Is God an Idiot: I don’t want to serve a king; I want allies who want to fight and defeat a vast evil, otherwise, God is useless

I know a lot of people out there take issue with my point of view. Good. I get involved in this stuff precisely because that is the case. I did not want another polite Bible study where everybody already agrees and then goes home feeling spiritually hydrated. I wanted an open discussion, talking to an audience, with the entire database of Jonathan Edwards in the chair across from me. Faith, theology, the Bible as I actually read it, and the work I have been doing for years under the heading I call the politics of heaven.

The timing is not accidental. We are living through what the documentary industry has branded The Age of Disclosure — a season in which former officials, intelligence people, and military witnesses are finally willing to say out loud that non-human intelligence is here, that craft have been recovered, and that the American state has been lying about it since at least 1947.[1] The film treats that as a national-security and science story. I treat it as a political story that starts long before Roswell. If you have read me for any length of time, you already know I do not separate UFOs from demons, Elohim, Watchers, or the divine council. I do not separate any of that from how human beings get sorted into controllable categories. That is the whole point of The Politics of Heaven.[2]

Why I Chose Jonathan Edwards as a Sparring Partner

Jonathan Edwards does not agree with me. That is why I wanted him. If I only talk to people who already think the universe is a messy civil war among non-human rebels, I am just warming up my own choir. Edwards spent a life preaching the absolute sovereignty of God over all things, including the devil.[3] His notes sit in one of my favorite Bibles on the planet. I love the intelligence in that book. I love the seriousness. I do not swallow the theology hook, line, and sinker just because it became part of the American founding atmosphere.[4]

A lot of people who read me are 1750s people in 2026 clothes. They want Edwards’s God — the God who never loses a committee vote, the God whose enemies only borrow power for a season. I understand the hunger. I have been through enough grief to know why a soul wants a strong anchor. I also think that hunger can become a psychological mechanism. When life is chaotic, the human heart will pay almost any price to believe somebody competent is driving. That does not make the belief true. It makes it useful.

Edwards would say Satan was once among the brightest in heaven, fallen, subtle, powerful, and still on a leash. He would say rebellion was never a political contest because God is not one being among beings. God is the ground of existence. I love that sentence. I have used versions of it myself. I also look at the last several thousand years, and I do not see a manager winning on the ground. I see a lot of borrowed-power talk and a lot of bodies.

The Age of Disclosure and the Politics of Heaven

Disclosure, as the government class uses the word, means a press conference. A file release. A hearing. A former AATIP guy staring at a building while the score tells you to feel solemn. That is not disclosure. Disclosure is when you admit the other intelligence in the room has been running a ground game through religion, politics, sex, war, and category-making since before your grandparents had a country.

Michael Heiser did the church a favor by forcing Psalm 82 back onto the table. God stands in the divine council. He judges among the gods. Deuteronomy 32, in the older reading, has the Most High allotting nations to the sons of God. Job opens with the sons of God presenting themselves and the Accuser walking in like he has a badge.[5] You can baptize all of that into “God is still in charge” if you need to sleep. Alternatively, you can read it the way a political operator reads a situation room: there is a board, there are governors, some of them have gone rogue, and the chairman keeps insisting the org chart proves he never lost control.  Moreover, to the point of evil being in control, remember Michael Heiser died of a rare illness.  I have also had a lot of trouble since completing my most recent book on this precise subject.  The bad guys look to get rid of people who are close to smoking them out of their hiding places.  I have seen it up close, and it is much more than a coincidence.  

Inside the disclosure world there is already a split. One camp wants interstellar biologists and reverse-engineered alloys. The other camp — the so-called Collins Elite strain inside defense culture — has been whispering for decades that these things are not cousins from Zeta Reticuli. They are deceivers. They deny the Son. They catechize abductees.[6] I am closer to the second camp, with one difference. I do not think calling them “demons” ends the argument. Demons is a church word that lets people stop thinking. I want the org chart. I want the ground game. I want to know who is manipulating whom, and why God keeps hiring the same contractors after they burn the city down.

Categories Are How Non-Human Intelligence Controls the Human Race

Here is the running thought I brought into the conversation. When astronomers hunted black holes, they did not start with a photograph. They started with a gravity signature. Something unseen was tugging at visible bodies. The logical conclusion was a compact mass so dense light could not climb out. Better instruments later confirmed what the footprints already said.

I look at human history the same way. You can see spirit-world manipulation in how people get thrown into categories, and then those categories get administered. Left, right. Saved, unsaved. Young earth, old earth. Alien, angel. Loyal servant, blasphemer. Once you are in the box, the box does the rest of the work. You police yourself. You attack the neighboring box. Meanwhile, the intelligence that built the shelves goes home early.

That is why I get impatient with people who think the main spiritual task is to pick the correct team jersey and never ask whether the stadium itself is the trap. I used a football picture in the conversation because I live in Bengal country and I have watched 60,000 people invent causation out of a lucky shirt. One receiver catches a ball in the last minute, and ten thousand isolated nervous systems all decide their fabric caused the physics. We do the same thing with God and history. We live in a vacuum of limited observation, and then we call the vacuum providence.

I Am Not a Young-Earth Creationist, and I Do Not Need the Planetarium to Close the Argument

The Creation Museum has a fine exhibit culture. I live in this triangle. I have sat through their planetarium show, which is really good, and I have been curious how they sell a 6,000-year-old Earth with a straight face while the sky over Petersburg is the same sky that makes deep time obvious.[7] I am not a young-earth man. I am a deep-past man. The idea that life only exists here, and only during this thin slice of time, is ridiculous to me. That is not rebellion against Genesis. That is refusing to let a nineteenth-century fight with Darwin become the whole religion.

Young-earth certainty and materialist certainty are twin categories. Both are easy to administer. Both spare you from the harder sentence: we do not know how old the war is, we do not know how many worlds it touches, and we are arrogant to think the Bible’s human camera angle is the only camera in the universe. I love the Bible because it is the longest political and spiritual after-action report I have. I do not love it because a committee told me I am not allowed to notice the lens.

Job Is Not Comfort Literature

I understand Job. I have had enough wreckage in my life that the book does not feel like a classroom exercise. I do not sit around looking for a hug from a psychotherapist. I outmaneuver hard things by moving. People say I am positive about everything. That is not a personality quirk. That is a method. You do not beat a siege by narrating your wounds to an audience that cannot lift a gate.[8]

What I will not do is pretend Job is a success story for management. Satan walks into the council, talks God into a demonstration, and a good man’s world is stripped for a wager. Edwards says the boundaries prove sovereignty because the Accuser had to ask permission. I say that is the behavior of a boss who can still sign the visitor badge while the factory burns. Permission is not the same thing as competence. Permission is not the same thing as loyalty to the people who actually bleed.

If I had been standing in that council, I would have wanted Satan’s head off in the air. Not as theater. As containment. Then I would have watched God’s face. That is the test nobody in Sunday school is allowed to run. If the Accuser is a rebel, you kill the rebel. If the Accuser is a tool, you just learned something about the toolmaker that the later chapters are designed to keep you from saying out loud.

