law, put that relic back in the ground and destroy its magical properties.  And why do the Indians believe these relics have magical properties? How are we scientifically talking about magic in objects and saying it with a straight face, then calling people like me pseudoscientists or, at best, contemplators of conspiracy?

Let’s take what we know, that Satan was reported to manipulate God in the Book of Job, and that God reacted to it in a way that was very hard on Job who was a good man doing all the good things a human being was supposed to be doing.  Why did Satan want to bring harm to such a good persont? Just because, Satan was evil? What does that mean and what’s the next layer of understanding?  That’s the kind of question I explore in the chapters to come.  What are the political motivations of spirit world malcontents, and how can we prepare ourselves as a human culture from their interdimensional tyranny?  And if we think that is wild, then how can we say that indigenous people have ancient relics that are magical and should be destroyed and put back in the ground and studied?  Yet we are supposed to take the word of the experts for it completely and “trust the science.”  As we were expected to do with Covid.  So here we had a problem, we are supposed to ignore all the evidence and give it back to people who had no genetic claim to the objects, in ways we still don’t understand, we don’t know who the Hopewell and Adena people were, we don’t know who mined the Lake Superior copper mines, we don’t know who the Windover people were, yet we are supposed to give all these treasures back to the newest people living on the block, without studying what they left behind.  The Shaman of Newark, I think, is one of the most important parts of John Hancock’s book, as he actually managed to put an image of it in the book before the purge of NAGPRA forced it into obscurity.  But how much else has been shoved away into a lack of study, and how can we claim to know anything about them? 

A lot to think about

I didn’t mean to, but I had a UFO experience that I talk about in this book also.  I would attribute it to big government programs and to a psychic reaction to me personally, which is something that dominating personality types seem to have been able to do over many years.  But who did they speak with, or rather, who answered?   I have seen it for myself.   I think non-human intelligence is always working with us, around us, through us, and for its own political motivations.  But what are those politics?  We might understand the Ohio governor’s race between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy through the political lens of Democrats versus Republicans.   And that was certainly the case between many researchers and me.  Overwhelmingly, college professors tend to be Democrats, as are Hollywood actors, for very good and definable reasons.  Productive capitalists might otherwise be said to be Republicans.  But what is the politics of Satan besides calling him evil?  Evil doesn’t tell the story nearly enough.   And what would be the politics of spiritual beings, as the Indians say, the Great Spirit? Perhaps they are talking about the same God we all are.  Or perhaps not, perhaps their god is just another version of Baal, Lucifer, Moloch, or Satan.  Yet, here we have in the Shaman of Newark a figure involved in human sacrifice, as many of the Mississippian Mound cultures did, Cahokia included, and nobody wants to talk about it?  NAGPRA says we are supposed to suspend belief and surrender our opinions to the experts who have no idea what they are talking about. 

I walked out of the Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day, telling my wife that everything had changed.  It’s not that the movie was jaw-droppingly good; it was just a movie.  But it gave permission, for a whole bunch of political reasons, to talk about this subject differently than at any time in the past.  The evidence, including the case of David Wyrick, and we will talk about evidence a lot in the murder cases I have been on, where I was the top cop of Butler County, Ohio, for a very treasured period.  Do demons and spiritual characters talk to people and soothsay them into self-destruction?  Yes, emphatically, over and over again, and I think when it came to David Wyrick, he needed public acceptance that some demonic force wanted him contained and destroyed.  He was an abolitionist who used his prominent social position as a mason to help spread the message of ending slavery.   And thought his opinion-based painkillers, a Satan-like character probably had his ear right up to the day of his death under the influence of that same painkiller.  But why, if you were an alien from a Type One civilization, would you try to derail an ant colony that was interrupting your version of a picnic?  If the creation of America was divinely inspired, as the Bible clearly indicates, wouldn’t that be good for the human race? Yet perhaps god was at war with all the other gods, and we are their chess pieces.  I’m inclined to that latter assumption, and the evidence certainly leans in that direction as I have experienced it. 

At the September 9th 2025, Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection hearing with the House Oversight Task Force, there were some very unusual things said on the very public record by George Knapp, Jeffry Nuccetlli, Dylan Borlan, and Alexandro Wiggins that have slowly taken the idea of UFO talk from conspiracy to actual scientific study.   We have open talk now that up to four species of non-human intelligence are interacting openly with the world’s governments.  And back to the movie Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg: as a work of art, it opens the box to talk about these things in ways we never have before, because of the compelling evidence emerging from these testimonies.  The movie is clearly fictional and meant to be a popcorn popper.  But there is a level of seriousness to it that hints at something much larger: how do these non-human intelligence types communicate with humans now and in the past, perhaps even the deep past?  I would say to all the scientists of the Smithsonian that objects like the Shaman of Newark and understanding how the complex mathematics in the Newark Earthworks were given to those indigenous people in the first place is all that matters.  Based on observation, with the thin proof that we have, the Sumerian God Nisaba was whispering geometry to the people of the Hopewell period, and probably longer. Or the Hindu goddess Lakshmi. Why not you say? Are we going to be fools and suggest that Sumerian Gods were regional, and could not speak to people on the other side of the world as easily as someone in a Sumerian temple under drug influence? Why would we assume that? The first question is understanding that. And how did a society that did not have any central government or modern technology such as TV or radio project those same mathematics, without flaw, from the Newark earthworks to Hopton, over 60 miles to the south, to Mound City, Seip, High Bank, and Fort Ancient, locations all over Ohio?  They had no paper that we know of, no Wal-Mart, no way to say that this, this, and this is important.  Let’s build massive earthworks that take millions of labor-hours each to complete, and do so to perfection, without any centralized corporation or government to keep everyone focused.  And modern science calls it a miracle of tribal knowledge.  I call it communication through shaman over vast distances, all over the earth, by non-human intelligence trying to manipulate the human race towards its own doom and destruction to fulfill the political needs of the rebels against God. 

And to further confirm that suspicion, many of these Hopewell sites are associated with the very ancient Teays River, which flowed up the Scioto over 2 million years ago, well before the last Ice Age.  The Teays and its tributaries touched many of the Hopewell sites, indicating a reverence for those spots on the land by an intelligence observing human beings over a vast span of time and connecting those locations to celestial alignments. And that relevance is important in knowing that the Great Serpent Mound was built on the crater of an impact crater from 300 million years ago.  How would indigenous people know that?  And even stranger, the Fort Hill complex is built within the impact crater zone as well.  Out of all the places in North America, why would anybody, and nobody really knows who they are, build these big, significant sites near geologic features that were millions of years old?  Why would they know anything about any of it with such precise mathematics?  How would that information ever be obtained in the first place, let alone passed along to these construction sites involving so many years and generations of labor and production?  It’s hard to build a McDonald’s consistently, even with all the modern tools we have now.  I would propose that it was the shaman with drug use who served as the primary communication device.  And with that, a relationship with Non-Human Intelligence that we are finally admitting to, that has always been a part of the human experience. 

Yes, the exhibit at the great Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum was very political, but not in the way that I think they intended.  I saw at the museum an attempt to understand these great mysteries with replicas of the relics themselves.  Again, that’s where I found a great copy of the Wilmington Tablet, along with the Holy Stones of Newark.   And we also know of the Shaman of Newark, so there were relics that depicted the same kind of human sacrifice that we know came from central Mexico, Mirador, Teotihuacan, and Cholula, in a time when many people didn’t think cultures were talking to each other.  They appear, as the evidence of the relics shows, to have been doing so.  Even in the Smithsonian views these days by John Hancock, we know that the Hopewell people were traveling many thousands of miles to obtain copper, obsidian, and mica, and likely traded with the Olmecs of Tabasco, Mexico, and affiliated cultures, which had their writing showing up in the Wilmington Tablet and the Cincinnati Tablet.  So the political motivations of David Wyrick are not as simple as has been attempted to be set out. 

As a surveyor of these great Indian mounds, and confronted with vast evil, as the Civil War over slavery unleashed itself, and studying the remains of these ancient cultures, likely the same voices that whispered in the ear of the Shaman of Newark were whispering in the ear of David Wyrick and his opium painkillers.  And was it Moses who wrote the Book of Job and discussed what Satan had said to whom and for what reason?  The same guy who talked to god on a mountaintop and came back 40 days later with the Ten Commandments, and spoke to a burning bush about freeing the Jewish people from the confines of Egyptian polytheism.  Should we ignore that the mound complex at Portsmith, Ohio has a very similar path-of-souls ritual to the one the Egyptians had for their preserved dead?  And that some of their paths actually go through the Ohio River, showing a reverence for what was there before even the Ohio River flowed through the area, when the Teays River instead flowed to the north.  And we could say with just as much authority that the mound sites were restored during the Hopewell period rather than constructed anew.  That they were marking spots on the ground, viewed from the air, to very ancient landmarks, for reasons for which we do not have enough evidence to speculate.   Yet they are there, and the evidence is begging to be found and analyzed.  And for the same political reasons that Satan tried to trick God into punishing Job, we have society punishing David Wyrick for daring to oppose slavery, or wanting to use the Ten Commandments as a hook into North American migration by Western civilization, bringing with it a religion of forgiveness instead of appeasement to some mysterious gods who demand decapitated human heads in the lap of their shaman before providing information. 

No, I didn’t want to be that guy, but sitting in front of the Newark Holystones at the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum and seeing the exhibit they had there, and noticing the quick tone to dismiss everything as a hoax, my life flashed before me in a way I would have rather had it not.  A deception was at play; Satan himself was trying to throw everyone off the scent.  And when theologians contemplate a single satan in the Book of Job, they miss the obvious problem that there are likely thousands of them always whispering in someone’s ear, maybe God himself, or David Wyrick laced out on painkillers, or the Shaman of Newark.  And that it didn’t take much to communicate, a spiritual terrorist from the land of Cannon could have been speaking the same message of sacrifice to some headhunter of the Adena culture depicted as a severed head in Hopewell mounds at the same time that they were whispering to Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Solomon’s First Temple, and to the Romans during the Second Temple, to destroy the vessels of God himself to make the world ripe for an overthrow, to the political objectives of the conspirators against God’s creations.  And the Essenes were turned into the channel, and wrote about it in their Dead Sea Scrolls. I had wished that the Johnson-Humrickhouse Museum exhibit, located well north of Newark, was less obvious and more scientifically grounded.  But the assumption was that Wyrick was an abolitionist living among evil people supporting the slavery of other people, more of that reference to the 1619 Project, the unjust settlement of indigenous land.  And as you read at the Holy Stone Exhibit, you can almost hear the whispers of Satan himself, showing Wyrick to be invalidated, corrupting future scientists in their assumptions, and making a case for not even founding America at all so the Christian premise of eliminating human sacrifice would be destroyed and current cultures continue the practice of honoring the spirit world with the blood of the living.  And I didn’t want to be the guy who reported what was hard to hear.  That Satan was a non-human intelligence that has been doing all this manipulating since before the Teays River flowed north along the Scioto River, then turned left near present-day Columbus and headed out to Indiana along the present-day I-70 corridor. 

If you really looked closely enough and blocked out the contemporary noise, you could hear the insecurities of Satan, hoping to get away with the deception of many lifetimes.  Humans need to appease what they thought of as their superiors, their gods, the malcontents that UAP whistleblowers are now revealing in the light of day in the Trump administration very hard truths.  It’s one thing to explain modern UFOs and their physics-defying characteristics, and another to explain the mysterious occurrences and hauntings at the Skinwalker ranch.  Yes, I talk a lot about hauntings, paranormal occurrences, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the kind of politics that will make your skin crawl in the pages ahead.   But it’s also a marvelous adventure that I share so that you don’t have to go through the pain firsthand.   And perhaps, after a lot of work, we’ll gather up enough evidence to change our perspective.  But in The Politics of Heaven, the ruse is in what isn’t said, not what is actually revealed.  Satan never tells God what he’s up to in trying to get him to turn against the very good Job.  But when we look at the human race, we see a lot of Jobs, David Wyrick being one of them.  Good people are crushed by their relationships with others who are otherwise motivated toward evil.  But what is evil anyway when you have the Shaman of Newark holding the severed head of an obvious victim, that shaman would use as currency to buy information from the spirit world.  The great spirit, or Satan himself.  We aren’t supposed to ask the question, only to accept that the experts told us what to think and when to think it.  But I didn’t want to be that guy.  Sometimes, I wish I could be a lot of other things.  But what is the adventure in that?   And in the adventure are the answers, the real answers if we dare to look.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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 like the Ostrich: A little chaos usually makes things better

I had been telling stories about visiting The Wilds, that impressive safari park and conservation center affiliated with the Columbus Zoo out in the hills of Ohio. It is one of those places worth the drive no matter where you are in the state, a sprawling expanse of reclaimed land turned into something that feels close to the real thing—vast pastures under open sky, exotic animals moving with room to stretch their legs. They have rhinos and giraffes in good numbers, along with camels, zebras, cheetahs, and others, all managed with a light enough hand that the illusion of wild freedom holds up pretty well from the back of an open-air safari vehicle.¹

You climb aboard one of their customized tour buses or trucks—solid machines built for the terrain—and set out through a series of large paddocks. The gates are there for a reason. They control movement between sections so the animals do not mix in ways that would cause trouble, and the whole operation runs on a balance between giving the creatures space and keeping things workable for keepers, vets, and paying visitors who want the Serengeti experience without the actual risks of the real wild. Supplemental feeding stations and strategic placement of water to help keep the herds where the staff wants them for health, breeding programs, and viewing. It is wildlife management at a high level, about as good as you are going to get when you are dealing with dangerous and valuable animals on thousands of acres that used to be strip-mined ground.²

The compliant animals make it easy. The rhinos—those massive southern white rhinos—graze and wallow near the resources provided for them, powerful but predictable in their routines. The giraffes tower elegantly, moving between browse stations and open pasture in ways that fit the management plan. Camels shed their coats in season, zebras stay in loose groups, and the whole scene looks like freedom while functioning inside a carefully designed system of fences, gates, rotations, and incentives. It is not a cage, but it is not the true untamed wild either. It is managed pasture with the look of the wild, and most of the animals play their part without fuss.³

That is what made the ostrich stand out to me.

I noticed him early, standing apart from the clusters near the food and water. Tall, alert, head turning with that sharp, curious rhythm ostriches have. While the rhinos and giraffes and camels stayed close to what the keepers had laid out for them, this bird was watching the vehicle. As we moved from one paddock into the next, the gate system did its job—or tried to. The tour vehicle went through, the mechanism closed behind us, and there he was again on the other side. He had figured it out. He waited, timed his approach, slipped in close behind the bus or jeep as it passed, and crossed into the fresh section before the barrier fully secured. Now he was loose in new territory, running with a different group, exploring ground the plan had not assigned him that day.⁴

The reaction from the staff told the whole story. You could hear it in the radio chatter and see it in the quick deployment of groundskeepers in another vehicle. They had to go after him, work him back toward his proper paddock without stressing the other animals or ruining the tour for the people who had paid to see a smooth, wild-like experience. It was not the first time. The bird had made a habit of it. One fence, one gate at a time, and he had learned the vulnerability. He did not need the food station to stay content. He wanted novelty, new company, the chance to impose his own will on the layout the humans had built.⁵

I was rooting for him the whole time.

Here was an animal refusing the script. The other creatures accepted the pasture as given—the convenient food, the predictable safety, the lanes they were expected to occupy. The ostrich treated the whole setup as a puzzle to solve. He used the tour vehicle itself, the thing the keepers relied on to move visitors through their controlled world, as his ticket to the next field. He did not stay near the bowl. He risked the chase, the herding, the temporary disruption, because something in him wanted to see what was over there and who else was around. That kind of ambition is rare in a managed environment, and it is exactly what makes systems better when you let it play out instead of crushing it on sight.⁶

It struck me then, and has stayed with me since, how perfectly this mirrors what I have seen over decades in aerospace and manufacturing. We build our own versions of The Wilds every day. We lay out departments like paddocks, write procedures like fence lines, and place compensation, titles, benefits, and job security like feeding stations to keep people content and predictable. We install gates—approval chains, compliance checklists, annual audits, legacy safety rules—and we staff them with officers whose job is to make sure nothing slips through unplanned. Most people, like most animals in the park, adapt. They stay near the resources, do the expected work, and the machine runs smoothly enough from a distance. Visitors and shareholders see order and productivity.⁷

But then there are the rebels and learning the actual work from the ground up, often see the single-gate weaknesses first. They know which rules came from someone who retired twenty years ago and never got revisited. They spot the places where the process has become theater—compliance for the sake of compliance, documentation that protects no one and slows everything. When they point it out or, worse, quietly work around it to get the real job done, it can be deeply disconcerting to layers of management that have never turned a wrench or stood on a shop floor during a real problem. Knowledge from the ground threatens the illusion of total control. So the system often responds the same way the keepers responded to the ostrich: more rules, more oversight, more “training,” or direct pressure to get back in the assigned pasture.⁸

The cost of that approach is enormous and mostly invisible until you add it up. Direct spending on regulatory compliance labor alone runs into the hundreds of billions annually across American business, with manufacturing carrying a heavy share. Broader economic drag—capital and talent diverted from productive work into compliance bureaucracies, innovations delayed or abandoned because the approval path is too long, small and mid-sized firms crushed under burdens that larger players can absorb—pushes the true opportunity cost into the trillions over time. We lose competitiveness, we lose resilience, and we lose the very people who could have fixed the problems if we had listened instead of herding them back into line. It is not dramatic like a factory closing overnight. It is the slow erosion of capability, the quiet decision by talented hands-on people to stop trying or to leave for places that still value initiative.⁹

SpaceX has shown what happens when you refuse that model. Elon Musk walks into meetings and asks the questions most compliance cultures are designed to avoid: Who wrote this rule? Why did they write it? Does it still make sense, or is it just legacy that nobody wants to touch? A shocking number of requirements get deleted or radically simplified once you trace them back to their origin. The company builds, tests, fails in public view, learns fast, and iterates. Reusable rockets, vertical integration, rapid launch cadence—these did not come from following the old aerospace playbook of exhaustive upfront documentation and risk aversion at every step. They came from treating the rulebook as a starting point to be challenged, not a sacred pasture to remain inside.¹⁰ The results speak for themselves in cost per launch and flight rate. The ostrich approach, applied at scale, forces the entire system to get better.¹¹

I have always had a soft spot for the ostriches in any workforce. I advocate for them on purpose. The ones who will not stay in their lane, who figure out how to get behind the jeep and into the next field, are usually the same people who reveal where the real weaknesses are and who come up with fixes nobody on the compliance side would have imagined. Sometimes they bite you—disrupt schedules, question authority in uncomfortable ways, make the tour guides nervous. That is the price of having them. The alternative is a pasture full of well-fed, predictable animals that look impressive when the bus drives by but generate very little genuine progress or resilience. Their souls get crushed under the weight of never being allowed to test the fence, and the organization slowly loses the capacity to adapt when the real world stops cooperating with the plan.¹²

In my own years moving from hands-on roles into executive responsibility, I saw this pattern repeat across programs and companies. The people who had done the work with their own hands carried an instinctive understanding of what was theater and what was necessary. They were often the first to spot when a procedure had become detached from reality or when a new requirement was solving a problem that no longer existed. Management that lacked that grounding sometimes viewed them as threats to order rather than assets to be unleashed. The organizations that protected and empowered those voices moved faster and solved harder problems. The ones that prioritized perfect compliance and predictable behavior above all else eventually found themselves defending processes that nobody could explain anymore, while competitors who tolerated a little productive rebellion pulled ahead.¹³

The same dynamic shows up far beyond factories and boardrooms. Education systems that reward sitting still and repeating approved answers over curiosity and independent problem-solving. Government bureaucracies where the safest career move is to add another layer of review rather than remove an obsolete one. Cultural institutions that present curated narratives as the full range of choice. We all live inside versions of The Wilds at times—the illusion of open range while the fences, feeding stations, and gate protocols quietly shape what is possible. Most days it feels normal. Then something like that ostrich reminds you that the system only works as well as it does because enough creatures choose not to test the boundaries too hard.¹⁴

What I liked most about watching that bird work the tour was how it improved the keepers. They had to confront the limitation in their current gate setup. They had to think about whether single-point control was enough or whether double-gate airlock procedures, better behavioral enrichment, or adjusted resource placement would reduce the escapes without turning the place into a tighter prison. The ostrich was not just causing trouble; he was doing unpaid consulting work for the management team. He showed them where their assumptions about animal movement and motivation had gaps. A purely compliant population would never have forced that improvement. The rebel paid for his freedom by making the whole operation a little sharper.¹⁵

I left The Wilds that day still thinking about him. The rhinos were impressive in their size and presence. The giraffes were beautiful against the sky. The cheetahs carried that coiled power that makes you respect the food chain. All of them cool in their own ways, and all of them content to operate inside the lanes the humans had drawn. The ostrich was the one I kept coming back to—the non-compliant one, the rule-questioner, the creature willing to go where the keepers did not want him and to accept the temporary chase as the cost of exploration. He did not need the easy food to stay interested in life. He wanted new ground and new company, and he found a way to claim it using the very system designed to contain him.¹⁶

That is the quality I look for and try to protect in the people around me, whether in aerospace programs, manufacturing operations, or just everyday life. Give the ostriches some room. Listen when they show you the weakness in the single gate. Accept that a little productive chaos now and then is cheaper than the long-term stagnation of perfect compliance. The organizations and societies that figure this out keep their edge. The ones that treat every deviation as a threat to be chased back into the assigned pasture eventually discover that their well-managed animals have lost the capacity to handle real trouble when it arrives.¹⁷

I have no interest in living in a world where the only acceptable animals are the ones that stay near the bowl. I would rather deal with the occasional escape, the radio calls, the groundskeepers earning their pay, and the improvements that come from being forced to see the system through the eyes of someone who refuses to accept it as final. That ostrich at The Wilds was doing exactly what the best innovators and problem-solvers do everywhere else: he treated the fence not as an absolute limit but as a problem to be solved, and in doing so he made the entire managed landscape a little more honest and a little more capable.¹⁸

When people ask me now what my favorite animal was on that visit, I do not hesitate. The big ones were impressive. The compliant ones were easy on the eye and the schedule. But the ostrich—the tall, curious, gate-hacking rebel who would not stay in his lane and who spent half the tour where he was not supposed to be—was the one that mattered. He reminded me why I have always had more respect for the people who figure out how to get behind the jeep than for the ones who never leave the feeding station. Encourage that spirit where you find it. Protect it when the compliance officers come with their herding tools. The future does not belong to the perfectly pastured. It belongs to those willing to test the gate now and then, accept the chase, and show the rest of us what we missed by staying comfortable.¹⁹

This experience at The Wilds lingered in my mind long after I returned home, connecting to deeper patterns I have observed across my life and work. The managed illusion of freedom in those paddocks is not so different from the structures we encounter in corporate America, where layers of policy and oversight create the appearance of progress while often stifling the very innovation needed to survive. In aerospace, where I have spent much of my career, the contrast between traditional approaches and more agile ones is particularly stark. Legacy programs can become bogged down in requirements that originated decades ago, defended not because they remain relevant but because changing them would require admitting that the original rationale might no longer hold. Hands-on experience reveals these disconnects quickly, yet articulating them can mark you as difficult rather than valuable.²⁰

Consider the broader implications for American manufacturing. When compliance becomes the primary metric of success, resources flow toward documentation and auditing rather than research, development, or process refinement. Studies have documented how regulatory burdens disproportionately affect smaller firms, creating barriers to entry and expansion that favor incumbents who can afford dedicated compliance departments. The result is slower adoption of new technologies, reduced experimentation on the shop floor, and a workforce trained more in navigating bureaucracy than in solving novel problems. The ostrich in such an environment would be quickly reassigned or sidelined, and the whole system suffers for it.²¹

Elon Musk’s approach at SpaceX offers a compelling counterexample, one I have followed with great interest. By insisting on first-principles thinking—breaking down every assumption to its fundamentals and rebuilding only what proves necessary—the company has achieved breakthroughs that seemed impossible under conventional paradigms. Reusability was not just an engineering challenge; it was a direct challenge to the accepted economics of spaceflight, where expendable vehicles and massive cost-plus contracts had become the norm. Questioning those foundations required a culture that rewarded the kind of boundary-testing the ostrich exemplified. The payoff has been dramatic reductions in launch costs and an unprecedented cadence of operations, reshaping the industry.²²

In reflecting on these matters, I often draw parallels to larger questions of human agency and the systems that seek to channel or constrain it. The ostrich’s refusal to remain content within the provided pasture speaks to something fundamental in the created order: a drive toward exploration, adaptation, and the exercise of will that resists overly deterministic management. In my ongoing work exploring the Politics of Heaven and the deeper spiritual and historical currents shaping human affairs, such metaphors take on added resonance. Just as the keepers at The Wilds maintain an illusion of wildness for educational and conservation purposes, larger forces in society—whether economic, cultural, or institutional—often construct environments that prioritize predictability and control over the messy vitality of genuine freedom. Individuals who, like the ostrich, find ways to slip through the gates challenge those illusions and force reevaluation.²³

This is not to romanticize chaos or dismiss the need for structure. Successful wildlife management at The Wilds demonstrates that boundaries serve important functions: protecting animals, enabling breeding programs, ensuring visitor safety, and advancing conservation goals. Similarly, in business and society, rules around safety, quality, and ethics are essential. The problem arises when those rules multiply unchecked, when compliance officers outnumber innovators, or when the original purpose of a regulation fades from memory while its enforcement mechanisms grow ever more elaborate. The ostrich does not demand the removal of all fences; he demonstrates the value of testing them and adapting the system in response.²⁴

My own background has given me a particular vantage on this tension. Having worked my way up through various roles in industry, from tasks requiring direct physical engagement to overseeing complex programs, I have witnessed how domain knowledge from the “shop floor” often clashes with abstract managerial frameworks. Those who have turned wrenches understand intuitively where procedures add value and where they have become ritual. Encouraging such perspectives requires leadership willing to tolerate temporary disruption for long-term gain—much like the keepers who, instead of permanently punishing the ostrich, likely considered improvements to their gate protocols or enrichment strategies.²⁵

Culturally, the pattern repeats in media and entertainment, where narratives often reinforce managed expectations rather than celebrating the disruptive questioner. From my observations of shifts in popular music and storytelling over decades, there has been a movement away from themes of individual agency and moral courage toward more passive or hedonistic portrayals that keep audiences comfortably within prescribed emotional and ideological lanes. The ostrich disrupts that too, by refusing the easy feed of convention and seeking fresh territory.²⁷

Politically and economically, the stakes are high. Over-reliance on compliance culture contributes to the kinds of institutional failures I encountered during grand jury service, where layers of bureaucracy sometimes obscured accountability and human judgment. Challenging stupid rules is not rebellion for its own sake but a necessary corrective to systems that drift toward self-perpetuation at the expense of their intended purposes. In local Ohio contexts, from school levies to commissioner races, I have seen similar dynamics: entrenched approaches defended vigorously, while innovative voices advocating for accountability and efficiency are treated as threats to the established order.²⁸

Ultimately, the lesson from that lone ostrich at The Wilds is one of balance and appreciation. Systems need structure to function, but they thrive when they incorporate the energy of those who test the edges. In manufacturing, this means streamlining regulations that no longer serve their purpose and empowering frontline workers to propose and implement improvements. In broader society, it means fostering cultures that value inquiry and agency over rote obedience. As someone who has long championed self-mastery, resilience, and the imposition of individual will on challenging circumstances—symbolized in my own life by the whip as a tool of precision and discipline—I see the ostrich as a kindred spirit. He navigates the managed wild with determination and ingenuity, improving it in the process.²⁹

When I share this story, people often smile at the image of the bird sneaking through gates and evading keepers during the tour. But beneath the humor lies a serious point about human flourishing. We are not meant to be permanently pastured, content with provided resources and predictable routines. The drive to explore, to question, to innovate—even at the risk of temporary conflict with authority—is part of what makes progress possible, whether in conservation parks, factories, or the grander arenas of history and spirit. I prefer the company of ostriches, even if they occasionally complicate the tour. They keep things alive, force adaptation, and remind us that true freedom, however constrained by reality, involves the courage to move beyond the feeding station and into the next field.³⁰

So the next time you find yourself in a system that feels overly managed, remember the ostrich at The Wilds. Look for the single gate, time your move, and be willing to run when the keepers come calling. The disruption might just lead to better management for everyone involved. In my experience, it almost always does.

Footnotes

¹ Official descriptions of The Wilds as a 10,000+ acre conservation center with open-range safari experiences, emphasizing educational value and animal welfare. See The Wilds website resources on mission and operations.

² Details on reclaimed strip-mined land conversion, paddock management, and gate systems for species separation and rotational grazing in large wildlife parks.

³ Visitor accounts and park literature highlighting predictable behaviors of rhinos, giraffes, and other megafauna near supplemental feeding and water sources.

⁴ Observations of ostrich curiosity and vehicle-following behavior in safari settings, consistent with ethological studies of ratite intelligence and learning.

⁵ Reports from guides and staff on recurring challenges with individual animals exploiting procedural gaps during tours.

⁶ Analysis of problem-solving in captive animals and its implications for enrichment strategies in conservation management.

⁷ Corporate analogies drawn from organizational behavior literature on incentive structures and departmental silos.

⁸ Personal reflections informed by decades in aerospace, noting tensions between experiential knowledge and administrative layers.

⁹ Quantitative assessments of regulatory compliance burdens, including labor costs and opportunity losses in U.S. manufacturing sectors.

¹⁰ Public statements and case studies on SpaceX’s first-principles engineering methodology and requirement rationalization processes.

¹¹ Industry analyses of launch cost reductions and operational cadence improvements attributable to iterative, challenge-based approaches.

¹² Discussions of innovation cultures versus compliance-oriented management in business strategy texts.

¹³ Insights from program management experience in aerospace regarding the value of shop-floor perspectives.

¹⁴ Broader applications to educational and governmental institutions, drawing on critiques of bureaucratic inertia.

¹⁵ Principles of adaptive management in wildlife conservation, where outlier behaviors drive procedural improvements.

¹⁶ Comparative evaluation of animal temperaments in managed environments and their contributions to system dynamics.

¹⁷ Recommendations for fostering psychological safety and autonomy in high-performance teams.

¹⁸ Philosophical ties between individual agency and systemic resilience, informed by long-term observation.

¹⁹ Synthesis of the ostrich metaphor as applied to personal and professional philosophy of resilience and inquiry.

²⁰ Examination of legacy requirements in traditional aerospace programs versus agile methodologies.

²¹ Empirical studies on regulatory impacts on firm size, innovation rates, and market entry barriers.

²² Detailed accounts of reusable rocket development and associated regulatory and engineering challenges.

²³ Connections to explorations of power structures, agency, and historical patterns in spiritual and societal contexts.

²⁴ Balanced view of necessary boundaries versus over-regulation, with examples from safety and ethical standards.

²⁵ Reflections on career progression and the role of practical knowledge in leadership effectiveness.

²⁶ Applications to intergenerational knowledge transfer and character development through hands-on challenges.

²⁷ Cultural critiques of shifts in media narratives and their effects on perceptions of agency.

²⁸ Observations from civic engagement and public service experiences regarding institutional accountability.

²⁹ Integration with personal symbols of discipline, precision, and moral agency in navigating constraints.

³⁰ Concluding emphasis on the long-term benefits of embracing productive non-conformity for societal and organizational health.

Bibliography

The Wilds. Official website and publications on conservation, safari operations, and animal management (thewilds.org).

Trebbi, Francesco, et al. Research papers on the costs of regulatory compliance in the United States, including establishment-level data analyses (NBER and related).

National Association of Manufacturers. Multiple reports detailing per-employee and aggregate regulatory burdens on U.S. industry.

Musk, Elon, and SpaceX team. Interviews, presentations, and public documentation on engineering philosophy and operational innovations.

Christensen, Clayton M. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvard Business Review Press.

Schumpeter, Joseph A. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Harper & Brothers (on creative destruction).

Various ethology and conservation journals on ratite behavior, wildlife park management, and behavioral enrichment.

Hoffman, Rich. Prior essays and books including The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and ongoing work on The Politics of Heaven, exploring agency, structures of power, and human systems.

Organizational psychology and management texts on compliance versus innovation cultures (e.g., works on psychological safety and adaptive leadership).

Visitor and video documentation of The Wilds experiences highlighting animal-vehicle interactions.

Government and think tank analyses of manufacturing competitiveness, opportunity costs, and regulatory reform needs.

Additional readings on free will, institutional critique, and historical patterns of rebellion against managed orders for deeper contextual understanding.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

MK ULTRA: The Most important part of Disclosure Day

I did not attempt to cap my enthusiasm when I walked into the theater for Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day. I had listened to a lot of the reviews that had been out for several weeks by the time I saw it. I had read the commentary, watched the clips, and absorbed the consensus that was forming around this picture. And yet I kept coming back to one element that almost nobody seemed to be talking about—the one part that mattered most to me. It was not the surface spectacle of the aliens themselves. It was not whether the gray figure at the end looked convincingly real or a little too much like polished CGI. It was not even the marvelous score by John Williams or the career-highlight work from Emily Blunt as the meteorologist who finds herself suddenly able to read minds and speak in strange tongues. Those things are all fine and good, and they make for a compelling piece of summer entertainment. But the film’s real power, the thing that has stayed with me and kept me turning it over in my mind for days afterward, lies in something far more unsettling and far more relevant to the world we actually live in right now.