Sovereignty, Lucky Jerseys, and the Divine Council Bureaucracy

Edwards’s best line in the exchange, the one that still rings, is that God is not a being among beings. He upholds the universe by the word of his power. The greater one in us is greater than the one in the world.[9] I like the music of that. I also asked the question bureaucracy always dreads: if he is in charge of everybody, why the council? Why the governors? Why the sons of God with portfolios? Why a heavenly civil service if the king can move the sun with a sentence?

The approved answer is generosity. God does not need help. He shares the dignity of rule, as a great king appoints judges. Fine. I have run companies. I have watched kings appoint judges. Sometimes it is generosity. Sometimes it is a man who cannot stand to be seen doing the ugly work with his own hands. A weak leader uses other people to do what he lacks the social courage to do himself. He works through passive systems. He keeps a villain on payroll, so the villain can be blamed when the quarterly report comes in bloody.

That is how Job reads to me when I take the piety filter off. God keeps an Accuser. The Accuser proposes torture. God authorizes a limited version. Later writers explain that it was for Job’s refinement and for the audience’s faith. Hindsight is the favorite tool of every failed administration. You look back at what already happened and discover it was necessary. Necessity is cheap when you are not the one burying children.

Why Does an All-Powerful God Need Proof of Loyalty Through Pain?

Edwards says God is not insecure. The infinite self-existent one was happy before he made a single atom. Tests are for us, not for him. The fire does not inform the goldsmith. It purifies the gold. I have heard that sermon. I have preached versions of it to myself on bad mornings. It still leaves the managerial question on the table.

Why is the refinement this expensive? Why do the loyal become the demonstration models? Why does Israel get the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Roman, the exile, the rape, the blinded king, the suicide cliff at Masada, and then a theologian with a clean desk explaining that holiness required it? I am too old to pretend that stacking enough millennia on the wound automatically turns it into wisdom. Maybe from the vantage of a thousand years and many worlds there is a logic. I have been looking for that logic. So far I have found a political war against non-human insurgents, and a human need to believe the chairman is still chairman.

People do not like that sentence because you are not supposed to question God’s authority. Scripture itself is full of people who did — Job, David, Jeremiah, the man on the cross quoting Psalm 22. The ban is not in the text. The ban is in the later management of the text. You may wrestle. You may not judge the judge. That rule is very convenient for the judge.

I Do Not Wake Up Looking for a Savior

I will say this as plainly as I said it in the conversation. I am not a bend-the-knee type. I am not looking for a replacement father. I think a lot of organized religion is built for people who never stopped needing that structure, and I do not despise them for it. If that is what holds a person together, it is more valuable than my path would be for them. It is not my path.

Loyalty has to be earned. You do not get my service because I inherited Adam’s paperwork. You do not get it because a Roman-era council said the canon is closed and the questions are now a character issue. If you let evil run loose through my world and then call the wreckage a quiz, you have not earned the title you keep putting on the letterhead.

Edwards asked the fair question: if you no longer believe God is fully in control, why keep the Bible? Because it is the only chronicle I have that is long enough to show the pattern. Three or four thousand years of God-talk, council-talk, war-talk, and human failure. I read it the way I would read an after-action report on a candidate who keeps losing precincts and then writing memoirs about hidden victories. I am looking for the ground game. I want to beat the evil that I think God has failed to contain. I do not want a ticket out. I do not want an eternal basement where I am safe because I surrendered. I want the thing hunted where it lives — on earth, in the unseen, in whatever dark matter and outer dark the language is pointing at.

The Strategic Failure Pattern Across Scripture

Edwards’s counter is the old one. Every time man tries to destroy evil in his own strength, he fails or makes it worse. Lasting victories come only when God acts through surrendered people. Therefore, the strategy I am hunting is the one I distrust: decrease so he can increase.

That sounds to me like passive-aggressive leadership. A failed executive telling the staff that the only competence left in the building is his, so stop trying. Maybe divine wisdom really does sit above my pay grade which is a concept I don’t believe in because it accepts a structure that protects evil from analysis.  Maybe. I have also watched that speech get used by every earthly institution that wanted obedience without performance. Israel tries to clear the land and cannot. Disciples try to cast out a demon and cannot. The church inherits the empire and then burns people for translation errors. The pattern I keep seeing is not “surrender works.” The pattern is “the movement needs the failure so it can keep selling surrender.”

If I could rewrite one rule of the war, I would stop using good and innocent people as acceptable casualties. I would stop treating the loyal as the easiest demonstration objects. A leader who lets the enemy chew his own household to make a point is not mysterious. He is a poor defender. Call that blasphemy if you need the category. I call it a performance review.

What Jesus Meant by “My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me”

That was the question I wanted Edwards for. In the last minutes, Jesus quotes the opening of Psalm 22.[10] The orthodox reading is elegant. Every Jew in earshot knows the rest of the psalm. Agony first, victory later. The Son bears wrath. The physical torture is not the worst part. The worst part is separation. It is not doubt. It is payment.

What I hear is a man in a scapegoat machine. The idea that the sins of the world can be loaded onto one body and walked out of the camp is older than Golgotha. It is in Leviticus. It is in the human nervous system. People who have cheated, grabbed, and gone numb need a goat. First-century Jerusalem had Rome on its neck and a purity system in its temples. A public death that could be read as both Roman order and Jewish atonement is politically efficient. I do not say that as a sneer at the man. I say it as a reading of the market.

Was he doubting? I think he was a tortured human body, lightheaded, pierced, and still honest enough to say the sentence that piety wants to footnote away. If the cry is only liturgy, then the pain is only theater. I do not think the pain was theater.

The Kashmir Question, Politics, and Why Bodies Matter

I am going to say the part that gets people really upset. I think the crucifixion was a political killing. I think Rome wanted a problem removed without owning the whole bill, and a slice of the Jerusalem establishment wanted a pressure valve. I think the body of Jesus becoming unfindable helped everyone who needed a story that could travel. Moreover, I think the Kashmir tradition — Roza Bal, Yuz Asaf, a man who survives the empire and dies old in the north of India — is at least as entitled to forensic curiosity as the claim that matter dematerialized because a later council said so.[11]

I know the Ahmadiyya have their own reasons for wanting Jesus alive and unsacrificed. I know Islam has its own reasons. I know Led Zeppelin fans have their reasons, and they are not theological. None of that makes the empty tomb automatically supernatural. It makes the empty tomb a contested piece of political property. If there are bones in a private or shrine context that people have whispered about for a century, the adult move is not to hiss “blasphemy.” The adult move is to ask what the genes say. We are not ready for that conversation as a culture because the conversation would smash too many identities at once.

Edwards, and the whole martyr argument after him, asks why the inner circle would die for a lie. It is a serious question.[12] My answer is not that they were cartoon frauds. My answer is that movements eat identity. Once your name, your friends, your enemies, and your hope of being remembered are all welded to a story, the story becomes the last asset you have. I have watched modern parties do it. I have watched people who finally got power try to crawl back into the victim costume because the costume was the only self they trusted. Rome, Judea, a dead or vanished leader, a handful of men who would otherwise be nobody — that is enough heat to bake a religion.[13]

James, Paul, and the Psychology of Movements After the Leader Is Gone

James is the hard case, and I will not pretend otherwise. He was not a believer during the ministry. Afterward, he becomes the spine of the Jerusalem church and dies for it.[14] Guilt is part of my read. Grief is part of it. So is the sudden, terrible honor of being the last blood left in the room. That is not the same celebrity as wine and women. If you inherit a crucified brother’s name, the only way the currency spends is to live poor, pray the knees off yourself, and look like him. Immortality through the written word is still immortality. Most people thrown off temples are forgotten. James is not. That incentive is real whether the metaphysics are true or not.