Disclosure Day is a story about the long, quiet interaction between non-human intelligence and this planet. The premise is that these visitors have been here for decades, moving in and out of our reality with an ease that makes our notions of locked doors and secure borders feel almost quaint. The characters in the film discover fragments of this truth through whistleblowers, through grainy archival footage of interrogations and examinations, through personal experiences that cannot be explained away by conventional science. The public revelation—the Disclosure Day of the title—arrives as both a shock and a kind of confirmation for anyone who has been paying attention to the steady drip of UAP testimony from Congress in recent years. But Spielberg, being Spielberg, does not stop at the wow factor of little green men or gray men or whatever form they take. He uses the revelation as a doorway into something much older and much more personal: the question of who really controls the territory inside our own heads.

That is the part the reviews mostly missed or chose to glide past. People came out of the theater talking about whether the alien looked fake, whether this was Spielberg’s best work or merely a solid return to form, whether the wonder of Close Encounters or E.T. had been recaptured or diluted by a more conspiratorial tone. They talked about the chase sequences, the mind-reading set pieces, the late reveal that lands with a mixture of awe and unease. All of that is fair game for conversation. But the deeper current running underneath the plot—the one that actually kept me awake after the credits rolled—is the depiction of how easily sovereignty can be stripped from a human being when someone else possesses the right technology or the right knowledge. In the film, that stripping occurs via a piece of alien-derived hardware wielded by a powerful figure within a shadowy aerospace-adjacent organization. The device does not simply persuade or threaten. It reaches into the mind of the target and begins to rewrite loyalties, plant impulses, and turn a person into an instrument who may not even remember why they are doing what they are doing—the subject acts without full memory of the programming. Compliance is tested, reinforced, and deployed. It is MKUltra logic dressed in twenty-first-century production values and tied to the arrival of non-human intelligence.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, long before this particular movie came along. I have listened carefully to the UAP whistleblowers who have testified under oath in recent years. I have read the declassified documents. I have watched how the conversation has shifted from outright dismissal to grudging acknowledgment that something real is happening in our skies and has been happening for a very long time. Congressional testimony has now put on the record that non-human biologics have been recovered from crash sites. Whistleblowers have described multi-decade crash-retrieval and reverse-engineering programs run in collaboration with private aerospace companies. They have spoken of threats, of intimidation, of people harmed or worse to keep the secret. David Grusch and others have indicated that the United States government is aware of several distinct kinds of non-human life forms—ranging from bipedal entities to other, stranger morphologies. Some estimates in the broader research community suggest four or more species have been documented through various channels, with speculation about larger networks or agreements among them. The precise numbers are less important than the underlying reality: we are not alone, we have not been alone for a very long time, and the institutions that have known this have gone to extraordinary lengths to manage the information and, more importantly, to manage us.

What Disclosure Day does so effectively—and what so many viewers seem to have glanced off—is to dramatize the next logical step in that management. If advanced non-human intelligences can move through our atmosphere and through our physical defenses with impunity, then the old model of sovereignty—the locked door, the national border, the personal boundary of skin and skull—has already been breached at the highest level. The film does not need to show fleets of saucers landing on the White House lawn to make this point. It shows something quieter and more insidious: the ability to reach inside a human being and turn that person into a vector for someone else’s will. In one sequence, a character under this influence is compelled toward betrayal and violence. The resistance, when it comes, is not primarily physical or technological in the conventional sense. It is moral and spiritual. A crucifix is clutched until it draws blood. A hand is stabbed to break the connection. Faith, or at least the memory of a deeper allegiance, becomes the firewall. That is not an accident of plotting. It is the thematic core.  This is a theme with Spielberg going back to the Indiana Jones film, The Temple of Doom.  When under possession, Indiana Jones is burnt with a torch to break the spell over him.  A fantasy movie full of fun with some very deep things to say about possession. 

I had a conversation with one of my grandsons not long ago that has stayed with me in exactly this context. We were at a campsite, and we came across a particularly striking beetle moving through the undergrowth. It was an interesting little character—armored, purposeful, going about its business with the single-minded intensity that insects possess. I pointed it out to him, and we talked for a long time about life forms, about how many different ways there are to be alive on this planet, about the vast gulf between a beetle’s experience of the world and our own. The beetle has autonomy within its limits. It can move, forage, reproduce, and respond to threats in accordance with its nature. But it has no concept of the larger forces that might casually end its existence. If I had chosen to step on it, there would have been no trial, no moral reckoning on my part beyond a momentary twinge, and certainly no legal consequence. The beetle’s sovereignty is real but radically circumscribed by its place in the order of things.

That is the feeling the film left me with regarding our own position. If there are intelligences that have mastered physics we do not yet understand, that can appear and disappear at will, that have been studying us for decades or centuries while we argued about whether they existed at all, then from their perspective we may look a great deal like that beetle looks to us. They would not necessarily hate us or wish us active harm. They might have priorities that do not include preserving our illusions of control. They might regard our political arrangements, our legal systems, our carefully constructed borders, property rights, and personal boundaries as charmingly provincial. And if they—or, more disturbingly, if human beings who have gained access to fragments of their technology—possessed the means to step inside our minds the way we can step on a beetle, then the question of sovereignty becomes existential rather than theoretical.

This is where the film’s connection to the real history of mind-control research becomes impossible to ignore. Project MKUltra was not a fever dream. It was a documented CIA program that ran from the early 1950s through the early 1970s, involving experiments in hypnosis, drugs, sensory deprivation, and psychological manipulation on unwitting subjects. The Church Committee hearings in 1975 exposed the broad outlines, and subsequent document releases have filled in more of the picture. While the formal program officially ended, the underlying impulse—to understand and ultimately to control the territory of human consciousness—did not simply vanish. Parallel lines of research into remote viewing and psychic phenomena were funded through the 1970s and 1980s under names such as the Stargate Project, which involved the Defense Intelligence Agency and contractors like the Stanford Research Institute. Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others demonstrated abilities to describe distant locations and events under controlled conditions. The results were mixed from an intelligence standpoint, and the program was eventually terminated, but the fact that the United States government spent serious resources exploring whether consciousness could be projected and information gathered without the ordinary constraints of space and time is itself revealing. It tells us that at least some people inside the system took seriously the possibility that the mind is not as bounded as we like to believe.

Disclosure Day takes that possibility and runs it forward into the present. The mind-control technology in the film is attributed to either reverse-engineered or directly supplied alien hardware, wielded by human actors within powerful institutions. The effect is the same as the old MKUltra aspirations: the subject’s agency is compromised, their memories may be fragmented or absent, and their actions serve purposes they may not fully understand or endorse. The film does not need to name the three-letter agencies explicitly to make the point. The shadow of those agencies, and of the aerospace companies that have long operated in the black-budget world alongside them, hangs over the story. In our real history, those same institutions have been accused—sometimes with documentary support, sometimes in the realm of persistent allegation—of using every tool at their disposal to protect secrets that would destabilize public assumptions about who is really in charge. The film dramatizes what that protection might look like when the secret in question is not merely a crashed craft or a recovered body, but the ability to edit human loyalty itself.

What makes Disclosure Day more than a standard conspiracy thriller is that it refuses to let the audience off the hook with easy answers. The aliens are not purely benevolent teachers, nor are they cartoonish invaders. They are other beings whose priorities and capabilities place them so far outside our frame of reference that our usual categories of friend or enemy feel inadequate. The human beings who have been managing the secret are not monolithic villains either. Some are genuinely trying to protect a population they believe would panic. Others are protecting power, careers, and the ability to continue operating without oversight. The film suggests that the greatest danger is not the arrival of the other, but the way that arrival can be used to justify ever-greater concentrations of unaccountable control over ordinary people. When the institutions that know the truth also possess tools to edit minds, the old social contract based on informed consent and transparent governance has already collapsed. The disclosure event itself can then be managed—shaped, delayed, or spun—to serve the interests of those who have the most to lose from genuine transparency.

This is why the film’s political dimension feels so charged, even if Spielberg himself has not always aligned with the political instincts I hold most dear. There is a long pattern in American governance of taking problems created or exacerbated by one set of policies and then offering expanded government power as the only solution. The same voices that spent decades denying or ridiculing the reality of UAP phenomena are now in a position to say, in effect, “See? We told you something was happening. Now let us manage the disclosure, the contact protocols, and the integration of whatever technologies we have recovered. Trust us. We are the only ones who can keep you safe.” The film does not have to spell this out in dialogue. It is evident in the conspiracy’s architecture that the characters are fighting. The same institutions that ran MKUltra, that ran Stargate, that have run the black programs around crash retrievals, are the ones positioned to become the gatekeepers of the new reality. Their argument is always the same: the public cannot handle the truth; therefore, we must control the narrative, the technology, and ultimately the minds that might resist the narrative.

I have seen this pattern up close in smaller arenas. Years ago, I served as foreman of a Butler County grand jury. We interviewed hundreds of officers, toured facilities, and listened to prosecutors describe cases that revealed repeated institutional failures—places where the system protected itself rather than the people it was supposed to serve. I came away with a clearer understanding of how two-tiered justice actually operates, how emotional intelligence and personal integrity can be in short supply even among those charged with protecting the public, and how easily ordinary citizens can be left without recourse when the institutions decide that transparency is too risky. That experience has colored everything I have observed since about larger structures of power, whether they are local school boards, federal agencies, or the aerospace contractors that move between them. The film’s depiction of a powerful organization using advanced tools to enforce compliance feels less like science fiction and more like an extrapolation of patterns I have already watched play out on a smaller scale.

The same pattern appears in the way certain political movements have approached questions of sovereignty at every level. Secure borders are not merely about keeping physical threats out. They are about preserving a people’s ability to maintain their own culture, laws, and capacity for self-government. When borders are treated as optional or as moral inconveniences, the message is that sovereignty itself is negotiable. The same logic that says a nation has no right to decide who enters its territory can be applied, with only a slight shift in framing, to the territory inside a citizen’s own mind. If outside forces can reach the mind—whether those forces are foreign governments, domestic agencies, or non-human intelligences with superior technology—then the individual’s ability to give or withhold consent becomes the first casualty. The film makes this connection visceral. The character who resists the mind-control device does so not by hacking a computer or shooting a drone, but by invoking something deeper and older than the technology arrayed against her. She invokes a loyalty that predates the institutions and the visitors alike.

That is why I keep returning to the role of faith in the story. It is not presented as a magic shield that automatically defeats advanced technology. It is presented as a form of resistance that operates on a different frequency—the mind-control device works by reaching into the spaces where memory, desire, and identity are formed. Faith, in the film’s treatment, appears to occupy some of those same spaces but answers to a different authority. When the character grips the crucifix or drives the blade into her own hand to break the connection, she is not performing a technological countermeasure. She is asserting that her ultimate allegiance is not available for reprogramming. Whether one shares the particular religious framework or not, the broader point stands: any system of control that treats human beings as programmable units must eventually reckon with the fact that many human beings experience themselves as having a dimension that cannot be fully captured or rewritten by external hardware. That dimension has been given many names across history—soul, spirit, conscience, the image of God. The film does not need to resolve the theological questions. It only needs to show that the control system encounters resistance precisely where that dimension is active.

This is also why the movie’s value extends far beyond the theater. Art of this kind enters the sovereign spaces where real conversation happens—around kitchen tables, in living rooms, on long drives with family members, in the quiet hours after children have gone to bed. Those are the places where people still feel they have some measure of control over the narrative. A film like Disclosure Day can plant questions in those spaces that mass media and official channels cannot easily reach or manage. People will talk about the alien at the end. They will debate whether it looked real. But some of them will also talk, eventually, about the mind-control sequences. They will wonder, out loud in the safety of trusted company, whether the technologies depicted are purely fictional or whether they represent an extrapolation of capabilities that already exist in fragments. They will ask each other what it would mean if the institutions that have lied for decades about the existence of non-human intelligence also possessed tools to edit citizens’ loyalties. Those conversations, multiplied across thousands of sovereign households, are where genuine cultural shifts begin. They are also where resistance to the next phase of control can take root.

I have spent a good portion of my life watching how power actually operates in the spaces between official stories and lived experience. In my younger years in the Cincinnati area, I had to move in circles connected to the old organized crime networks that ran through Newport, Kentucky, and parts of the Sharonville corridor. I saw firsthand how cash, documents, and high-profile individuals were handled, how coded language functioned, how plausible deniability was maintained, and how networks of influence could reach into law enforcement and the courts when necessary. I learned early that the visible structures of authority are not always the real ones, and that the people who truly understand the game rarely advertise the fact. Those lessons have served me well in analyzing everything from local political races to national policy debates to the larger questions of who benefits from keeping certain realities off the public table. Disclosure Day resonates with that accumulated experience. It shows a system in which the official story and the operational reality have diverged to the point that ordinary people no longer possess the information required to give meaningful consent to the world they live in.

The film also resonates with the work I have been doing on my own book, The Politics of Heaven. That project has taken me deep into questions of biblical conspiracy, ancient interactions between humanity and other intelligences, the role of giants and fallen entities in the historical record, and how spiritual warfare has manifested across centuries as struggles over who gets to define reality for the rest of us. The idea that non-human intelligences have been present and active for a very long time is not new to me. What Disclosure Day adds is a contemporary, technologically inflected version of the same ancient pattern: beings with superior capabilities interacting with humanity, human institutions attempting to manage or exploit that interaction for their own ends, and ordinary people caught between forces that treat their sovereignty as an inconvenience. The film does not frame the conflict in explicitly biblical terms, but the underlying architecture is recognizable to anyone who has studied how power has been exercised in the shadows since the earliest recorded civilizations.

I do not expect everyone who sees Disclosure Day to come away with the same set of questions I have. Some will enjoy it as a well-crafted thriller with strong performances and a dose of wonder. Others will criticize it for not going far enough in one direction or for going too far in another. That is as it should be. The measure of the film is not whether it converts every viewer into a full-time researcher of UAP phenomena or declassified mind-control programs. The measure is whether it succeeds in getting people who would otherwise never discuss these things to talk about them inside their own sovereign circles. On that score, I think it succeeds more than its early reviews suggest. The conversations it provokes are the point. The spectacle is secondary.

I hope the film does well at the box office. I hope it reaches enough people that the questions it raises cannot be easily contained or dismissed. I hope it encourages more artists to explore the territory where advanced technology, ancient mysteries, and the enduring human hunger for sovereignty intersect. And I hope that viewers who find themselves unsettled by the mind-control elements will take the time to look into the real historical record—the MKUltra documents, the Stargate files, the congressional UAP hearings, the whistleblower testimony—rather than treating the film as pure fantasy. The line between what has been documented and what remains speculative is narrower than most people assume.

In the end, Disclosure Day is not primarily about aliens. It is about us. It is about what happens to a species that has spent generations being told it is alone in the universe, only to discover that the institutions it trusted to tell the truth have been managing a much larger reality behind the curtain. It is about what happens when those same institutions acquire tools that can reach inside the last private space—the space between a person’s ears—and begin to edit what that person believes, remembers, and chooses. It is about whether faith, conscience, and the stubborn refusal to be rewritten can still function as firewalls when the technology of control has advanced beyond anything the framers of our Constitution could have imagined. Those are the questions worth carrying out of the theater and into the conversations that happen in the places we still control. Those are the questions that will determine whether disclosure, when it finally comes in full, leads to greater freedom or to a more sophisticated form of captivity.

Footnotes

I have no interest in putting a cap on that conversation either. The film has done its job if it leaves people talking long after the popcorn is gone. My own contribution is to point out that the most important part of Disclosure Day is not the part everybody is already discussing. It is the part that touches the deepest fear and the deepest hope we carry as human beings: the fear that our minds are not our own, and the hope that something in us remains beyond the reach of any program, any device, or any agenda that would turn us into instruments rather than sovereign souls. That hope is what makes the film worth seeing, and worth arguing about, for a long time to come.

[1] Project MKUltra was a covert CIA program focused on mind control and behavioral modification that officially ran from 1953 until its termination in the early 1970s. The Church Committee hearings of 1975 brought many of its activities into public view. See John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (New York: Times Books, 1979).

[2] Remote viewing research received significant government funding beginning in the early 1970s at Stanford Research Institute under CIA and later DIA sponsorship. The Stargate Project operated from approximately 1978 to 1995. See Joseph McMoneagle, Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2000); and the declassified CIA documents available through the agency’s reading room.

[3] In July 2023, former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch testified before Congress that the U.S. government had operated a multi-decade crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program involving non-human craft and recovered “non-human biologics.” He has since elaborated that the government is aware of several distinct kinds of non-human life forms. See the official transcript of the July 26, 2023, hearing before the House Oversight Committee, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs; and Luis Elizondo, Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UAP (New York: William Morrow, 2024).

[4] Spielberg has long explored themes of consciousness, communication across boundaries, and the loss or recovery of personal agency. In Always (1990), a deceased pilot communicates with the living through intermediaries and grapples with unfinished emotional business. In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the alien’s presence both disrupts and ultimately restores family bonds fractured by divorce. Catch Me If You Can (2002) examines manipulation, identity, and the ability of a skilled individual to impose his will on institutional systems. Disclosure Day continues and darkens these threads by introducing technologies that can directly edit loyalty and memory.

[5] The concept of multiple non-human species or “federations” appears across decades of UAP research literature, from Jacques Vallée’s Passport to Magonia (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969) to more recent compilations of whistleblower and contactee testimony. While precise numbers remain contested, the existence of morphological diversity in reported encounters is a consistent thread.

[6] The author’s service as foreman of a Butler County, Ohio, grand jury provided direct exposure to institutional dynamics, two-tiered justice, and the human costs of systemic failures. These experiences inform the analysis of larger structures of unaccountable power.

[7] The author’s background in aerospace program management and long-standing interest in black-budget activities provide additional context for interpreting the role of private contractors in managing sensitive technologies and information. See also the author’s forthcoming book, The Politics of Heaven, which examines biblical and historical patterns of interaction between humanity and non-human intelligences.

[8] The beetle metaphor draws from direct observation during family camping and model rocketry activities with the author’s grandson. The contrast between limited insect autonomy and human technological vulnerability serves as a recurring image for the asymmetry of power when advanced intelligences interact with less advanced ones.

[9] Hillary Clinton’s public defenses of her husband during the 1990s scandals frequently emphasized themes of personal control and boundaries. The film’s exploration of mental sovereignty resonates with those older rhetorical claims about locked doors and complete self-knowledge.

[10] The evolution of surveillance and influence technologies from mid-century mind-control experiments to contemporary digital systems (facial recognition, always-on microphones, algorithmic curation of information) represents a continuous thread rather than a clean break. Smartphones and AI interfaces can be understood as distributed, voluntary extensions of earlier aspirations for remote influence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR FURTHER READING

Primary Sources and Government Documents

•  Church Committee. Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. U.S. Senate, 1975–1976.

•  Central Intelligence Agency. Declassified MKUltra and Stargate Project documents. Available through the CIA Reading Room.

•  U.S. House of Representatives. Hearing on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, July 26, 2023. Official transcript.

•  Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UAP. New York: William Morrow, 2024.

•  Grusch, David. Congressional testimony and subsequent public statements, 2023–2026.

Historical and Analytical Works on Mind Control and Remote Viewing

•  Marks, John D. The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control. New York: Times Books, 1979.

•  McMoneagle, Joseph. Remote Viewing Secrets: A Handbook. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2000.

•  Swann, Ingo. Natural ESP: A Layman’s Guide to Unlocking the Extra-Sensory Power of Your Mind. New York: Bantam, 1987.

•  Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. New York: Dell, 1997.

UAP and Non-Human Intelligence Research

•  Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

•  Kean, Leslie. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Harmony Books, 2010.

•  Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State (two volumes). Rochester, NY: Keyhole Publishing, 2000–2009.

•  Imbrogno, Philip J. Interdimensional Universe: The New Science of UFOs, Paranormal Phenomena and Otherdimensional Beings. Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2010.

Biblical, Archaeological, and Spiritual Warfare Context

•  The Book of Enoch. Translated by R. H. Charles. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1912. (Multiple modern editions available.)

•  Biblical Archaeology Review. Various issues, 1975–present. (The author has been a subscriber since childhood.)

•  Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural World of the Bible. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming 2027). Manuscript in circulation among select readers.

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: Winning Strategies from the American West. (Earlier work establishing the author’s philosophical framework of sovereignty and will.)

Spielberg Filmography and Thematic Studies

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Big Muskie Bucket, The Wilds, and the Heart of American Energy Innovation

I just got back from a family trip that turned into one of those unexpected journeys where you set out thinking one thing and come away with something far deeper. We headed out to The Wilds in southeastern Ohio, that remarkable conservation center and safari-style wildlife park built on what used to be strip-mined land. I love zoos and conservation efforts in the right way—the kind that actually preserves species and land while recognizing that humans are part of the picture, not some parasitic afterthought. What I didn’t fully expect was how a side trip just south of there to see the remnants of the Big Muskie would crystallize so many thoughts I’ve been carrying about energy, innovation, capitalism, and the way the political left has twisted conservation into something that often works against human flourishing.

The Wilds sits on nearly ten thousand acres of reclaimed surface-mined land in Muskingum County, near Cumberland. It opened to the public in 1994 after the Central Ohio Coal Company, a subsidiary of American Electric Power (AEP), donated over 9,000 acres to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals. That gift, combined with the reclamation work already underway, transformed what had been an industrial extraction site into one of North America’s largest conservation centers. We stayed right there at the new Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds—beautiful sites on that same land that once fed coal into the power grid. From the campground, you can head into the park proper and experience open-air safaris rolling through habitats where giraffes, rhinoceroses, cheetahs, and other species roam across rolling terrain that, in its own way, echoes the African Serengeti. The landscape doesn’t look like the steep Allegheny foothills that were here before mining; the stripping and reclamation flattened and reshaped sections into wide, grassy vistas perfect for large herbivores. It’s not the exact ecology that existed pre-mining, but it’s productive, beautiful, and teeming with life in ways that serve conservation science and education every single day.

One afternoon, we drove the short distance south to Miner’s Memorial Park to see the Big Muskie bucket—the last major remnant of what was once the largest dragline excavator ever built. Standing there, walking inside that colossal bucket, touching the steel that once clawed through hundreds of feet of overburden, you can’t help but feel the scale of human ingenuity. The machine itself, officially a Bucyrus-Erie 4250-W, stood nearly twenty-two stories tall, weighed around thirteen and a half thousand tons, and swung a 220-cubic-yard bucket capable of lifting 325 tons of earth and rock in a single bite. The bucket alone is the size of a twelve-car garage or easily two full-size buses side by side. When it operated from 1969 to 1991, Big Muskie moved more than 483 million cubic yards of material, revealing high-sulfur coal seams that powered Ohio homes, industries, and the broader grid through plants like the Muskingum River Generating Station. It walked on massive shoes, its boom stretching over three hundred feet, built on site because nothing that big could be transported whole. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-four days a year, it did the work that surface mining made possible—safer in many respects than sending men deep underground into the old room-and-pillar mines, and efficient enough to supply the energy that built modern Ohio.

I grew up in the seventies and eighties, hearing the news coverage of strip mining in Ohio. It was always framed as an environmental catastrophe—radical voices and mainstream outlets alike talking about the “rape of the land,” the destruction of precious topsoil, acid mine drainage polluting streams, and corporate greed tearing up the earth for profit. Central Ohio was a focal point of that conversation. You couldn’t miss it. The narrative was clear: this was primitive, destructive, something that enlightened environmental regulation would eventually rein in and correct. And regulation did come—the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 imposed new standards for contouring, topsoil replacement, and revegetation. I’m not against sensible environmental protections. What concerns me is when those protections become a vehicle for anti-capitalist ideology that ignores the human benefits of energy production and pretends that the companies doing the actual work weren’t already innovating reclamation methods long before politicians and bureaucrats showed up to take credit or impose penalties.

Because here’s what you see when you stand at the Big Muskie bucket and then drive back to The Wilds: the power company that operated the machine also owned vast stretches of the land. They extracted the coal—formed over three hundred million years in ancient swamps and forests—and turned it into usable energy that lit homes, ran factories, and powered the machines that built the modern world. Then they participated in turning the worked-out land into something new and valuable. The Wilds exists in large part because of that private-sector decision to donate thousands of acres rather than walk away or fight endless legal battles. The reclamation wasn’t just compliance; it became an opportunity. What had been stripped to fuel progress was reshaped into a world-class center for wildlife conservation, research, and public education. You can sit at the Overlook Cafe or Terrace Grill at The Wilds, look out over the valley at giraffes and rhinos moving through grasslands that mining and reclamation made possible, and eat a good meal with running water and modern conveniences while the animals graze below. Try doing that with a picnic basket on raw, unrestored ground in the middle of nowhere and tell me which approach actually serves both people and wildlife better.

That contrast hit me hard. The same companies the political left loves to demonize as destroyers of the planet were the ones who made The Wilds possible. AEP’s Central Ohio Coal Company didn’t just comply with later regulations; they were already engaged in preservation and restoration efforts. The environmental movement often attaches itself to these stories after the fact, claiming moral victory while ignoring that the capital, the engineering, and the willingness to take risks came from the private sector. Without the coal extraction that powered Ohio’s growth, without the wealth created by that enterprise, there would have been far less capacity to fund or even imagine large-scale conservation projects like this one. It’s the classic pattern: innovators and producers do the hard work, create the surplus, and then the critics arrive to regulate, tax, and re-narrate history as a story of exploitation that only enlightened government could fix.

I thought about that same dynamic when we talk about today’s energy battles, particularly around nuclear power in Ohio. The two plants—Davis-Besse near Toledo and Perry near Cleveland—have long been critical to the state’s grid. I’ve heard the numbers bandied about; depending on the year and how you count, they contribute a substantial share of reliable baseload power, something in the range of ten to perhaps fifteen percent or more of Ohio’s electricity at times, and historically more when coal was dominant. The exact percentage varies in conversation, but the point is that they matter enormously for grid stability. In a state where natural gas now supplies roughly half or more of generation and coal has fallen sharply from its peak, nuclear provides the steady, high-capacity-factor power that intermittent sources can’t match. Yet for years we’ve watched political attacks from the Obama and Biden eras—subsidies fights, regulatory pressure, public narratives framing nuclear as dangerous or unnecessary—while the same voices rarely offer a credible, scalable replacement that keeps the lights on and the economy growing. It’s the Big Muskie story all over again: paint the producers as villains, ignore the benefits ordinary people receive every time they flip a switch or charge a device, and push policies that ultimately raise costs or reduce reliability for everyone, especially working families.

You see the same pattern in how the left approaches energy restriction as a tool of control. Whether it’s coal in the seventies or nuclear today, the rhetoric is that these things are existential threats to the planet and that only by limiting human access to abundant, affordable energy can we “save” the Earth. But energy is what lifts the burden of labor from human beings. A person hauling water by hand all day isn’t freer or more virtuous than one who turns a tap and uses the saved time to build, create, or rest. Electricity powers the data centers, training the AI models that will transform medicine, logistics, and discovery. It powers the factories, hospitals, schools, and farms that feed billions. The notion that we should all retreat to some primitive campfire existence—sitting around telling stories about pagan gods while the productive capacity of civilization withers—isn’t conservation; it’s a recipe for poverty and stagnation dressed up as virtue. The environmental movement has deep strains of this anti-human thinking, sometimes explicit in population-control rhetoric or degrowth economics that treat human ingenuity and consumption as the problem rather than the solution.

Standing inside that Big Muskie bucket puts it in perspective. That machine represented the best engineering of its era applied to the problem of extracting energy from the ground efficiently and at scale. It wasn’t pretty. It changed the landscape. But it also delivered the energy that made post-war Ohio prosperous, that kept factories running, that let families in Middletown and across the state live with lights, refrigeration, and opportunity their grandparents could only dream of. The coal it uncovered took three hundred million years to form; we used it in decades to build a civilization. Then the same enterprise that did the extracting turned around and helped create The Wilds on the worked land. That’s not destruction followed by cosmetic repair. That’s productive use followed by genuine restoration and the creation of new value. It’s what real conservation looks like when it’s driven by people who understand both the land and the ledger.

I kept coming back to the parallel with the fight over slavery in this country. Republicans led the effort to abolish it, at enormous cost in blood and treasure, while many Democrats and the broader establishment either defended the institution or dragged their feet. After the war, it was Republicans who pushed the early civil rights amendments and enforcement. Yet somewhere along the line, the narrative flipped, and today the party that fought to end slavery is often painted as the problem while the party whose members founded the KKK and enforced Jim Crow for generations gets to claim the moral high ground on race. The pattern repeats with energy and conservation. The companies and workers who built the power grid, engineered machines like Big Muskie, extracted the resources that industrialized the nation, and then reclaimed the land for new uses—these are treated as villains. The activists and politicians who arrived later, often with no skin in the game and plenty of opportunity for moral posturing, get to define “environmentalism” as whatever restricts the producers. It’s the same rhetorical capture, and it serves the same underlying goal: concentrating power in institutions that claim to speak for the Earth while actually limiting human potential.

At The Wilds, you see the better path. Capital enterprise created the wealth and the technology. It extracted the resource that powered progress. It then donated the land and supported the transformation into a living classroom for conservation science. The restaurant with the view, the safari vehicles, the research programs, the campground where families like mine can stay on the very ground that once fed coal into the grid—all of it exists because someone took the risk, did the work, made the profit, and then chose to leave the place better in meaningful ways. The strip mining didn’t “destroy” the land in any permanent sense; it changed it, and human ingenuity changed it again into something that now supports species that never lived here naturally in these numbers. That’s the story of civilization itself: we impose order and purpose on raw nature, we extract what we need to thrive, and when we’re at our best, we restore and improve rather than consume and abandon.

I think about my own work and the themes in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business—the idea that you impose your will on circumstances rather than waiting for perfect conditions, that resilience and disciplined action turn challenges into advantages. The men who ran Big Muskie didn’t have the luxury of modern environmental impact statements or endless public comment periods. They had a job to do: get the coal out safely and efficiently to keep the power flowing. They did it with machines that still boggle the mind. Then the next generation of the same enterprise looked at the worked land and saw not a scar but an opportunity for something new. That’s the gunfighter spirit applied to energy and land use. You don’t retreat from the necessary work because critics call it ugly. You do it well, you do it responsibly within reason, and you leave the place positioned for the next chapter.

Visiting both sites in the same trip—the living conservation success at The Wilds and the monumental tool that helped create the conditions for it—ought to be required for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion about energy policy in this country. You can’t stand inside that bucket, read the history of how much earth it moved and how much power it ultimately enabled, then walk the safari trails where rhinos and giraffes now graze on reclaimed ground, and still believe the simple story that extraction equals destruction and only government regulators plus activists equal salvation. The truth is more interesting and more hopeful. Human beings using reason, capital, and engineering solved the problem of energy scarcity that had kept our ancestors poor and short-lived. Along the way, we made mistakes, as every generation does. But we also built the surplus that lets us fund conservation at scales that previous societies could never have imagined. The Wilds is proof of that. The Big Muskie bucket is proof of the tool that made part of it possible.

We’re in a moment right now where the same arguments are playing out over nuclear power, over natural gas development, over any serious attempt to expand reliable generation to meet the exploding demands of AI data centers and electrification. The political left still reaches for the same rhetorical weapons: portray the producers as greedy or reckless, emphasize risks while downplaying benefits, offer no realistic replacement that maintains or increases living standards, and treat any expansion of human productive capacity as inherently suspect. It’s the Big Muskie fight with better public relations. The companies that actually keep the grid running—whether legacy coal operators that have reclaimed land or the nuclear fleet that provides steady power—are doing the real work. The activists protesting outside are often performing for an audience that has never had to keep the lights on for millions of people or balance a multi-billion-dollar capital investment against regulatory uncertainty.

I came away from this trip more convinced than ever that the path forward isn’t to demonize the enterprises that built our energy foundation or to pretend that conservation requires halting human progress. It’s to recognize that the best conservation often flows from the same innovative, risk-taking, profit-seeking institutions that extract resources productively in the first place. The Wilds wouldn’t exist without the coal mining that preceded it. The power that lets us enjoy air-conditioned homes, smartphones, and yes, even the electric vehicles some environmentalists champion, comes from somewhere. Right now, a significant portion of that, somewhere in Ohio, includes the steady output of our nuclear plants. We should be building more of that kind of reliable, high-density energy, not tearing it down under the guise of protecting a planet that has survived far worse than human industry and will continue long after our current debates are forgotten.

If you ever find yourself in southeastern Ohio, do what we did. Spend a few days at Hellbender Campground or one of the other lodging options at The Wilds. Take the open-air safari and watch animals that have no business being in Ohio thriving on land that mining and reclamation made suitable for them. Then drive south a short way to Miner’s Memorial Park and stand inside the Big Muskie bucket. Touch the steel. Imagine the machine walking across the landscape, the bucket biting into the earth, the coal coming out to feed the boilers that kept the grid alive. Talk to the exhibits about the workers who ran it and the land that came after. Then go back to The Wilds and have lunch at the overlook with a view of the valley. You’ll see, as I did, that the story of energy in America isn’t a simple morality play of villains and heroes. It’s the story of human beings using their minds and their tools to turn raw materials into civilization, and then, at our best, using the surplus to restore and improve what we touched.