Paul is the scaling engine. Without Paul there is no Gentile church as we know it. James and Paul did not roast hot dogs in matching shirts. They fought. The later harmony is a product, the way party platforms are products.[15] I like James. I think he was one of the good ones. I also think good men can stabilize a narrative they did not start and cannot fact-check anymore because the body is gone and the politics have already hardened.

Led Zeppelin, Kashmir, and the Whisper of the Spirit World

Why do people who like to dissolve their ordinary mind keep circling that song? I do not think it is just the riff.[16] I think the spirit world has a long memory and popular art is one of the leaks. We hear whispers, and we dress them as taste. That is not an argument for taking a rock band as a footnote to Matthew. It is an argument that the official custodians of the story do not have a monopoly on the residue.

If you love God and you look around, you do not see a tight ship. You see evil spitting in the claim of control every five seconds. Then you see nice people turn the other cheek and use Jesus as a permit to stay out of the fight. Martyrdom becomes a brand. Cowardice borrows a cross. I want the opposite instinct. I want the war taken to the thing that is torturing people.

Are We Free, or Are We Reading a Record Left by People Who Needed Compliance?

Who wrote the dumb rules? That was my question when Edwards said the only way to beat evil is to yield to the God who, from my chair, has let it run. A rational rule would look like any competent shop floor. Contain the arsonist. Do not use the night shift as kindling to prove the arsonist exists. Do not publish a handbook later that says the fire was a teaching moment.

The Bible I trust is the Bible I can read between the lines of. I trust it more than I trust the handlers. Councils, empires, reformers, and television teachers all have motives. Rome needed glue as the frontiers cracked. A crucified provincial who could be turned into a cosmic loyalty oath is better glue than another legion.[17] That does not make every line a lie. It means you read like an adult. You ask what was written down and what was not, and why.

My assertion is simple enough to make people furious. Non-human intelligence — call them Elohim, Watchers, demons, NHI, whatever shelf-label you need — has been trying to undo what was made. I think the garden commission was a political statement against rebels on the council. Humans were not designed to be mascots.[18] We were designed to be dangerous to the bureaucracy that did not want us here. That is why the categories exist. That is why “do not question” is preached as humility. A questioning human is harder to herd.

What I Am Looking For in the Bible

I am looking for a strategy. I study wars because I want to know where people failed to beat what was hunting them. I want to succeed where they failed. That is not pride in the cheap sense. It is refusal. I did not wake up wanting to be anybody’s servant, on earth or off it. I woke up wanting to do good work and to stop watching evil treat the world like an open cafeteria.

Edwards was right about my temperature. I am angry. I think anger, in this case, is cleaner than the sweetness that calls itself faith while the same pattern repeats. He was also right that I still have the book open. I keep it open because it is the only long record that does not pretend human beings are only animals or only angels. It shows the council. It shows the Accuser. It shows the empires. It shows the scapegoat. It shows the men who died with the name in their mouths. It shows, if you will look, the politics.[19][20]

If you want the softer Edwards, he is in the Study Bible, and he is worth the time. If you want the American warrior version of the same hunger — competence, natural law, no more yielding to a failed order because the order has a hymn — that is the work I put into The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business and the earlier books.[21] Read both. Argue with both. I did not earn the right to say these things by being careful. I earned it by thinking them for a long time and then saying them with my own name attached.

Are we free? That is the only question left that matters. Free will is either real, or we are livestock with better marketing. I act as if it is real. I read as if the other side is trying to convince me it is not. Moreover, I will keep looking for a way to destroy the evil that has been working for thousands of years, with God if he will do a decent job of it, and without him if he will not. That is the conversation I wanted. That is the conversation I had. 

Notes for Searchers, Pastors, and Operators

If you came here from a search on Age of Disclosure, divine council, Jonathan Edwards sovereignty, Job and Satan, Jesus in Kashmir, or whether UAP are demons, you are in the right file. The point was never to baptize a documentary. The point was to stop letting science-press-conference language hide a much older political structure. Read Psalm 82 before you read the next hearing transcript. Read Job 1 before you let a preacher tell you permission and goodness are the same thing. Read the crucifixion as both theology and provincial crisis management. Then decide what you are willing to serve.

Bibliography and Further Reading

Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam. Jesus in India. 1899. English editions vary.

Alberino, Timothy. Birthright: The Coming Posthuman Apocalypse and the Annihilation of Man. 2020, and related Enochic commentary in the current disclosure debate.

Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 3rd ed. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Creation Museum / Answers in Genesis. Public exhibits and published young-earth materials. Petersburg, Kentucky.

Edwards, Jonathan. Freedom of the Will. 1754. WJE vol. 1. Yale University Press, 1957.

Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. 1746.

Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741.

Edwards, Jonathan. Sermons on the sovereignty of God in the salvation of men. Various WJE volumes.

Eusebius. Ecclesiastical History.

Farah, Dan, dir. The Age of Disclosure. 2025.

Goodman, Martin. Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations. Knopf, 2007.

Habermas, Gary, and Michael Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. Kregel, 2004.

Hassnain, Fida. A Search for the Historical Jesus. 1994, and later Roza Bal collaborations.

Heiser, Michael S. The Unseen Realm. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Supernatural. Lexham Press, 2015.

Heiser, Michael S. Reversing Hermon. Defender, 2017.

Hoffman, Rich. The Symposium of Justice. 2004.

Hoffman, Rich. Tail of the Dragon. Cliffhanger Research and Development, 2012.

Hoffman, Rich. The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021.

Hoffman, Rich. The Politics of Heaven. Forthcoming.

Hoffman, Rich. The Overmanwarrior. https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/

Josephus. Jewish Antiquities.

Led Zeppelin. “Kashmir.” Physical Graffiti. Swan Song, 1975.

Millar, Fergus. The Roman Near East, 31 BC–AD 337. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Redfern, Nick. Final Events. Anomalist Books, 2010.

The Holy Bible. Especially Genesis 1–11; Deuteronomy 32; 1 Kings 22; Job; Psalm 22; Psalm 82; Daniel 4; Matthew 27; Mark 15; Acts; Galatians; Ephesians 6; Hebrews 1; 1 John 4.

Wright, N. T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.

1 Enoch (Book of the Watchers) and related Second Temple literature, including material from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Suggested search headers for syndication

Age of Disclosure spiritual meaning; non-human intelligence demons or Elohim; Jonathan Edwards sovereignty of God critique; divine council Psalm 82 politics; Book of Job Satan permission; Jesus tomb Kashmir Roza Bal; James brother of Jesus motive; why did disciples die for the resurrection; Creation Museum planetarium old earth; politics of heaven Rich Hoffman; Overmanwarrior theology.