That trip reminded me why I keep returning to these themes in my writing and podcast. The battles over energy, over land use, over what counts as “conservation”—they’re never just about science or engineering. They’re about whether we believe human beings have the right and the capacity to shape the world productively, or whether we accept a vision that treats us as a problem to be managed and reduced. The Big Muskie and The Wilds together make the case for the former. They show what free people and free enterprise can accomplish when they’re allowed to work, to risk, to profit, and to give back in ways that actually endure. Everything else is commentary.

If you’ve read The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, you know the mindset I’m talking about—imposing order and purpose on circumstances rather than surrendering to them. That’s what built the machine, that’s what powered the grid, and that’s what turned a mined landscape into a living conservation success. We need more of that spirit, not less. The age of disclosure is here, and understanding the politics of heaven—the deeper forces behind the attacks on human energy and human life—matters more than ever. But for today, see the bucket and the park. Stand where the work was done and where the restoration happened. You’ll come away with a clearer head and a stronger conviction that the future belongs to those who build, not those who merely protest.

Footnotes

1.  Specifications and operational history of Big Muskie drawn from contemporary engineering records and historical summaries maintained by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at Miner’s Memorial Park.

2.  Details on the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company (AEP subsidiary) to the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals and the subsequent development of The Wilds come from the official history published on thewilds.org.

3.  Ohio electricity generation mix data for recent years (natural gas dominant at approximately 50-59%, coal around 20-22%, nuclear from the two plants contributing roughly 10-13% of net generation) sourced from the U.S. Energy Information Administration state analysis and related reports covering the 2024-2026 periods.

4.  Bucket capacity, machine weight, boom length, and total material moved by Big Muskie confirmed across multiple engineering and historical sources, including Bucyrus-Erie records and Ohio historical markers.

5.  Description of current visitor experience at the Big Muskie bucket exhibit, including ability to stand inside the 220-cubic-yard bucket, based on Ohio State Parks and Ohio DNR public information as of 2025-2026.

6.  Information on Hellbender RV Campground at The Wilds, its location on reclaimed land, and amenities, including safari discounts, from the official The Wilds website and 2025-2026 opening announcements.

7.  Dining options at The Wilds (Overlook Cafe / Terrace Grill) with views over animal habitats confirmed via official site descriptions of food service and visitor experiences.

8.  Broader context on surface mining reclamation practices pre- and post-1977 SMCRA, and the role of private land donation in creating large conservation areas, drawn from Ohio coal industry historical analyses and The Wilds timeline.

9.  Recent developments regarding power purchase agreements for Ohio nuclear plants (Davis-Besse and Perry) supporting AI/data center demand, including Meta agreements announced in 2026, reported in industry and local news sources.

10.  Philosophical and historical parallels regarding narratives around energy production, conservation, and political rhetoric are interpretive commentary grounded in the observable outcomes at the sites visited and long-term patterns in U.S. energy and environmental policy debates.

Bibliography

•  “Big Muskie.” Wikipedia. Accessed 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Muskie (overview of specifications, history, and connection to The Wilds).

•  Ohio Department of Natural Resources. “Miner’s Memorial Park & Big Muskie’s Bucket.” ohiodnr.gov. Detailed visitor information and historical markers on the machine and reclamation.

•  The Wilds. “History.” thewilds.org/history. Official timeline, including the land gift from Central Ohio Coal Company and the transformation of the mined land.

•  U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Ohio – State Energy Profile Analysis.” eia.gov/states/OH/analysis. 2024-2026 data on electricity generation mix, nuclear contribution, natural gas, and coal shares.

•  Ohio State Parks / Ohio DNR. Social media and site posts regarding the Big Muskie bucket as a tourist attraction and an engineering landmark (2025).

•  The Wilds. “Hellbender RV Campground.” thewilds.org/hellbender-rv-campground. Details on the new campground on reclaimed land and visitor offerings.

•  The Wilds. “Food and Shopping.” thewilds.org/food-and-shops. Descriptions of Overlook Cafe and Terrace Grill with habitat views.

•  Various contemporary reports on AEP / Central Ohio Coal Company operations and reclamation achievements, including historical coal industry studies from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.

•  Industry announcements regarding Vistra / Energy Harbor nuclear plants and 2026 power purchase agreements with Meta for Ohio nuclear output supporting data centers.

•  Historical context on Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) of 1977 and its implementation in Ohio coal regions, drawn from state and federal regulatory histories.

This essay reflects my direct observations from the family trip, historical research, and long-standing convictions about energy, innovation, and the proper relationship between human enterprise and conservation. The views expressed are my own, grounded in what I saw on the ground and in what the record shows actually works.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Gunfighter’s Ethos: Living by a measure that isn’t commonly understood, but is very highly sought after

I wrote The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business back in 2021 because I had grown weary of hearing about Japanese warrior codes every time someone discussed Lean manufacturing or the Toyota Production System.  Those approaches contain real value—Toyota’s emphasis on eliminating waste, Just-in-Time production, and continuous improvement through Kaizen has influenced industries worldwide. But as an American who spent decades in manufacturing and aerospace, applying those lessons while teaching teams how to solve problems on the fly, I felt our culture needed its own framework. We have our own warrior tradition, one rooted in self-reliance, quick decision-making under pressure, and the willingness to face risk head-on. That is the spirit of the gunfighter—the fast-draw competitor who practices until shooting from the hip becomes an expression of hard-won skill and confidence rather than recklessness. 

The book is not aimed at legacy corporations seeking incremental tweaks to maintain the status quo. It is for entrepreneurs and individuals who want to build something real in a world full of obstacles. I drew heavily from the sport of fast draw, which I have long seen as a perfect metaphor for high-stakes business: when you are truly skilled, you can act decisively and accurately without hesitation. Chapters explore placing bets wisely, managing risk, and understanding that real success often means operating as a “ghost”—staying agile and unencumbered by titles, corner offices, or attachments that others can target in an effort to gain control over you.

This year, 2026, has brought several moments that reminded me why the message matters. People have approached me in everyday places like Costco in Liberty Township—recognizing me from the blog, videos, or the book itself. They want to talk, ask for a signature, or share how the ideas resonated with them. One particularly memorable encounter came from the CEO of a large company a few states away who had read the book and flew in specifically to find me. He made a substantial offer: come consult for several months, coach his workforce on the gunfighter mindset, and help reshape the culture. It was the kind of money that would make most people in my position jump with enthusiasm. I said no.

I critique consultants throughout the book, and I stand by that. Not because every single one is worthless, but because too many function as the “dandies” or “bounty hunters” in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven—profiting from the legends and hard work of others without ever stepping into the real fight themselves.  The gunfighters are the ones who face the target, put their lives or reputations on the line, and deliver results. I have always tried to live as the latter. Turning down that opportunity was not about rejecting money; it was about staying consistent with the principles I laid out. I am not racing to stuff a retirement account before time runs out. I have a different measure of success, one shaped by decades of experience and a marriage built on integrity.

That integrity traces back to a moment early in my relationship with my wife, nearly forty years ago. I was selling cars as a young man—good at it, making strong commissions in a cutthroat environment. One Saturday, I had an older, retired customer ready to buy a truck, paying $5,000 over sticker price, all cash. The finance department balked at the markup, but the sales manager pushed me to close it anyway. I had the man’s keys, had built genuine trust over hours of conversation, and convinced him to walk across the street to withdraw the cash. My future wife showed up at the lot right as I was finishing the deal. I thought she would be impressed by the big sale. Instead, she was deeply upset that I had taken advantage of an honest man. She came from a different background—modeling, country club circles—and had seen plenty of “successful” men who measured life by mansions, boats, and flashy deals. She wanted none of it. She told me it was the Corvette I was about to buy or her; she would not marry someone who operated that way. I walked the deal back, took the ethical path, and my commission was cut in half. I left that job soon after. We have been married ever since, and that decision remains one of the best of my life. It taught me that real leverage comes from living in a way your spouse and family can respect—not from cornering every last dollar or using dollars to gain control of people.

These same values run through the book and my daily work. I have encountered “safety tyrants” and sandbaggers in manufacturing facilities—people who hide behind compliance rules, slow output to protect their own power or laziness, and attack anyone who pushes for genuine improvement.  I have seen engineers and managers who opposed efficiency gains, only for the pressure of their own schemes to catch up with them later. I do not celebrate their misfortunes, but I also do not mourn those who tried to destroy my teams or me. When you face real opposition in business—or life—you square your shoulders like Andrew Jackson in his duels or Theodore Roosevelt finishing a speech with a bullet in his chest.  You do not cry over the grave of someone who would have put you in one. Forgiveness in the theological sense is between them and God; my job is to defend what matters and keep moving forward.

This mindset is not just for business. It applies to politics, culture, and how we build any healthy organization or society. Capitalism, properly understood, rewards those willing to initiate, risk, and deliver—not the parasites who live off others’ efforts. I see parallels in today’s corporate world and broader culture: too much fear disguised as safety, too many incentives to sandbag rather than excel. SpaceX stands out as a counterexample—lean, confident, and willing to accept calculated risk in pursuit of big goals. That spirit is what America’s economy needs more of in the years ahead, especially as entrepreneurs step up in the current environment.

I am not closed to opportunities, and I am grateful when people find value in the work. Some have bought copies in bulk to share with their teams. The book was written so readers can engage with the ideas independently—the bullet-point summaries at the end of each chapter help reinforce the key lessons without needing me in the room. Royalties still arrive occasionally, and my wife and I enjoy turning a good check into a nice dinner. That feels honest and sustainable. Turning a large consulting gig into another form of selling out would betray the gunfighter ethos I wrote about.

The stories and principles in The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business come from real experience—car lots, stamping plants, aerospace programs, and the hard lessons learned alongside a supportive wife who keeps me honest. They are meant for those with the guts to start companies, face opposition, and build something lasting. If you have not read it, I believe you will find it useful, whether for your own ventures or simply understanding how to navigate a world full of safety tyrants and bounty hunters. The gunfighter spirit is not about recklessness; it is about skill, ethics, and the courage to act when others hide behind rules. That is the skeleton key I aimed to offer to Western civilization and American enterprise. I still carry it with me every day and live by every word.  Many are finding those words very valuable, and I’m glad to hear it.  Thanks for the opportunities.  But to me, opportunities are measured in more than just money, even though this offer was for a lot of it.  The gunfighter still has to take bullets and to bite bullets, and be willing to deliver them. 

Footnotes

[^1]: For deeper context on the Toyota Production System and its philosophical roots, see the official Toyota documentation and historical analyses of Lean principles.

[^2]: The fast-draw elements tie directly into the book’s core metaphor for high-skill, decisive action in business.

[^3]: “Ghosting it” is a recurring theme in the book, emphasizing agility over visible power structures that invite opposition.

[^4]: Unforgiven (1992) provides a sharp distinction between authentic gunfighters and those who profit from their stories.

[^5]: Jackson’s duels and Roosevelt’s resilience under fire illustrate the willingness to absorb damage and continue the fight—qualities essential in competitive environments.

[^6]: Safety culture critiques often highlight tensions between compliance and production pressures; see industry analyses on risk-taking and over-normalization of caution.

[^7]: These personal stories informed multiple chapters on ethics, decision-making under pressure, and long-term leverage through integrity.

[^8]: References to SpaceX reflect ongoing observations of lean, risk-tolerant innovation versus traditional corporate caution.

Bibliography

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business: A Skeleton Key to Western Civilization. Liberty Hill Publishing, 2021. (Core text referenced throughout.)

Ohno, Taiichi. Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Productivity Press, 1988.

Liker, Jeffrey K. The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer. McGraw-Hill, 2004.

Womack, James P., Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos. The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production. Free Press, 1990.

Eastwood, Clint, dir. Unforgiven. Warner Bros. Pictures, 1992.

Brands, H.W. Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times. Anchor Books, 2006.

Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. Random House, 2001.

Additional sources:

•  Toyota Motor Corporation official materials on the Toyota Production System and Kaizen philosophy.

•  Industry reports and critiques on safety culture in manufacturing (e.g., discussions of production vs. compliance tensions).

•  Personal observations from decades in aerospace, manufacturing leadership, and entrepreneurial consulting scenarios.

•  Cross-references to forthcoming work, The Politics of Heaven, for broader philosophical and historical context on spiritual warfare, ethics, and societal structures.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Wilds: Where conservation and capitalism come together in a great way

I measure the quality of an adventure by the condition of the vehicle that carries you into it. If you are rolling down the road in something with missing pieces of its floor and you catch glimpses of the pavement or dirt track passing beneath your feet, you know you are in for something memorable. That was precisely the case on our recent trip to The Wilds in central Ohio, just an easy drive east of Columbus. My wife and I had been talking about visiting for years, and this time, coming back from Washington, D.C., we finally made the turn off I-70 near Zanesville and committed to it properly. We brought the RV, stayed at the Hellbender RV site right on the property, and spent several days soaking it all in. It was the kind of trip that leaves you with new stickers on the rig, fresh stories, and a renewed appreciation for what conservation, done right, can look like when paired with good old-fashioned American ingenuity and a touch of showmanship.

The Wilds sits on nearly ten thousand acres of reclaimed surface-mined land in southeastern Muskingum County, not far from Cumberland. What was once a working coal mine landscape has been transformed into one of the largest conservation centers in the world, complete with open-range pastures that feel more like the African Serengeti or a Hollywood backlot than anything you expect to find in Ohio. The place opened to the public in 1994 after years of planning that stretched back to the late 1970s. Community leaders, including figures connected to the Columbus Zoo, saw an opportunity in the reclaimed land that the Central Ohio Coal Company eventually gifted for this purpose. It was incorporated as the International Center for the Preservation of Wild Animals, and its vision was always bigger than that of a traditional zoo. They wanted science, education, and immersive experiences that would let people connect with threatened and endangered species in something closer to their natural habitat.

Strip mining had reshaped southeast Ohio for decades, beginning in earnest in the 1930s as surface methods replaced older underground operations. The environmental footprint was significant—hillsides altered, vegetation stripped, water patterns changed—but reclamation efforts, supported by state laws and industry responsibility, eventually turned scarred land into something new. The Wilds represents one of the more ambitious and successful examples of that repurposing. Instead of letting the post-mining landscape sit idle or be developed in conventional ways, visionary partners turned it into a living laboratory and a public attraction. The economic story of the region shifted along with it. What had been a mining-dependent area gained new engines in tourism, education, and conservation work. Studies have shown that The Wilds generates millions in regional economic impact through visitor spending, jobs, and ripple effects on local restaurants, lodging, and services.

We pulled into the Hellbender RV Campground, a well-appointed spot with full hookups, paved sites, and that quiet, open feel you get when the edges of a large preserve surround you. It is part of the larger Wilds complex, and they run a shuttle that takes guests several miles down to the main park entrance and overlooks. Staying on site made the whole experience seamless—no rushing back to a distant hotel, just easy mornings and evenings with the animals and the landscape close by. RV travel remains my favorite way to move around. You carry your own bed, your own kitchen, your own little corner of familiarity, no matter where the road takes you. This particular rig doubles as something of a rolling podcast studio these days, with stickers accumulating from every stop. The Hellbender site earned its own sticker on this trip.

Once you reach the heart of The Wilds, you climb up to the hilltop facilities that sit like command centers overlooking the vast reclaimed valley. There are two main overlook buildings. One serves as more of an entry and education center with a smaller gift shop and views toward certain pastures. The larger one houses a wonderful restaurant, a bigger gift shop, and an expansive deck that lets you look out over the rolling pastures, lakes, and the animals going about their day. It is an extraordinary vantage point. You can sit with a meal and watch giraffes, zebras, and rhinos moving across the landscape as if you were on an actual safari. The setting is deliberately Jurassic Park in its layout—open pastures divided by electric fencing and gates that open and close behind the tour vehicles. The original film came out in 1993; The Wilds opened in 1994. It is impossible not to notice the influence. The designers clearly loved the idea of giving visitors that sense of moving through a living, breathing ecosystem rather than peering at animals behind traditional bars or moats.

The open-air safari tours are the heart of the experience. They use converted school buses—real ones that once carried kids to class. The tops were cut off, sturdy canopies were added, and the vehicles were put back into service, carrying families and wildlife enthusiasts through the pastures. Some of them show their miles. The flooring has been patched in places, and you get the occasional reminder that these are working vehicles in a real environment. Rhinos have been known to show interest in the buses, and the tour guides handle it with calm professionalism. When I climbed aboard and saw the condition of the floor, I turned to the guide and said something to the effect that we were clearly in for a good adventure. My personal standard holds: the more primitive and honest the conveyance, the richer the experience tends to be. Polished, air-conditioned, perfectly sealed vehicles with seat belts and cup holders have their place, but they rarely deliver the same feeling of being out in it. These buses deliver that feeling in spades. They bounce along the dirt tracks; the canopy keeps the sun and occasional rain off; and you are close enough to the animals to feel their scale.

One ostrich in particular became a highlight for me. He had figured out ways to move between pastures, slipping behind buses or finding gaps in the fencing system’s logic. The guides were equal parts amused and impressed. He was not content to stay in one assigned area; he wanted to explore. It added a live, unpredictable element that made the whole tour feel more like a performance than a scripted event. Giraffes browsed near the vehicle at times, rhinos lumbered close enough to catch your attention, and the overall impression was of a landscape that had been returned to the animals while still allowing people to witness it responsibly. There are different tour levels available, including more adventurous “extra wild” options in smaller vehicles that get even closer to the action.

The restaurant and deck experience deserve their own mention. Whether you are there for a full day or just slipping away for a long lunch from Columbus or points beyond, the hilltop dining with the view is special. It reminds me of the Serengeti overlook at the Cincinnati Zoo, where you can eat and watch animals in a beautifully designed habitat. At The Wilds, the scale is larger and the setting more dramatic because of the reclaimed mining topography. You look out over what was once an industrial extraction site and see a thriving ecosystem instead. That contrast is powerful. Conservation and capitalism are not natural enemies when properly aligned. Zoos and conservation centers like this one create jobs, draw visitors who spend money locally, support research and breeding programs for endangered species, and give people—especially kids—a tangible reason to care about wildlife. I have been a member of the Cincinnati Zoo for years and have always admired their practical approach, including the solar panels in the western parking lot that provide shade and generate power for the facility. Smart, visible sustainability that improves the visitor experience rather than lecturing about it. The Wilds operates in the same spirit.

The economic transformation of the area is worth pausing over. Southeast Ohio’s mining heritage ran deep. Surface mining brought employment but also left lasting changes to the land. Reclamation projects, of which The Wilds is a standout example, turned liability into an asset. Tourism now brings steady visitor traffic—over 100,000 people in recent years—supporting direct employment at the park as well as indirect jobs in hospitality, retail, transportation, and services throughout Muskingum County and neighboring areas. Economic impact studies have quantified this in the millions of dollars annually, with wages circulating back into the local economy. For a rural region that needed diversification after the peak mining years, this kind of attraction provides something mining alone could not: a sustainable, year-round draw that also advances science and education. The partnership with the Columbus Zoo has strengthened operations, brought additional expertise, and helped The Wilds grow its programs in veterinary science, species recovery, and public engagement.

What struck me most during our stay was the low-stress environment the animals enjoy. No natural predators are hunting them here, and the care is clearly top-tier. The staff and volunteers radiate genuine dedication. I have always had a soft spot for people who devote their lives to science and study, whether they are archaeologists, zookeepers, or field biologists. Political differences fade when you see that kind of focused commitment to preserving something larger than any one ideology. Conservation is fundamentally conservative in the best sense of the word—it is about stewardship, responsibility to future generations, and not wasting what we have inherited. The Wilds embodies that.

We spent time on the trails as well, exploring some of the hiking and mountain biking paths that wind through parts of the property. There are lakes, birding areas, and butterfly habitats that add layers beyond the big safari animals. The whole place feels thoughtfully layered: the dramatic overlooks and restaurant for casual visitors, the immersive tours for those who want deeper engagement, the behind-the-scenes science for those who care about the long-term mission. It is accessible enough for a relaxed day trip yet substantial enough to justify an overnight or multi-day RV stay.

If you are anywhere in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, or even further, The Wilds is an easy and rewarding destination. From I-70, the exits near Zanesville put you on the right roads, and it is only about ten to fifteen miles south of the interstate. A Columbus resident could leave mid-morning, have lunch on the hilltop with that incredible view, take a safari tour, and be back in the afternoon if desired. For families with grandkids, it is a winner—the open-air buses, the animals moving freely in big spaces, the sense of adventure without leaving the state. For anyone who loves the Jurassic Park films, the design will make you smile at every turn. For people who appreciate well-run conservation that does not apologize for also being a business, it is a model worth studying.

I left The Wilds feeling genuinely enchanted. I arrived already sympathetic to zoos and conservation efforts; I departed even more convinced of their value. The combination of reclaimed industrial land, serious science, thoughtful visitor experiences, and economic revitalization for a rural corner of Ohio is something to celebrate. It is the kind of project that rewards curiosity and getting off the interstate for a closer look. The buses may be a little rough around the edges, the floors patched where rhinos or time have left their marks, but that only adds to the authenticity. By my measure, that is exactly how a good adventure should feel.

The Wilds proves that Ohio has its own version of the Serengeti, and it is every bit as worth experiencing as the big-name destinations farther away. Pack the RV, bring the family, or take the day trip. Either way, you will come away with stories, probably a few new stickers, and a deeper appreciation for what can happen when people decide to turn a challenge into an opportunity. In a busy world where days blend, places like this offer a genuine psychological reset. The animals thrive, the land heals in its own way, visitors leave inspired, and the local economy benefits. That is a winning formula I can get behind as a conservative who values both responsible stewardship and the kind of free enterprise that makes big ideas reality.

There is something deeply American about the story of The Wilds. It is not a government fiat handed down from on high. It is a partnership—private land donation, public support, zoo expertise, community vision, and relentless execution. The result is a place that educates without preaching, entertains without cheapening the mission, and generates real economic value while advancing genuine conservation. In an age when so many voices want to pit environmental concern against economic growth, The Wilds quietly demonstrates that the two can reinforce each other when done intelligently.

My own life has always included a deep respect for the natural world. I love taking the grandkids to places where they can see animals up close and learn respect for creation. Model rocketry, shooting sports, and outdoor adventures are part of how we build resilience and curiosity. The Wilds fits perfectly into that tradition. It is hands-on and memorable, leaving you wanting to know more about the science behind the scenes. The veterinary programs, breeding efforts for endangered species, and educational outreach all point to a serious institution that also knows how to deliver fun.

RV travel amplifies the whole thing. There is no better way to explore than to have your home on wheels. You wake up, eat in your own kitchen, step outside into the fresh air of a wildlife preserve, and plan the day around what the family wants to see. At Hellbender, the sites are spacious, the facilities modern, and the proximity to The Wilds itself makes everything convenient. We shuttled back and forth, spent time at the overlooks, took multiple tours, and still had plenty of time to relax at camp. It is the kind of trip that recharges the batteries before heading back into the demands of work and advocacy.

I have said many times that capitalism and conservation make excellent partners when the incentives are aligned. The Wilds is living proof. Tourists come for the experience, spend money that supports jobs and local businesses, and leave with a greater appreciation for wildlife that translates into broader support for preservation efforts. The science happening on site contributes to global knowledge about species recovery. It is not charity; it is value creation across multiple dimensions. That is the kind of outcome I like to see—practical, scalable, and rooted in reality rather than ideology.

If you have never been, put it on the calendar. Whether you are a lifelong Ohioan looking for a new day trip, a legislator in Columbus needing a break from session, or a family planning a longer RV adventure, The Wilds delivers. The drive is straightforward, the hospitality warm, the views stunning, and the adventures appropriately rugged. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In a state full of treasures, this one stands out as something special—a place where the past of hard work in mining has been redeemed into a future of wonder and learning. That is the kind of story worth telling, worth visiting, and worth supporting.

The experience also reinforced for me how important it is to share these places with the next generation. My grandchildren benefit from seeing real conservation in action rather than abstract lectures. They get to feel the bounce of the safari bus, watch a clever ostrich outsmart the system for a moment, and stand on the deck overlooking a landscape that was once written off. Those memories stick. They build wonder and respect. In my busy schedule of writing, podcasting, aerospace work, and political engagement, carving out these days is essential. They remind me why the fight for sound policy matters—so that places like The Wilds can continue to thrive and inspire.

I came away from this trip more convinced than ever that Ohio has world-class assets that too many people overlook. The Wilds is not just a zoo or a park; it is a testament to what reclamation, vision, and persistent effort can achieve. If you live within a few hours’ drive, do yourself a favor and go. Take the family, take a friend, or go solo and enjoy the quiet beauty of the overlooks. Eat at the restaurant with that million-dollar view. Ride the buses and embrace the adventure. You will leave better for it, just as we did. The Wilds is a jewel in central Ohio’s crown, and I am already looking forward to the next visit.

Footnotes

¹ The Wilds official history, thewilds.org/history. Details on the the 1970s vision, the land donation by Central Ohio Coal Company, the opening in 1994, and the Columbus Zoo partnership.

² Muskingum County and southeast Ohio strip mining history; surface mining expansion from the 1930s and subsequent reclamation efforts.

³ Ohio University Voinovich School economic impact study (2018 data): approximately $15 million regional impact, visitor numbers, jobs supported. Later figures show continued growth.

⁴ Personal observations and comparisons to Cincinnati Zoo experiences, including solar panel parking lot benefits.

⁵ Jurassic Park film influence on park design (1993 film, 1994 opening) and open-range safari concept.

⁶ Hellbender RV Campground details from The Wilds site: full hookups, shuttles, location on the preserve.

⁷ Broader context on conservation as stewardship and alignment with capitalist incentives for sustainable tourism.

Bibliography

•  The Wilds. Official website (thewilds.org): History, About, and Hellbender RV Campground pages.

•  Ohio University Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs. “Economic Impact of The Wilds” study (2018 and subsequent updates).

•  Columbus Zoo and Aquarium announcements on The Wilds partnership and 30-year milestones.

•  Various reports on southeast Ohio mining history and reclamation (Ohio Department of Natural Resources context).

•  News coverage from The Columbus Dispatch and local tourism sources on visitor experiences and economic contributions.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Space Economy: A changing manufacturing environment that will impact every human being on earth

I have been following the developments in space with a kind of quiet intensity these past few years, the way a man watches the weather when he knows his livelihood and his grandchildren’s future depend on understanding which way the wind is truly blowing. What is unfolding right now is not just another round of rocket launches or another billionaire’s side project. It is the opening of an entirely new economic frontier, one that will make the industrial revolutions of the past look small by comparison. The space economy is already measured in the hundreds of billions and is projected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035, with some projections running well beyond that once Starship-class vehicles make mass-to-orbit routine and cheap. 

I picked up Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars, the week it came out, the same week SpaceX went public in what is already being called one of the largest IPOs in history.  It is a little over three hundred pages, the kind of book a man can start after dinner and finish before midnight if he reads with purpose. I read it straight through in one of my evening sessions, the same way I have been working through four or five books a week for years. Zitelmann lays out the historical case plainly: government monopoly and central planning never scaled space the way private enterprise, property rights, and relentless iteration can. The book arrived at exactly the right moment, when the largest single company in the sector was opening itself to Main Street investors, and the manufacturing revolution at Boca Chica was becoming impossible to ignore. 

A day or so later, I watched the CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX. She has been there from the early days, the steady hand next to Elon Musk’s electricity. The conversation was one of those rare television moments where you could feel the ground shifting under the old assumptions. She spoke about manufacturing techniques the way a craftsman talks about a well-tuned machine, not the way most aerospace executives talk about compliance and risk matrices. She described facilities where the design-test-fly-fix loop runs so fast that what was not even contemplated on flight twelve is already being incorporated for the next ones. The flame trench and diverter that now channel the exhaust were not part of the original flight-one plan; necessity and data drove the change, and they made it happen without waiting for a decade of committee reviews. That is the new standard. 

I have spent my working life in aerospace. I know what the old way looked like from the inside: layers of requirements that accumulated over decades, change orders that took months or years to process, engineers who had learned to protect themselves by writing rules that nobody could later say they ignored. The result was predictable. Progress crawled. Costs ballooned. The same organizations that once put men on the Moon in less than a decade now need longer to decide whether a minor material substitution was acceptable. SpaceX has broken that pattern at Boca Chica and the new facilities rising at Cape Canaveral. They are building the equivalent of a Toyota Production System for orbital-class vehicles, only the takt time is measured in days and weeks instead of minutes on an assembly line. The goal is a Starship every couple of days, with longer-term ambitions of three per day once the infrastructure matures. They are already talking about monthly flights by the end of 2026 and then scaling from there. 

Marcus House has been documenting every step of this on his YouTube channel, week after week, with the kind of detail that lets a serious observer see the trend lines before the headlines catch up. Flight twelve went up a few weeks ago. Thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen are already in various stages of stacking and testing. The new Gigabay structures going up will give them dozens of parallel workstations. That is how you move from a handful of flights a year to something that starts to look like routine transportation. 

What Shotwell made clear, and what the book reinforces, is that this manufacturing revolution is not limited to rockets. Once you have a vehicle that can put serious mass into orbit on a regular cadence, everything downstream changes. Starlink already blankets the planet with broadband and is moving to direct-to-cell. The same architecture that delivers low-latency internet can host compute. There is serious discussion now about data centers in orbit, where power and cooling constraints on the ground become someone else’s problem and latency to certain users drops dramatically. Rare-earth mining on the Moon stops being science fiction once you have a bus that can go up and come back with tonnage instead of ounces. Orbital manufacturing, propellant depots, and eventually point-to-point Earth transport all become engineering problems rather than physics problems.

The economic implications are straightforward. Abundance at this scale does not require redistribution; it requires production. The old arguments that we must slow growth so that workers can be paid more or protected from robots miss the point entirely. I have seen what happens when labor is unreliable. I worked service jobs when I was younger and watched people spit in food because they were mad at a manager or distracted by drive-through drama. Robots do not have bad days, do not call off, and do not need a union to show up on time. They are tools. The people who own the tools, or who own shares in the companies that deploy them at scale, will see the returns. That is how wealth has always compounded when new production frontiers open. The difference this time is that the frontier is not a continent or an ocean; it is everything above the Kármán line and everything those vehicles can enable on Earth.

I hear the same tired pushback I heard in 2020 and 2021. Lock everything down, work from home, let the government manage the allocation of resources and risk. We tried that experiment on a national scale. Manufacturing and logistics do not run on Microsoft Teams. The people who insisted they did were usually the same voices that had spent years teaching children that socialism was just “being nice to each other” and that capitalism was exploitation. By 2035, those lessons will look as primitive as slide rules. The children who were told the economy is a fixed pie will watch robots and AI handle the drudge work while new markets in orbit and on the Moon create wealth that did not exist before. Some of them will have equity in the companies doing the work. Others will live in a world where goods and services that once required human hands at every step are cheaper and more reliable.

Here in Butler County, the evidence is already visible if you drive the roads I have driven for fifty years. The data centers going up around Trenton are not abstract. They are the physical plant that will run the AI models training the next generation of robots and processing the firehose of data coming down from Starlink constellations. I pass the old Armco site and the steel legacy of Middletown on one side and the Garver family farm on the other, stopping for fresh apple juice at their little store the way I have for years. The new infrastructure needs power, land, and water. Ohio has all three. The question is whether we welcome the growth that funds schools and roads and keeps farms viable, or let the same regulatory and cultural habits that slowed aerospace for decades strangle this opportunity, too. I know which side I am on.

My own life has been a long argument for the same principle that Shotwell and Musk are proving at industrial scale. Show up. Do the work. Iterate faster than the problem can change. I have worked sixteen- to twenty-two-hour days for most of my career, with power naps when the body demands them, because the alternative was letting someone else define the pace. That is the same mindset that turns a flame trench that was not on the original drawing into standard equipment on the next vehicle. It is also the mindset that lets a man in his later decades look at regenerative medicine, extended healthspan, and robot labor not as threats but as tools that let him keep contributing on his own terms, rather than being forced into some bureaucratic retirement at sixty-five or seventy.

By 2035, we will look back on 2026 the way we now look back on 1995. The phones will be different, the medicine will be different, the available jobs and the definition of retirement will be different, and a meaningful fraction of the global economy will trace its supply chains through orbit. The people who positioned themselves to own a piece of that expansion, whether through equity, skills, or simply the willingness to adapt, will have options their parents could not have imagined. The people who spent the intervening years trying to slow the world down to the speed of the least ambitious regulator will be wondering what happened.

I am not telling anyone to quit their job and day-trade Starship futures. I am saying pay attention. Watch the weekly updates from people like Marcus House who track every stack and every test fire without corporate spin. Read the book that puts the current moment in historical context. Catch the interviews with the people actually building the hardware, the ones who have to make payroll and hit launch windows while the rest of the world argues about pronouns and pronouns and pronouns. The manufacturing standard being set at Boca Chica is already leaking into every other industry that has to move metal and electrons at scale. The capital that flowed into the SpaceX IPO is the first wave of what will become a much larger reallocation toward anything that reduces the cost of moving mass or processing information above the atmosphere.