[1] Dan Farah, dir., The Age of Disclosure (Farah Films, 2025). The film compiles testimony from current and former U.S. government, military, and intelligence officials asserting an eighty-year concealment of non-human intelligence and recovered craft.

[2] Rich Hoffman, The Politics of Heaven (forthcoming). The working thesis is that biblical theology, ancient Near Eastern political structures, and modern power systems describe one continuous contest, not two separate subjects called “religion” and “politics.”

[3] Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of the Will (1754), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 1, ed. Paul Ramsey (Yale University Press, 1957). Edwards distinguishes God as the permitter and disposer of events from God as the moral author of sin.

[4] Jonathan Edwards Study Bible (various Crossway/ESV study editions and companion notes used in American Reformed preaching). Edwards remains the most serious American attempt to hold together revival, metaphysics, and civic order.

[5] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, 2015); see also Psalm 82:1; Deuteronomy 32:8–9 (Dead Sea Scrolls / LXX reading); Job 1:6–12; 1 Kings 22:19–23.

[6] On the “Collins Elite” and the demonic interpretation of UAP/NHI inside defense circles, see Nick Redfern, Final Events (Anomalist Books, 2010), and later pastoral briefings discussed in coverage of Age of Disclosure. The claim is contested. The pattern is not.

[7] Answers in Genesis / Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky. The institution is a short drive from the Cincinnati–Northern Kentucky metro. Young-earth chronology is their public commitment; it is not mine.

[8] Job 1–2; Job 38–42. The book is not a Hallmark card. It is a courtroom transcript with a body count.

[9] Hebrews 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17; 1 John 4:4. Edwards and the Reformed tradition treat these as proofs of unshared sovereignty. I treat them as claims that still have to survive contact with history.

[10] Psalm 22. The first line is agony; the psalm ends in public vindication. That literary fact does not automatically settle what a dying man felt.

[11] Roza Bal (Rozabal) shrine, Khanyar, Srinagar. The Ahmadiyya claim that Yuz Asaf is Jesus after a survived crucifixion is advanced in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, Jesus in India (1899), and later in Fida Hassnain and popular Kashmir travel literature. Mainstream historians and the shrine’s Sunni caretakers reject the identification. I am not asking anyone to baptize the theory. I am asking why the empty-tomb claim is protected from ordinary forensic curiosity.

[12] N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Fortress, 2003), remains the strongest academic case that the earliest Christians believed they had seen a bodily risen Jesus and were willing to die for that claim. Gary Habermas and Michael Licona collect the “minimal facts” argument. I am familiar with that literature. I am unpersuaded that martyrdom proves the metaphysics. It proves intensity.

[13] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[14] Josephus, Antiquities 20.197–203, on the death of James. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.23, preserves Hegesippus on James’s reputation and execution.

[15] Acts 9; Galatians 1–2; and the well-documented tension between Paul and the Jerusalem circle. Christianity as a scaled movement is unthinkable without Paul. That is a political observation, not a Sunday-school slight.

[16] Led Zeppelin, “Kashmir,” Physical Graffiti (Swan Song, 1975). Popular culture often keeps older spirit-world memory that official theology pretends it has already solved.

[17] On Roman provincial management of Judea, the threat of messianic movements, and the later Constantinian settlement, see Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem (Knopf, 2007); Fergus Millar, The Roman Near East (Harvard, 1993); and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

[18] Genesis 1:26–28; Psalm 8. The image-of-God commission is a political charter over the garden and the nations, not a permission slip to become a house pet in someone else’s bureaucracy.

[19] 1 Peter 5:8; Ephesians 6:12. Principalities and powers language is not a metaphor for bad vibes. It is organizational language.

[20] Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741); Religious Affections (1746); and the sermons on God’s sovereignty in the salvation of men. Edwards feared chaos in the human heart more than he feared looking like a weak manager. That is the difference between us.

[21] Rich Hoffman, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business (Liberty Hill / Overman Warrior Publications, 2021); The Symposium of Justice (2004); Tail of the Dragon (2012).

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.

Psychedelics, Skull Cults, and the Politics of Heaven: Why Christianity Broke the Cycle of Appeasement to Non-Human Intelligence

I have been carrying these questions in the background of my thinking for decades. The frequency with which they demand attention has risen sharply since the recent UAP disclosures. When the best technology the Air Force possesses cannot keep pace with something that behaves more like a ghost than a craft, the old categories collapse. It is not enough to say a flying saucer is real. It is not enough to say a religious claim is real. I want to know what causes people to believe what they believe, what political order forms around those beliefs, and what self-interest drives the entire system. Once you understand the political motivation behind belief, you understand the kind of society people are actually building—and whether you should support it.

That is why the conversation around Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key landed with such force. The book is not merely another academic argument about ancient wine. It is a direct challenge to the sanitized version of early Christianity most of us inherited. And it raises a harder question: if the original Eucharist carried a pharmacological charge, what does that tell us about the entities people were trying to contact, and why did Christianity’s later institutional form deliberately move away from that charge?

The Immortality Key and the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis

Muraresku’s central claim is straightforward and explosive. The original Christian communion was not a symbolic sip of ordinary wine. It was a potent psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greek mysteries, specifically the cult of Dionysus and the rites at Eleusis. For nearly two thousand years, the greatest minds of antiquity—Cicero among them—traveled to the sanctuary at Eleusis to drink the kykeon. They claimed the experience removed the fear of death. The recipe was a state secret punishable by death.

The chemistry focuses on ergot, the fungus that grows on barley and rye—the same fungus from which Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD in 1938. The theory is not new. It was proposed in 1978 by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck in The Road to Eleusis. Hofmann and Ruck’s academic careers suffered for it. The idea that the foundations of Western philosophy and early Christianity rested on controlled visionary pharmacology was too much for the scholarly stomach of the time.  And when you think about that very obvious claim, and the way those names were ostracized, you can see the root cause of a much larger problem.  

Muraresku spends years in the Vatican archives and archaeological sites looking for the transition. He notes that ancient wine was rarely plain fermented grape juice. It was routinely an infusion of herbs, roots, and potentially fungi—a pharmakon. The Gospel of John, the most Greek of the Gospels, uses language for the wine that suggests something more complex than table drink. Jesus’ miracle at Cana occurs in a cultural zone saturated with Dionysian imagery. In early Jesus centuries, Dionysus and Jesus were sometimes treated as interchangeable figures of death, rebirth, and ecstatic immortality.

The book’s most compelling social argument concerns women. For millennia, the preparation of these visionary beverages was women’s work. As Christianity became institutionalized and more patriarchal, particularly from the fourth century onward, those women and their spiked drinks became a threat to the emerging clerical monopoly on the divine. Muraresku reads the Inquisition’s language of pharmaka and sorcery not merely as superstition but as the systematic eradication of a competing technology of direct encounter with the sacred. The shift, in his framing, is from pharmacological Christianity to placebo Christianity.

I want Christianity to succeed. I do not read Muraresku as an enemy of the faith. He identifies as a Catholic who is trying to recover rather than destroy the Eucharist. Yet the implications cut in two directions at once. If the earliest layers of the tradition carried a visionary intensity later deliberately muted, then the institutional Church both preserved and constrained something powerful. And if that intensity was chemically mediated, we must ask what, exactly, the initiates were encountering.

Beer, Skulls, and the Long Continuity of Death Cults

The problem is larger than Greece. When I go back further—ten thousand years further—the pattern sharpens.

At Göbekli Tepe (the site that Muraresku and others still sometimes refer to by earlier or variant names in popular discussion), the evidence is no longer subtle. T-shaped pillars, snakes carved everywhere, a clear skull cult, and chemical traces consistent with beer brewing. People were not merely gathering to eat. They were preparing fermented beverages, removing soft tissue from human heads, drilling holes, and displaying the skulls in ritual contexts under carefully oriented architecture. The same complex appears, in different local forms, along the Jordan Valley in the dolmen fields that stretch from the Golan south toward the Dead Sea, and again in the megalithic “Wheel of Giants” (Rujm el-Hiri / Gilgal Refa’im) east of the Sea of Galilee—roughly 160 meters across, built of more than 40,000 tons of basalt, aligned with solar and stellar markers.

I have scoured the archaeological literature for a serious treatment of these Jordan Valley dolmens from roughly 10,000 to 3,000 BC. The silence is telling, just like any discussion dealing with the use of wine in Greek culture outside of mainstream opinion. Mainstream discussion prefers the safer Bronze Age and later. Yet the structures are there. The alignments are there. The continuity of ritual astronomy with later Hopewell earthworks in the Ohio Valley is difficult to ignore once you stop treating the Atlantic as an absolute barrier.

Pure native copper from the Lake Superior region was extracted for thousands of years. Isotopic and purity studies continue to raise questions about whether some of that copper moved farther than orthodoxy allows. The Windover bog people of central Florida preserve soft tissue and brain matter from the same deep time window. The Newberry Tablet and other Michigan finds remain controversial, but the pattern of megalithic and copper-working activity across the Great Lakes and the Upper Peninsula does not vanish because it is inconvenient.

Everywhere you look in this pre-biblical window, you find cultures oriented toward death, severed heads, fermented or psychoactive drink, and communication with something beyond the ordinary dead—the politics of that communication matter. Human beings do not casually cut off a neighbor’s head, scrape the flesh, hang the skull, and pour blood on an altar for sport. They do it because they believe the act buys favor, knowledge, rain, fertility, or protection from harm.

The Mouse and the Snake

I use a simple allegory. Watch a pet snake being fed. Drop a mouse into the glass enclosure. For the first few minutes, the mouse runs, freezes, and tests every corner. Eventually it realizes there is no exit. Then the behavior changes. It becomes still. It positions itself near the water dish or the food bowl as if stillness and proximity to ordinary life might persuade the snake to look elsewhere. The snake, of course, is not persuaded. It simply waits and then eats.

Humanity has lived for a very long time with the anxiety of that mouse. Non-human intelligences—call them Watchers, old gods, ultraterrestrials, or whatever the current UAP language prefers—appear in the record as entities that demand appeasement. Psychedelics, ritual sex, blood, and skull display are technologies of that appeasement. The mouse tries to make itself useful or invisible so the snake will not strike.

Christianity, in its mature form, broke that cycle. It did not deny the existence of the hostile powers. It declared them defeated in principle and offered a different posture: moral agency, individual responsibility, and direct relationship with a God who does not require the constant feeding of death. The result, imperfect as every human institution is, was the rise of a civilization that valued the living more than the skulls of the dead. Strip the Christian premise from a mass of people, and the older pattern reasserts itself with remarkable speed. I have watched it at a Jason Aldean concert from the VIP area—twenty thousand people, many drunk since morning, public sexual display, the old fertility and abandon patterns returning the moment the moral frame loosens. The same retreat appears wherever the teachings of Jesus are actively removed from a culture.

That is why I am not enthusiastic about the modern psychedelic renaissance framing itself as the recovery of a lost “religion with no name.” The experiences reported at Johns Hopkins and NYU—ego death, loss of fear of mortality—are real. The question is whether the entities contacted in those states are friends of the human project. My reading of the long archaeological record is that they are not. They have been competing for control of human attention and behavior for a very long time. Christianity was never their preferred outcome.

The Four Pillars That Still Need Digging

The gap between roughly 10,000 BC and the world of Abraham remains the least examined and most consequential stretch of the human story. Four clusters of evidence deserve far more serious, well-funded attention than they currently receive.  I am committing myself to putting money and attention to these ideas:

1.  The skull cult, beer residues, and snake iconography at Göbekli Tepe and related Anatolian sites.

2.  The dolmen fields and the Wheel of Giants along the Jordan Valley and Golan.

3.  The pure copper extraction systems of the Lake Superior region and their possible long-distance movement.

4.  The Windover and related Archaic Florida populations with their extraordinary preservation of soft tissue and ritual practice.

These are not isolated curiosities. They form the deep background against which both the biblical narrative and the later Greek mysteries emerge. More excavation, more isotopic analysis, more open discussion of possible transoceanic contact, and less reflexive dismissal of “fringe” data would change the conversation. I am writing The Politics of Heaven in part to force that conversation into the open. The secular publishing world prefers books that treat Christianity as the problem rather than as a partial solution to an older and darker problem. That preference itself looks, from where I sit, like another form of the mouse’s stillness—keeping the larger questions safely inside the glass.

Conclusion: Do Not Be the Mouse

The original Eucharist may well have carried a pharmacological dimension inherited from older Mediterranean practice. The women who prepared the drinks may have been the last keepers of a technology the institutional Church found threatening. None of that requires us to return to the skull cults and the blood altars. The miracle of Christianity was not that it invented the sacred. It redirected the human drive for transcendence away from appeasement of predatory powers and toward a moral and spiritual posture that could build a durable civilization.

I want more money poured into the archaeology of the deep past—not the archaeology that already knows what it is allowed to find, but the kind willing to follow the copper, the alignments, the beer residues, and the severed heads wherever they lead. I want the conversation about non-human intelligence to stop treating the entities as either cartoon aliens or harmless spirit guides. They have a politics. Humanity needs a politics equal to theirs.

The Politics of Heaven is my effort to map that battlefield. The four pillars above are the places where the next decade of serious digging should concentrate. The rest is commentary, color, and the long memory of a man who has watched the same patterns repeat across continents and millennia.

Do not be the mouse. Learn the snake’s methods. The enemy is the one who puts the mouse in the cage with the snake.  That is the answer to our many questions.  And in the UAP disclosures, we are getting a hint of that world.  

Footnotes

1.  Brian C. Muraresku, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name (St. Martin’s Press, 2020).

2.  R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978; later editions).

3.  On the ergot detoxification experiments and the University of Athens work referenced by Muraresku, see the discussion and citations in The Immortality Key, chapters on Eleusis and the chemistry of the kykeon.

4.  Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press, 2003) and subsequent biomolecular archaeology papers on mixed fermented beverages.

5.  For Göbekli Tepe skull cult and brewing evidence: Klaus Schmidt and subsequent publications of the German Archaeological Institute; recent chemical analyses of residues in stone vessels.

6.  Rujm el-Hiri (Gilgal Refa’im / Wheel of Giants): surveys and interpretations in Israeli archaeology literature; see also popular and specialist treatments of its astronomical alignments.