I have grandchildren. I want them to grow up in a country that still knows how to build things faster than it can regulate them into mediocrity. I want them to have the option to work because they choose to, not because a clock is ticking on their productive years. The space economy does not guarantee any of that on its own. Only the underlying philosophy does: that human beings thrive when they are free to try, free to fail, free to keep the fruits of success, and free to try the next morning again with better data. That is what I see when I watch a Starship climb out of Boca Chica and when I read a book that explains why private enterprise, not state planning, is the only force that has ever scaled a frontier this far.

The old arguments will keep coming. They always do. The people who benefit from scarcity and control will insist that abundance is dangerous, unfair, or bad for the planet. They will be wrong in the same way they were wrong about the internet, wrong about container shipping, wrong about every technology that lets ordinary people do more with less supervision. The evidence is already in the sky and on the factory floor in South Texas. It is also in the data centers rising in places like Trenton and in the quiet confidence of the engineers who have stopped asking permission to move fast.

I intend to keep watching, keep reading, and keep saying what I see. The next ten years are going to be loud. They are also going to be the most opportunity-rich stretch any generation has seen since the opening of the American West. The only question worth asking is whether we will meet that opportunity with the same spirit that built the first Starships, or let the people who have never built anything tell us it is moving too fast.

Footnotes

¹ McKinsey & Company / World Economic Forum, Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth (2024/2025 projections).

² Rainer Zitelmann, New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars (Skyhorse Publishing, June 9, 2026).

³ CNBC interview with Gwynne Shotwell, June 12, 2026 (Morgan Brennan).

⁴ SpaceX official updates and production reports, 2026.

⁵ Marcus House YouTube channel, weekly Starship and SpaceX updates (e.g., “SpaceX Just Revealed Its Biggest Plans Yet,” June 2026).

⁶ Walter Isaacson CNBC/Squawk Box discussion on SpaceX IPO and new space economy, June 2026.

⁷ Additional context from Zitelmann’s book and historical analysis of private vs. public space efforts.

⁸ Personal observations from aerospace executive experience and local Butler County development (Trenton data centers, Garver Farms area).

Bibliography

•  Zitelmann, Rainer. New Space Capitalism: The Entrepreneurial Path to the Stars. Skyhorse Publishing, 2026. (With contributions/foreword elements involving Newt Gingrich in related coverage.)

•  McKinsey & Company and World Economic Forum. Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth. 2025 report.

•  SpaceX official website updates on Starship production and facilities (Starbase/Boca Chica, 2026).

•  CNBC transcripts and videos: Gwynne Shotwell interview (June 12, 2026) and Walter Isaacson on SpaceX IPO.

•  Marcus House. YouTube channel – regular, in-depth coverage of Starship flights, manufacturing, and space-economy news.

•  Additional economic analyses from Payload Space, Morgan Stanley, and related space industry reports on trillion-dollar projections and manufacturing shifts.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

Election Integrity, the California Playbook, and the Cost of Letting Stupid Requirements Stand

I don’t want to be that guy who keeps circling back to the same uncomfortable subjects, but the truth doesn’t do me any favors by staying quiet. There was a very good episode of War Room the other day in which Rudy Giuliani spent about 45 minutes across three segments laying out exactly what happened in the Los Angeles mayoral race. Steve Hilton, a strong candidate who was performing well on election night, watched the lead evaporate as ballots kept being counted long after the polls closed. It wasn’t mysterious. It was the same playbook we saw in 2020, refined and deployed again in 2026 wherever the rules allow endless mail-in and provisional ballots with minimal traceability. I put the episode on my blog because people need to see it. When you have no voter ID requirement, same-day voting standards, and the ability to keep counting until the desired number appears, the cheese is already baked into the system. You’re not running a representative republic anymore. You’re running a managed installation process. 

Anybody who lived through 2020 knows what massive fraud looks like when it happens in plain sight. Ballots appearing in the middle of the night, unsecured drop boxes, signature verification that was loosened or ignored under the cover of COVID, and the endless counting in key jurisdictions until the numbers flipped. No one of any real consequence was ever punished for it. Rudy Giuliani stepped forward, paid an enormous personal price in wealth, reputation, and legal warfare, and they tried to destroy him. Trump, as a billionaire, could finance his way through the lawfare with good lawyers. Most people cannot. That is the chilling effect. Whistleblowers see what happens to Tina Peters in Colorado or the January 6 defendants and decide the personal cost is too high. The evidence gets suppressed or buried because the people who hold it are intimidated into silence. “Where is the proof?” the critics ask. The proof is in the ruined lives of those who brought it forward and in the jurisdictions where the rules were deliberately written to make fraud easy and detection hard.

Look at California under Gavin Newsom. The rules he and his allies put in place allow ballots to be counted well past election day. No strict voter ID. Mail-in ballots that arrive with weak chain-of-custody protections. Once the election-night numbers come in and the gap is known, the machinery can produce or process just enough additional ballots to close it. Steve Hilton was doing well enough that night, but the final certified results told a different story. This is not speculation. It is the observable pattern in places where the system is designed for it. In Ohio, we saw Amy Acton, as health director, literally cancel an election during COVID because it was supposedly too dangerous to vote in person. The same public health apparatus that pushed masks, lockdowns, and trust-the-science messaging while gain-of-function research funding flowed created the pretext for changing voting rules nationwide. Dr. Fauci’s emails, the lab-leak questions that were dismissed as conspiracy theories, and the lack of accountability afterward showed the credentialed class protecting its own. Rand Paul and others tried to hold them accountable through proper channels, but the Department of Justice under Biden was not interested. The push was always toward more centralized control and less verifiable elections. 

I have watched this up close in Ohio politics for years. Butler County, Lakota schools, commissioner races—the local battles matter because they are where the rubber meets the road for families. But the bigger picture is national. Republicans who still carry water for the old institutional order—McConnell holdovers, Susan Collins types—look at their role as sandbagging the tide rather than representing the voters who sent them there. They see Trump as a temporary disruption, a lame duck whose influence will fade, and they want to preserve what they call the “institution” even if it means slow-walking real reform on election security. Bernie Moreno is doing a great job in the Senate from Ohio. JD Vance represents a different, more combative generation. Ten years from now, people like them will be the moderates compared to the harder line the base demands. The Senate is changing, but the sandbaggers are still there, trying to keep the door open just wide enough for the familiar game to continue.

The Marxist playbook is not subtle. Control the flow of information, install sympathetic officials in key positions (secretaries of state, election boards), loosen verification, and use emergencies—real or manufactured—to justify changes that make fraud scalable. COVID was the perfect vehicle. It allowed rule changes that never fully reverted. In blue strongholds and sanctuary jurisdictions, the combination of no ID, mail ballots without robust tracking, and post-election counting creates the opportunity to “find” whatever margin is needed. They laugh about it because they believe the system protects them. Giuliani, despite everything they threw at him, is still willing to go on War Room and say the quiet part out loud. Tina Peters went to jail for trying to preserve records. January 6 protesters who raised their voices about election integrity are still suffering consequences. The message is clear: bring forward the evidence, and we will bankrupt you, jail you, or block you.

I know a thing or two about blocklisting. In my line of work and in the writing I do, talking about these subjects attaches your name to algorithms that throttle reach. Platforms claim to support free speech but run background filters that limit the distribution of content on controversial topics. Pay to remove restrictions if you have the money, or stay throttled. It is a revenue stream and a control mechanism. Yet the truth does not disappear just because the search results are manipulated. Election fraud evidence exists in the affidavits, the video footage, the statistical anomalies, the whistleblower accounts that never received fair hearings, and the simple, observable reality that, in too many places, the counting never seems to stop until the right side wins. Steve Hilton’s race is only the latest example. Unless every state adopts strict voter ID, same-day voting with paper trails, and real-time chain of custody for mail ballots, the door stays open. Federal elections have national consequences, so national standards are not radical—they are constitutional common sense.

People ask why Republicans don’t just win bigger everywhere. Look at the states where elections are reasonably secure versus those that treat ballots like confetti. The contrast is obvious. The rhinos who shrug and say “demographics are destiny” or “we can’t fight the system” are the ones preserving the very mechanisms that import and protect the demographics they claim are inevitable. Trump showed what happens when you fight. The institutional response was lawfare, censorship, and two-tier justice. They tried to destroy him financially and legally because he was too big to intimidate easily. Most candidates are not. That is why the credentialed and connected class thought they could install Biden, prop him up, and continue the managed decline. The economy suffered, borders were chaotic, and trust evaporated. Now in 2026, we see the same tactics locally and statewide.

I have reverence for genuine history and for the people who were here before European settlement. I have read deeply on Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, the Shawnee, and the broader Native nations of the Ohio Valley. Their stories are rich and tragic. But calling every group that happened to occupy land at a particular moment “indigenous” in a way that freezes history and justifies modern political narratives is the same credentialed sleight-of-hand we see in election administration. Cultures rose and fell here long before. The Windover Bog People in Florida, the Old Copper Complex around the Great Lakes, the Hopewell and Adena earthworks—these show sophisticated societies with trade and complexity going back thousands of years. The point is evidence, not ideology. The same applies to elections. Let the ballots be verifiable. Let the voters be who they say they are. Anything less is an invitation to the kind of managed outcomes we keep witnessing.

In my aerospace work, I deal with credentialed experts who cling to old drawings because their name is on them. Changing anything costs time, money, and bruised egos. SpaceX succeeds by ruthlessly eliminating stupid requirements. Gwynne Shotwell laid it out clearly—ditch the unnecessary parts, simplify, iterate faster. That mindset scales. The same disease infects our politics and election systems. Layers of bureaucracy, legacy rules, and protected interests prevent simple fixes like voter ID and paper-trail same-day voting. The result is predictable: outcomes that do not match the obvious sentiment on the ground. People see their neighborhoods change, costs rise, and security erode, yet the installed officials keep winning under rules that favor volume over verification.

The future Senate looks better with people like Bernie Moreno and JD Vance. They represent a harder edge that will not tolerate the old sandbagging. But the McConnell holdovers still act as if their job is to restrain the voters rather than represent them. Trump’s influence, even as a lame duck in their eyes, forced the conversation. The base will not go back to business as usual. Election integrity is non-negotiable. States that leave the door open to post-election counting and unsecured mail ballots are advertising their willingness to let the system be gamed. California’s recent races are Exhibit A. Newsom’s rules enabled the endless counting. The gap on election night was known, and the machinery filled it. This is not democracy. This is an installation.

I have no illusions that talking about it will win me friends in certain circles. My name gets associated with searches for election security and fraud, and my reach gets limited. But the truth is stubborn. Giuliani, despite everything, keeps speaking. Tina Peters paid a heavy price for preserving records. Ordinary people who showed up on January 6 to protest what they saw are still living with the consequences. The credentialed class and their political allies thought they could intimidate everyone into silence. They overreached. The backlash is building because people can see the pattern with their own eyes. When ballots keep appearing until the right number is reached, when ID is treated as oppression rather than basic security, and when emergencies are used to rewrite rules permanently, the representative republic is replaced by something else.

My book The Politics of Heaven explores the deeper spiritual and historical layers—how non-human influences, heavenly politics, and human power structures interact across time. Election fraud fits inside that larger story. It is not just technical cheating. It is the attempt to frustrate the will of a people and impose an agenda that cannot win in the open. The ancient temptation is always to seize control by any means. The modern version uses bureaucracy, emergency powers, and captured institutions. The solution is the same as it has always been: transparency, accountability, and courage. Secure the elections. Demand ID. Insist on same-day counting with paper trails. Punish fraud severely. Anything less leaves the door open for the next round.

The rhinos who think they can wait Trump out and return to the comfortable institutional game are misreading the moment. The base has seen too much. Bernie Marino and others like him point to a different Senate ten years from now—one less tolerant of sandbagging. The future belongs to those willing to close the loopholes and let the people’s will actually decide. Until then, the California model—endless ballots, no ID, counting until victory—is the warning. Giuliani laid it out in the War Room. The episode is worth watching. The pattern is clear. The evidence is in the rules themselves and in the observable results that defy election-night reality.

I keep coming back to these subjects because they matter more than comfort. My job in aerospace shows me daily how clinging to stupid requirements destroys efficiency and progress. The same is true in government and elections. Scrap the unnecessary parts. Simplify. Verify. Iterate on truth instead of protecting the machine. The republic depends on it. The age of disclosure demands it. The Politics of Heaven is coming soon because the heavenly politics have earthly consequences, and we cannot afford to ignore either.

Footnotes

[1] War Room episode with Giuliani on LA mayoral race (recent 2026 broadcast); patterns of post-election counting under California rules.

[2] COVID-era changes in Ohio and nationally, including Acton’s election cancellation; Fauci-related correspondence and gain-of-function context from public records and testimony.

[3] Ohio Senate figures (Moreno, Vance) and McConnell holdovers; institutional resistance patterns.

[4] General election security literature on voter ID, mail ballot chain of custody, and statistical anomalies in 2020/2026 races.

Bibliography

•  Giuliani, Rudy. Appearances and segments on War Room (2026 episodes covering California election practices).

•  Public records on California election rules under the Newsom administration (mail ballot processing, post-election counting).

•  Ohio election history, including Amy Acton’s COVID-era decisions (state health department archives).

•  Peters, Tina. Case documents and Colorado election integrity proceedings.

•  Various congressional testimony on the 2020 election (House and Senate committees).

•  ODNI and related reports on broader integrity and influence issues.

•  Standard references on election administration: voter ID studies from the Heritage Foundation and state audit reports.

•  Personal and local Ohio political context (Butler County, Lakota, commissioner races) from public records.

•  The Politics of Heaven manuscript themes (spiritual/historical layers intersecting modern power structures).

•  Additional reading: Works on lawfare against Trump and Giuliani; January 6 case summaries; comparative state election security analyses (e.g., states with strict ID vs. expansive mail-in).

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Wilmington Tablet and the Cost of Stupid Requirements: Disclosure is about more than just UFOs

I was down at the Johnson-Humrickhouse House Museum in Coshocton the other day, just wandering through the exhibits and glancing at the shop shelves the way you do when you’re killing a little time in a small Ohio town. Something caught my eye—a sandstone replica, maybe five inches long, a few inches wide, sitting there like a forgotten coaster. The people running the place didn’t know what it was. They couldn’t put a price on it because they didn’t recognize it. But I did. Instantly. I’d carried that exact design in my head for years.

It was the Wilmington Tablet. [1]

Map of the copper mines of Lake Superior

I knew it from Joseph Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology, the big, rich volumes my daughter hunted down for me one Christmas when they were long out of print and going for serious money on the secondary market. She knew how much those books meant to me. I’d been deep into Campbell in my twenties—reading at Perkins and Denny’s at all hours while other people my age were doing whatever twenty-somethings do. I even joined the Joseph Campbell Foundation back then, partly because George Lucas was on the board and I wanted the chance to talk to the man who made Star Wars and Indiana Jones. The foundation sent me the first of those atlas volumes. They were dense, illustrated treasures. When I saw the Wilmington Tablet sitting on that museum shelf, the memory came flooding back—the line work, the central figure, the sense that it was recording something far more than decoration.

The original is Adena culture, roughly 2,000 years old, recovered from a mound near Wilmington, Ohio. Sandstone. Compact. The engraving shows a powerful central form that reads to me as a bird-like or avian prayer figure—with wings or feathered aspects suggested by the flowing lines, and a sense of movement across what looks like mirrored or dimensional space. One side echoes the other. What happens here happens there. That’s the phrase that keeps coming back when I look at it. These weren’t doodles. They were records. Shamanic. Visionary. The kind of thing you carve after you’ve been somewhere else and come back with a story the ordinary world needs to remember. [2]

The Adena and the Hopewell cultures that followed them in the Ohio Valley weren’t simple hunter-gatherers scratching out a living. They built geometric earthworks on a scale that still stuns people—Newark’s great octagon and circle, Fort Ancient up the road from here, the Miamisburg Mound half an hour away. They moved materials across enormous distances: copper from the Great Lakes, mica from the southern Appalachians, marine shell from the Gulf, obsidian from the Rockies. They aligned structures to lunar standstills and solar events with precision that modern surveyors respect. And they left behind these small, dense tablets that nobody has fully decoded because the people who could read them are gone and the credentialed class that inherited the sites prefers older, safer stories. [3]

That brings me to the copper.