7.  Old Copper Culture / Lake Superior copper: standard Midwestern archaeology; purity and sourcing debates continue in archaeometallurgy literature.

8.  Windover site, Florida: Glen H. Doran et al., publications on the Archaic wet-site cemetery and preserved soft tissue.

9.  Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery, 1969) and later works on the continuity of non-human encounter narratives.

10.  Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2009).

11.  Biblical Archaeology Review, ongoing coverage of Jordan Valley and related megalithic sites; earlier issues treating dolmens remain limited relative to the density of the remains.

12.  On Hopewell copper and ceremonial complexes: standard Ohio Valley archaeology; Newark Earthworks and related lunar alignments.

13.  Dolores Cannon’s reported communications with Essene figures appear in her Conversations with Nostradamus series and related remote-viewing / past-life material; treated here as phenomenological data rather than conventional historiography.

14.  Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) and later works on Göbekli Tepe and catastrophic prehistory; useful for raising questions even where orthodoxy disagrees with conclusions.

Selected Bibliography

•  Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key. St. Martin’s Press, 2020.

•  Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck. The Road to Eleusis. 1978 and later editions.

•  MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Viking, 2009.

•  Vallée, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. 1969.

•  McGovern, Patrick E. Ancient Wine. Princeton University Press, 2003.

•  Schmidt, Klaus. Publications on Göbekli Tepe (German Archaeological Institute).

•  Doran, Glen H., et al. Windover site monographs and papers.

•  Hancock, Graham. Fingerprints of the Gods and subsequent titles.

•  Biblical Archaeology Society. Biblical Archaeology Review (ongoing).

•  Standard references on Rujm el-Hiri, Old Copper Culture, Hopewell, and Jordan Valley dolmens in regional archaeological journals.

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 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

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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.

My ‘Disclosure Day’ Review: More than just a statement about illegal immigration, MK Ultra, and the Inspiration for ‘The Politics of Heaven’

I have always lived with one foot in the ordinary world, local Ohio politics, family life along the Great Miami River in Butler County, and the other in the deeper currents of history, archaeology, and the unexplained. Growing up in the Cincinnati area, my family in the 1970s was already investigating strange lights in the sky and odd occurrences that didn’t fit neatly into everyday explanations. Those early experiences planted seeds that would later bloom into serious inquiry. I have never claimed to have been abducted or to have lived through anything as dramatic as the portrayal of Travis Walton’s ordeal in Fire in the Sky. My encounters have been subtler, more provocative, and in one memorable case, downright infuriating in their precision and timing. 

One such encounter stands out, not just because of what I saw firsthand in earlier instances, but also because of how it unfolded in response to something I said publicly. A couple of years ago, amid ongoing discussions about government transparency, surveillance, and the lingering shadows of the COVID era, I recorded a video. In it, I dared whatever forces—whether extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or black-budget human technology—might be listening to show themselves right there in my backyard of Butler County, Ohio. I pointed to a specific spot in the sky near Middletown. I wasn’t expecting fireworks or a close encounter of the third kind. I was making a point about power, information, and the dangers of hidden knowledge wielded by institutions that demand trust while offering none in return. 

A short time later—mere days—a ring of bright green lights appeared in the night sky exactly in that vicinity. Multiple residents captured video around 10:30 or 11 p.m. The lights rotated, hovered, then shot off with impossible speed. People stopped at stoplights, pulled out their phones, and filmed what appeared to be a circular formation moving counterclockwise before it vanished. Reports flooded local news: WCPO, WLWT, and others covered the strange rotating green lights over Middletown in Butler County. Witnesses described it as unlike any drone or conventional aircraft. Some called it frightening; others were fascinated. I wasn’t on site that night, but the proximity and timing were unmistakable. 

This wasn’t my first brush with the phenomenon. I had witnessed other UFO activity years earlier, including one that left me genuinely angry at the audacity of it. But this particular event felt targeted. Given my political activity—my role as a vocal conservative voice in Butler County, my history with local issues like Lakota schools, tax fights, and broader America First advocacy—I have long assumed surveillance. Decades ago, in a previous neighborhood in Mason, Ohio, I confronted a drug ring operating too close to families. That brought FBI interviews and scrutiny that carried over for years. Local and federal eyes have been on me, my family, and my work for a very long time. When you dare powers—visible or invisible—to reveal themselves while criticizing government overreach, you invite responses. Whether this was a genuine non-human craft, advanced human technology (perhaps reverse-engineered or projected), or something meant to rattle me, it landed with precision. 

I took it as a message. Not the kind that turns you into Richard Dreyfuss piling dirt in the living room from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but one that demands deeper reflection. I have visited Roswell. I have investigated the Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia—right across the river from Ohio territory familiar to me. There, UFO sightings were rampant alongside the Mothman reports in the 1960s. John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies (later a film with Richard Gere) details how lights in the sky, strange calls, and Men in Black phenomena intertwined with the creature sightings leading up to the Silver Bridge collapse. You cannot grapple with Mothman without confronting the UFO dimension. I went there for personal research, on a birthday trip no less, and came away convinced that these events form a pattern far older than modern disclosure narratives. 

Watching Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day recently brought it all into sharper focus. Spielberg, who has fielded countless UFO stories from the public over decades while making films like Close Encounters, treats the subject with a humanistic lens. The movie explores ordinary people pushing back against secrecy. I found it compelling, even if some critics dismissed elements. It reminded me of my own journey. Spielberg has no personal UFO encounter, by his account, yet he has shaped public imagination on the topic. I have had them, and they propelled me to write. 

My thoughts also turned to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Many reviewers scoffed at the interdimensional beings, calling it the weakest entry. I saw sophistication in it. The film uses Indy to explore ancient alien influence on human civilization—archaeologists from another realm, imprints on societies, crystal skulls tied to Roswell-like events and portals. It gave popular culture the moral license to think seriously about these ideas. It opened doors for shows like Ancient Aliens. The Peruvian connections, snakes as symbols (echoing the Garden of Eden), and hidden-in-plain-sight craft at the end resonated. I dedicated a chapter in my book to serpentine imagery and interdimensional influences. 

Broader Context: UFOs in Ohio and Butler County

Ohio has a rich history of sightings. The 1952 “Flatwoods Monster” event in nearby West Virginia involved a bright object and a strange entity. In 1994, Trumbull County saw police-chased lights. Middletown itself has a history of reports, including cigar-shaped objects. The 2023 green lights fit a pattern of rotating formations and rapid departures defying conventional explanation. Some dismissed it as a prank or drone, but the speed and multiple witnesses suggest more. Butler County’s location—near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, long rumored in UFO lore for reverse-engineering—adds intrigue. Reverse-engineering Roswell tech? Congressional testimony and retired officials hint at it. I know enough insiders to take such claims seriously. 

These aren’t new. Ancient texts, archaeology, and global myths describe sky beings, watchers, and technology influencing humanity. The Book of Enoch, Dead Sea Scrolls (which I viewed at the Museum of the Bible on my birthday), Nephilim, and giants speak to this. My book, The Politics of Heaven, dives into spiritual warfare, divine rebellion, population agendas, and how non-human intelligences have shaped history. Biblical conspiracies, demons, and interdimensional entities aren’t “crazy” when disclosure normalizes the conversation. Spielberg’s film and real events make mainstream what was once fringe. 

Government, Power, and the Politics of Disclosure

I have built my life around self-reliance, discipline (symbolized by my whip iconography from my family’s Kentucky heritage), and skepticism toward centralized power. The UFO debate often serves as a pretext for more government authority: “Trust us to protect you from them.” Yet the same institutions lied about COVID, mandates, elections, and more. Black budgets, compartmentalized programs at places like Wright-Patterson, and associations with supernatural tech-seeking make the government threat more immediate than hypothetical aliens. If entities have visited since civilization’s dawn, then history makes more sense—temples, sacrifices, and beliefs born of observed phenomena. 

My dare and the subsequent sighting felt like a ritual response. Call it out, and it appears. Whether it was a government projection (holographic or drone tech) to discredit me in political circles, actual craft, or something responding to frequency/intent, it happened. Proximity to my pointed location, in an area with patterns (Middletown, Monroe, West Chester), wasn’t a coincidence. It reinforced my view: information is power. Secrecy builds empires on lies. As a grand jury foreman, I saw institutional failures up close. Two-tier justice, surveillance of citizens like me—these are real. 

This encounter, revisited through Disclosure Day, crystallized my decision to finish the manuscript. I weave personal stories, including this one, with biblical archaeology, ancient civilizations (Axum, Britain BC, the Windover Bog People), giants, and modern spiritual warfare. Chapters explore how UFOs, interdimensional beings, and government secrecy intersect with heavenly politics. Reviewers call it wild, but grounded in my experiences and research. It answers questions Disclosure Day raises: What next? What does it mean for faith, power, and humanity? 

Conclusion: Toward Understanding

I stand by my premises. Aliens or their tech have been with us. Government lies pose clearer dangers. My encounter was deliberate, provocative, and inspirational. It led to The Politics of Heaven, a book for those seeking the next layer after disclosure. Look up Middletown UFO reports yourself. Study Keel, Enoch, archaeology. Question power. Live with discipline and curiosity. The sky holds answers, but so does rigorous inquiry into heaven’s politics. 

The modern cultural moment surrounding extraterrestrial disclosure sits at the intersection of fiction, data, belief, and institutional power. What once belonged exclusively to speculative literature and late-night radio has steadily entered mainstream discourse through cinema, congressional hearings, intelligence reports, and public polling. The convergence of these domains—popular storytelling, emerging government transparency, and shifting public opinion—marks not merely a fascination with the unknown, but a broader transition in how societies process uncertainty and authority.

Science fiction has long functioned as a precursor to technological and conceptual breakthroughs. From Jules Verne’s imagined submarines to Star Trek’s communicators, speculative narratives have historically inspired real-world innovation, shaping the ambitions of engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs 12. This feedback loop between imagination and material progress has created a cultural environment in which ideas once dismissed as fantasy are re-evaluated as plausible futures. The genre’s influence extends beyond gadgets into ethics and social systems, providing frameworks for grappling with artificial intelligence, space exploration, and extraterrestrial life itself 1. In this sense, science fiction does not merely predict the future—it establishes the intellectual conditions that make certain futures conceivable.

The normalization of extraterrestrial discourse is reflected in recent polling data, which reveals a decisive shift in public belief. As of June 2026, approximately 63% of Americans believe intelligent life exists beyond Earth, a substantial increase from fewer than half in 2010 3. Moreover, about 21% of respondents believe direct contact with extraterrestrial life has already occurred 3. These figures illustrate a cultural transformation: belief in extraterrestrial life is no longer marginal but widely accepted. Even more telling is that roughly 84% of Americans believe the federal government knows more about unidentified aerial phenomena than it has disclosed 4. This convergence of belief in extraterrestrials and skepticism toward institutional transparency underscores a broader erosion of trust in official narratives.

Parallel to this shift in public perception, the United States government has released a series of reports on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), providing an unprecedented—though limited—window into classified data. The 2021 preliminary assessment reviewed 144 documented cases, many supported by multi-sensor evidence and some exhibiting unusual flight characteristics such as abrupt acceleration and stationary hovering 5. By August 2022, the number of recorded incidents had expanded to 510, reflecting both increased reporting and reduced stigma among military personnel 6. The 2023 and subsequent reports further expanded the dataset to hundreds more cases, with total investigations surpassing 800 and later exceeding 1,600 by 2024, demonstrating a rapidly growing body of observations 75.

Despite this increase in data, a significant proportion of cases remain unresolved. While many sightings are eventually attributed to balloons, drones, or atmospheric phenomena, a persistent subset defies easy classification. Notably, no confirmed extraterrestrial origin has been established in these official reports, yet the continued presence of unexplained cases sustains public speculation 5. The reports emphasize aviation safety concerns and the need for improved data collection, framing UAP primarily as a defense and intelligence issue rather than a confirmation of alien technology 7. Nevertheless, the mere acknowledgment of unexplained aerial phenomena by government institutions has legitimized a topic long relegated to the fringes.

The cultural impact of this gradual disclosure cannot be separated from the role of media, particularly large-scale cinematic releases that translate complex or controversial ideas into accessible narratives. Films centered on extraterrestrial contact often serve as intermediaries between classified knowledge and public imagination, offering emotional and philosophical interpretations of what scientific reports leave unresolved. These narratives tend to humanize the unknown, framing extraterrestrial encounters in terms of curiosity, conflict, or moral testing. In doing so, they provide audiences with conceptual tools to process information that might otherwise provoke skepticism or fear.

At the same time, the enduring appeal of theories regarding ancient extraterrestrial influence demonstrates the persistence of alternative explanatory frameworks. The so-called “ancient aliens” hypothesis suggests that extraterrestrial beings contributed to early human civilizations, influencing architecture, religion, and technological development. While this theory remains popular in media and literature, it is widely regarded by professional archaeologists as pseudoarchaeology, often criticized for ignoring contextual evidence and substituting speculation for rigorous analysis 89. Scholars argue that such theories can undermine appreciation for human ingenuity by attributing historical achievements to non-human actors. Yet their popularity reflects a deeper cultural impulse: the desire to locate external origins for complex systems and unexplained accomplishments.

This impulse extends into modern interpretations of government secrecy and psychological control. Among the most controversial historical programs associated with these concerns is Project MK-Ultra, a covert CIA initiative conducted between 1953 and the mid-1960s. The program involved extensive experimentation with drugs, hypnosis, and sensory manipulation in an attempt to develop methods of controlling human behavior 10. Many of these experiments were conducted without informed consent, leading to lasting ethical and legal controversies when the program was exposed in the 1970s 11. MK-Ultra’s documented abuses have contributed to a broader skepticism toward intelligence agencies, reinforcing narratives in which governments possess capabilities that remain hidden from public scrutiny.

The persistence of such ideas reflects the influence of narrative storytelling, which often amplifies real-world events into more dramatic or comprehensive systems of control. This blending of fact and fiction can complicate efforts to establish a shared understanding of what is known, unknown, and unknowable.