The Old Copper Complex along Lake Superior—Keweenaw Peninsula, Isle Royale, the Brule River country—represents one of the earliest large-scale metalworking traditions in the world. People were mining native copper there by at least 4000–5000 BC, cold-hammering it into tools, points, and ornaments without smelting. Thousands of pits are documented. One historical estimate put the total copper removed in the hundreds of thousands to over a million pounds; some older analyses floated even higher figures. Sediment cores from the region still carry the chemical signature of that ancient mining activity from six thousand years ago—copper, lead, potassium from the fires used to anneal the metal. [4]

Where did all that copper go? It traveled. Artifacts show up far outside the immediate region. But the sheer volume raises the same question that serious people have been asking for a long time: was this purely an internal trade among indigenous networks, or did the scale and timing suggest something more—visitors, traders, or knowledge moving in both directions across what we now call oceans? The Newberry Tablet, found in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, near the old mining country, in 1896, bears a grid of characters that Smithsonian and University of Michigan experts at the time could not decipher. Some later researchers read it as possible Old World script. The Cincinnati Tablet, recovered in the 1840s from a mound right downtown where a UPS facility sits today, carries its own dense symbolic language. [5]

Mainstream archaeology has long held that meaningful transoceanic contact before the Norse or Columbus was impossible—that people here were isolated after the Bering migrations, that boats couldn’t cross, that the timelines don’t allow it. I understand the institutional reasons. Once you admit earlier or more complex movements of people and ideas, many published books, careers, and tidy secular narratives have to be revisited. The same instinct that made credentialed experts during COVID say “trust the science” while gain-of-function research happened in under-regulated labs in Wuhan and elsewhere is alive in archaeology. Protect the published record. Don’t upset the people whose names are on the big monographs. The result is the same: progress slows, anomalies get explained away or ignored, and the public gets a thinner story than the evidence supports. [6]

I see the same pattern in my own industry. Aerospace is full of brilliant PhD engineers who treat drawings from twenty or thirty years ago like sacred texts. “My name is on that print. You can’t change it.” Even when better materials exist, even when regulations have evolved, even when a simpler design would work better and cost less. Changing the print means committees, reviews, months or years of delay, and sometimes millions in added cost. Personalities clash. Egos lock in. You end up herding cats on a hot tin roof to get something built that should have been obvious. It’s not that the people are bad. Many of them are very good at what they do. But the system rewards protecting the old requirement more than it rewards solving the actual problem.

SpaceX operates differently. Gwynne Shotwell explained it plainly in a recent CNBC interview. They used to put “pushers” on the Super Heavy booster to shove the Starship upper stage away during separation—extra hardware, extra mass, extra failure points. Following what she called Elon’s algorithm—get rid of stupid requirements, get rid of the part—they eliminated them. Now they use hot staging: light the upper-stage engines while still attached, let the flames and pressure do the separation work, and divert those flames through a simple ring structure on the booster. Fewer parts. Higher reliability. Faster learning. That’s why they’re catching boosters with chopsticks at Boca Chica, and why the rest of the industry will eventually have to copy the approach or fall behind. [7]

The same logic applies to history. We don’t need to protect every old theory just because a credentialed person wrote it down in 1957 or 1972. We need to let the evidence lead and be willing to revise when better data arrives. The Wilmington Tablet, the copper mines, the geometric precision of the Hopewell earthworks, the Windover Bog People in Florida with their 7,000–8,000-year-old preserved remains—these things are not problems to be explained away. They are invitations.

I brought that replica home. It sits where I can see it. It reminds me why I wrote The Politics of Heaven and why I keep talking about these things. The book is a long treasure hunt through heaven and human history—biblical conspiracies, giants, non-human intelligences, spiritual warfare, the politics that play out beyond the veil. These tablets fit inside that story. They look like records left by people who encountered something avian, something serpentine, something that crossed between realms. Shamans under the influence of what we would now call entheogens, or in dream states, or in direct contact, carving what they saw so the next generation would remember: there are more layers to reality than the daylight world admits. The Mothman sightings at Point Pleasant, the Birdman imagery at Cahokia, the reverence for the feathered serpent farther south—they rhyme. Current UAP disclosures are forcing the credential class to talk about non-human intelligences again. Once that door opens, many older doors that were nailed shut start to creak.

There are also the old Shawnee silver legends around Clifton Gorge and Yellow Springs, right in this part of Ohio. Stories of rich deposits or hidden caches that go back to Blue Jacket’s time and earlier. Geologists have found traces. Amateur shafts and assays over the years turned up silver. The mother lode, if it exists in any serious quantity, has never been properly located. The area has changed—some of it flooded, some developed—but the stories persist because the geology allows for it and because people who lived here before us clearly knew things about the land we’re still re-learning. Another thread worth pulling. [8]

The larger point is simple. We are living through a moment when old gatekeeping structures are under real pressure—from space companies that refuse to accept “that’s how we’ve always done it,” from citizens who watched credentialed experts lie or overreach during COVID, from independent researchers and venture-funded digs that don’t need a university committee’s permission to ask inconvenient questions. The Smithsonian and the old academic apparatus still carry enormous cultural weight, but they no longer have a monopoly on attention or funding. Capitalism, properly applied, is excellent at this. It rewards people who eliminate stupid requirements and penalizes those who cling to them out of ego or job security. SpaceX is proving it in orbit. The same principle can work on the ground, in the archives, and in the dirt.

I’m not saying every fringe theory is correct. I’m saying the evidence deserves better than reflexive defense of mid-twentieth-century consensus. The Wilmington Tablet is one small, heavy piece of that evidence. It sat on a museum shelf, unrecognized, because upstream experts had told the people in charge it wasn’t important enough to feature. That’s the system working exactly as designed. It protects the published record and keeps the public from getting too curious.

We can do better. Dig the copper country properly. Re-examine the tablets with fresh eyes and better tools. Fund the dives on the underwater anomalies in the Great Lakes. Let serious, well-resourced people chase the silver legends with modern methods. And keep watching what SpaceX and the companies that follow them do—because the mindset that catches rockets with chopsticks is the same mindset that will eventually fund the archaeology we should have been doing all along.

The age of disclosure isn’t just about UAPs. It’s about everything we were told was settled that never actually was. The tablet on my shelf is a quiet reminder. What happens here still echoes there. The only question left is whether we dare to listen.

Footnotes

[1] Physical description and museum context based on Adena tablet records and personal observation of the replica. See also noahsage.com archaeological summaries.

[2] Interpretive framework drawing from comparative mythology in Campbell’s work and user analysis of symbolic avian/interdimensional motifs common in Adena/Hopewell artifacts.

[3] Hopewell interaction sphere and earthwork details from standard references on Ohio Valley mound-builder cultures.

[4] Old Copper Complex data: Martin (1995), Drier et al. (1961), and sediment studies. Estimates vary but highlight significant prehistoric extraction.

[5] Newberry and Cincinnati Tablet descriptions from historical accounts, including Smithsonian correspondence and Cincinnati Museum Center records.

[6] Parallel to COVID credentialism drawn from public records, emails, and congressional testimony on gain-of-function research and lab-leak origins.

[7] Gwynne Shotwell CNBC interview (June 2026) on Starship hot staging and elimination of pusher mechanisms.

[8] Shawnee silver legends and Clifton Gorge/Yellow Springs geology from local historical accounts and assay reports.

Bibliography

•  Campbell, Joseph. Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1: The Way of the Animal Powers. Harper & Row, 1983 (and subsequent volumes/foundation editions).

•  Drier, Roy W., and Octave J. Du Temple. Prehistoric Copper Mining in the Lake Superior Region. 1961.

•  Lepper, Bradley T. Ohio Archaeology: An Illustrated Chronicle of Ohio’s Ancient American Indian Cultures. Orange Frazer Press, 2005.

•  Martin, Susan R. Wonderful Power: The Story of Ancient Copper Working in the Lake Superior Basin. Wayne State University Press, 1999.

•  Mills, Lisa A. “Mitochondrial DNA Analysis of the Ohio Hopewell of the Hopewell Mound Group.” PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2003.

•  Pompeani, David P., et al. “Sediment Record of Prehistoric and Historic Metal Mining in Lake Superior.” EOS, 2014.

•  Squier, Ephraim G., and Edwin H. Davis. Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley. Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, 1848.

•  Various primary accounts on Newberry Tablet (1896 discovery) and Cincinnati Tablet (1841 mound find), Cincinnati Museum Center and Smithsonian archives.

•  Barry Fell’s epigraphic works (controversial; for diffusionist perspectives).

•  Recent UAP/UFO disclosure materials: ODNI reports and congressional hearings (2020s).

•  Local histories on Shawnee silver legends, Clifton Gorge, and Yellow Springs (Greene County historical collections).

•  Shotwell, Gwynne. CNBC interview transcript on SpaceX Starship development, June 2026.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.

The Trump Marriage: Sex can’t define commitment or our young lives

I feel for President Trump. He has a very beautiful wife, a genuinely beautiful person in many ways, and it has been a little embarrassing at times to watch him go public, trying to hold her hand only to have it gently or firmly pushed away. The speculation that follows—the rumors of divorce, whispers that she is leading toward some younger man—strikes me as unnecessary and unkind. I feel it is worth discussing this directly because the truth is far more ordinary, biological, and human than conspiracy-minded narratives suggest.

Melania Trump is the same age as my wife. She was born on April 26, 1970, in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, so she is now in her mid-fifties. When you reach that stage of life, nobody is particularly interested in your sex life. Nobody wants to hear the details, and almost nobody wants to picture it. By the time you are a grandparent, the cultural and biological machinery has shifted. Sex is no longer the central organizing principle of existence, the way it is for teenagers. It is still possible, it can still be meaningful, but it is no longer the priority it once was. The body and the mind both signal that the intense reproductive drive has quieted.

Menopause arrives for most women in their late forties or early to mid-fifties. Periods become irregular and then stop. Estrogen and other hormones decline. Libido often drops, sometimes dramatically, though individual variation is enormous. Many women report that the mental and emotional space once occupied by sexual urgency opens up for other things—family, independence, quiet reflection, practical concerns like grocery prices at Costco versus Kroger. It is not that desire vanishes for everyone, but it is no longer the loud, insistent biological ticker it was in the twenties and thirties. 

For men, the parallel process is slower but real. Testosterone levels begin a gradual decline after the thirties, accelerating in later decades. At eighty, President Trump is well into what some call andropause territory. The body changes. Recovery takes longer. The constant background hum of sexual interest that defines so much of male adolescence and young adulthood quiets. An eighty-year-old man waking up and thinking “I must have sex today” is not the typical reality for most men that age, any more than a woman in her fifties waking up with the same urgent thought is typical after menopause. Biology is not destiny in every case, but it sets powerful defaults.

Studies bear this out. Research from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project found that sexual activity declines with age: roughly 73 percent of adults aged 57–64 reported being sexually active, dropping to 53 percent for those 65–74, and lower still beyond that. A University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging showed that among women 50–80, about 43 percent had been sexually active in the past year, with higher rates among the younger end of that range (50–64) and among those who were married or partnered. Frequency for couples in their fifties often settles into a few times per month rather than several times per week. By the seventies and eighties, the numbers dropped further, though intimacy, affection, and companionship remained important for many. 

These are averages and ranges. Plenty of couples in their fifties and sixties maintain active sex lives, and some continue into their eighties. The point is not that it stops cold; it becomes less urgent, less defining, and far less of a public or cultural preoccupation. Teenagers are biologically wired to think about little else. Their entire social and emotional world can revolve around whether someone wants to sleep with them or whether they can attract that attention. We spend the first decade and a half of life training children to use their minds—ABCs, sentences, science, languages—precisely because the reproductive drive does not yet dominate their biology. Then adolescence hits, and suddenly everything is filtered through sexuality. That phase is real and powerful, but it is not supposed to be permanent.

When people reach their fifties and beyond, the healthy maturation is to stop letting sexuality be the primary lens through which identity and worth are measured. Midlife crises often represent the last frantic attempt to hold onto the reproductive and youthful self before the body and culture both insist on change. Some people handle the transition with grace. Others chase younger partners, new money, or power in an effort to recapture what they feel slipping away. In extreme cases, this can shade into the manipulative or predatory patterns we see in certain corners of elite or celebrity culture—older, wealthy individuals seeking validation or control through relationships with much younger people. That is not maturity; it is often a refusal to accept the next chapter.

I have watched my own children and their friends move through this. My kids are now in their mid-thirties. I remember the conversations when they and their peers were approaching thirty—the quiet panic some felt that the “blooming flower” years were ending, that attention from the opposite sex might dry up, that life’s value was somehow tied to being desired in that specific sexual way. It is a hard passage, especially for women in a culture that still overvalues youthful female appearance. By the time people reach their fifties and sixties, many have made peace with it. They discover that their worth is not located in whether someone wants to sleep with them. They find sovereignty, independence, and new sources of meaning—family, work, faith, quiet competence.

This brings me back to the Trumps. Donald Trump is eighty. He works long hours. He has the weight of the presidency on him again. Melania, in her mid-fifties, has raised their son to adulthood. She has her own privacy and independence. She is not required to perform constant public affection to prove the marriage is real. When he reaches for her hand in public and she pulls away or does not enthusiastically reciprocate, it does not necessarily mean a crisis or a conspiracy. It can simply mean she is past the stage where constant touchy-feely performance feels necessary or natural. Many women in that age group describe exactly this: they love their husbands, they value the partnership, but they do not want to be pawed at or expected to perform youthful romance on demand. They have earned their own space.

The recent UFC Freedom 250 event on the White House South Lawn for the President’s eighty-year-old birthday offered a small window. Melania was there, stylish and composed as always, sitting ringside beside her husband. Observers noted she looked pretty and seemed at ease in the energetic setting surrounded by fighters. That does not contradict the picture of a woman comfortable in her own skin and her own marriage on her own terms. It simply shows someone participating in her husband’s world without needing to manufacture constant physical closeness for the cameras. 

I do not see a vast conspiracy here involving Epstein files or secret plans for divorce. I see two people who have been married a long time navigating the ordinary biological and emotional realities of aging. He still has the instinct of a showman and communicator: public hand-holding signals unity to the world that judges marriages partly through the lens of visible sexuality. She has the instinct of a private person who has already raised a child, built a life, and no longer feels the need to perform that particular script. Their marriage has produced a grown son and has endured the pressures of the White House twice.

We live in a culture that has trouble imagining value or vitality beyond sexual desirability and performance. Teenagers are taught, subtly and not so subtly, that their worth is tied to whether they can attract sexual attention. Adults are often encouraged to chase the same validation into middle age and beyond. The healthier path is the one many people eventually find: sex and romance remain possible, but they are no longer the central proof of one’s aliveness or worth. Work, family, ideas, faith, simple competence—these become the larger measures. President Trump found something larger than the Playboy life when he became President. Melania has found something larger than being defined solely as a wife or mother. That is growth, not failure.

It is natural for people to speculate. It is less natural and less kind to turn every awkward public moment into proof of marital collapse or hidden scandal. The Trumps are living through the same biological and psychological transition that faces every couple that stays together long enough. The hand that reaches and the hand that does not always meet it do not signal the end of respect or partnership. They can signal two people at different points in the same long journey, each honoring their own stage of life.

I have been married nearly four decades. I know what it is to share space with another adult human being day after day, to build a life, to raise children, and then to watch those children become adults with lives of their own. The intensity of early sexual connection gives way to something steadier and, in its own way, deeper. It is not better or worse; it is simply next. Most couples who make it to this point learn that the marriage is held together by far more than the frequency or enthusiasm of physical intimacy. Shared history, mutual respect, practical partnership, and the quiet decision to keep choosing each other matter more.

President Trump and Melania Trump appear to be making that choice. The rest is mostly noise from people who have not yet reached the stage where they understand that life after the peak reproductive years is not a decline into irrelevance but an invitation to a different kind of maturity. We should give them the dignity of that process instead of turning every public gesture into tabloid fodder. Their story is not a scandal. It is simply life, lived at the highest levels of visibility, with all the ordinary human adjustments that come with age.

We all age. The lucky ones among us reach the point where we are no longer defined by whether anyone wants to sleep with us. That is not a loss. That is freedom. I wish the Trumps, and every couple navigating these years, the peace that comes with accepting it.

 Footnotes

1.  Melania Trump’s birthdate and age details are confirmed via biographical sources.

2.  National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) data on sexual activity by age.

3.  University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging findings on women 50–80.

4.  UFC Freedom 250 event coverage describing Melania’s appearance and attendance at the White House South Lawn for President Trump’s 80th birthday.

5.  General medical consensus on menopause effects from sources like the North American Menopause Society.

6.  Observations on cultural shifts in sexuality and aging drawn from broader sociological studies.

Bibliography

•  Lindau, S.T., et al. “A Study of Sexuality and Health among Older Adults in the United States.” New England Journal of Medicine, 2007.

•  University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging. “Women’s Health: Sex, Intimacy, and Menopause,” 2022.

•  North American Menopause Society. Clinical guidelines and patient resources on menopause and sexual health.

•  Various archaeological and historical sources on the Old Copper Complex (for contextual biology discussion).

•  Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and related writings on maturity and culture.

Rich Hoffman

More about me

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About the Author: Rich Hoffman

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.