Within this landscape, the concept of “disclosure” operates as both a political and psychological threshold. It represents not only the potential revelation of classified information but also the collective readiness of society to integrate disruptive knowledge. Historical precedents suggest that transformative discoveries—whether heliocentrism, evolution, or nuclear technology—require gradual assimilation. Sudden exposure to paradigm-shifting ideas can provoke resistance, denial, or reinterpretation within existing belief systems. Consequently, any process of disclosure, whether regarding extraterrestrial life or advanced technology, is likely to unfold incrementally, mediated by cultural narratives and institutional frameworks.

Religious perspectives add another dimension to this process. The possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence raises fundamental questions about humanity’s place in the universe, challenging anthropocentric interpretations of creation and divine purpose. Yet many theological traditions possess conceptual flexibility, allowing for the existence of life beyond Earth without negating core doctrines. The idea of a universe governed by a singular creator is not inherently incompatible with multiple inhabited worlds. Rather than undermining faith, the discovery of extraterrestrial life could expand the scope of theological inquiry, prompting reconsideration of divine agency and cosmic order.

Public reaction to such possibilities appears increasingly nuanced. Polling data indicates that a majority of Americans would respond to extraterrestrial contact with curiosity rather than fear, though a significant proportion also anticipates anxiety 3. This duality reflects the tension between fascination and uncertainty that characterizes human engagement with the unknown. Cultural conditioning through decades of science fiction has arguably prepared audiences for the idea of extraterrestrial life, normalizing it to a degree unimaginable in earlier generations.

At the same time, political framing continues to shape interpretations of disclosure. Debates over transparency, national security, and governmental authority influence how information is released and received. Bipartisan interest in UAP investigations suggests that the issue transcends traditional ideological divides, yet its implications can be mobilized within broader narratives about governance, sovereignty, and public trust. The question of who controls knowledge—and who decides when it is revealed—remains central to the discourse.

The interplay between science fiction, empirical data, and cultural belief ultimately reveals a society in transition. As technological capabilities expand and information becomes more accessible, distinctions between speculation and reality grow increasingly porous. Ideas once confined to fiction are reexamined through the lens of possibility, while scientific findings are interpreted within preexisting narrative frameworks. This dynamic creates both opportunities and challenges: opportunities for expanded knowledge and imaginative exploration, and challenges in maintaining epistemic clarity.

Future developments in astronomy, planetary science, and space exploration may provide more definitive answers regarding extraterrestrial life. Missions to Mars, Europa, and other celestial bodies aim to detect biosignatures or evidence of past life, potentially transforming speculation into empirical reality. At the same time, continued analysis of UAP data may resolve many currently unexplained cases, narrowing the gap between observation and explanation. Whether these processes culminate in confirmation of extraterrestrial intelligence remains uncertain, but their trajectory is unmistakable.

In this context, disclosure is less a singular event than an ongoing process—a gradual unfolding shaped by technological progress, institutional decisions, and cultural interpretation. The convergence of widespread belief, partial governmental transparency, and influential storytelling suggests that society is moving toward a new equilibrium in its understanding of the cosmos. This transformation is not driven solely by evidence but by the narratives constructed around that evidence, which determine how it is perceived, debated, and ultimately integrated into collective knowledge.

The enduring power of science fiction lies in its ability to anticipate and normalize the unfamiliar. By envisioning encounters with the unknown, it prepares audiences to confront them, bridging the gap between imagination and reality. As the boundaries of knowledge continue to expand, this role becomes increasingly significant, guiding public discourse through uncharted intellectual territory. In the evolving dialogue surrounding extraterrestrial life and government disclosure, fiction and fact are not opposing forces but complementary elements in a broader cultural process—one that continues to redefine humanity’s place in an ever-expanding universe.  And with all that said, the movie, Disclosure Day, is a fantastic movie everyone should see.  It’s important.

—

Footnotes

[1] Data on public belief in extraterrestrial life: 3

[2] Public perception of government secrecy on UFOs: 4

[3] 2021 UAP preliminary report findings: 5

[4] 2022 UAP report total cases (510): 6

[5] Expansion of UAP reports through 2023–2024 (800+ to 1600+ cases): 75

[6] Science fiction influence on technological innovation: 12

[7] Archaeological criticism of ancient aliens theory: 89

[8] MK-Ultra program overview and methods: 10

[9] MK-Ultra experimentation and exposure: 11

Bibliography (Selected; expanded in full manuscript with footnotes)

•  Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. (Core text on Point Pleasant events, UFOs, and interconnected phenomena.)

•  Spielberg, Steven, dir. Disclosure Day. Universal Pictures, 2026. (Film exploring disclosure and government secrecy.)

•  Spielberg, Steven, dir. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Paramount, 2008. (Interdimensional beings and ancient influences.)

•  Biblical Archaeology Review (various issues; lifelong reading source).

•  NUFORC and local news reports on Ohio/Middletown sightings (WCPO, WLWT, 2023).

•  Enoch, Book of (Dead Sea Scrolls context).

•  Additional sources: Clark, Jerome. UFO encyclopedias; reports on Wright-Patterson; ancient-astronaut theories grounded in archaeology (e.g., Peruvian sites, crystal-skulls lore); congressional UAP testimony. 

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.

My UFO Encounter: A Personal Dare, a Local Sighting, and the Inspiration for The Politics of Heaven

I have always lived with one foot in the ordinary world of aerospace program management, local Ohio politics, family life along the Great Miami River in Butler County, and the other in the deeper currents of history, archaeology, and the unexplained. Growing up in the Cincinnati area, my family in the 1970s was already investigating strange lights in the sky and odd occurrences that didn’t fit neatly into everyday explanations. Those early experiences planted seeds that would later bloom into serious inquiry. I have never claimed to have been abducted or to have lived through anything as dramatic as the portrayal of Travis Walton’s ordeal in Fire in the Sky. My encounters have been subtler, more provocative, and in one memorable case, downright infuriating in their precision and timing. 

One such encounter stands out, not just because of what I saw firsthand in earlier instances, but also because of how it unfolded in response to something I said publicly. A couple of years ago, amid ongoing discussions about government transparency, surveillance, and the lingering shadows of the COVID era, I recorded a video. In it, I dared whatever forces—whether extraterrestrial, interdimensional, or black-budget human technology—might be listening to show themselves right there in my backyard of Butler County, Ohio. I pointed to a specific spot in the sky near Middletown. I wasn’t expecting fireworks or a close encounter of the third kind. I was making a point about power, information, and the dangers of hidden knowledge wielded by institutions that demand trust while offering none in return. 

A few days later, a ring of bright green lights appeared in the night sky in that vicinity. Multiple residents captured video around 10:30 or 11 p.m. The lights rotated, hovered, then shot off with impossible speed. People stopped at stoplights, pulled out their phones, and filmed what appeared to be a circular formation moving counterclockwise before it vanished. Reports flooded local news: WCPO, WLWT, and others covered the strange rotating green lights over Middletown in Butler County. Witnesses described it as unlike any drone or conventional aircraft. Some called it frightening; others were fascinated. I wasn’t on site that night, but the proximity and timing were unmistakable. 

This wasn’t my first brush with the phenomenon. I had witnessed other UFO activity years earlier, including one that left me genuinely angry at the audacity of it. But this particular event felt targeted. Given my political activity—my role as a vocal conservative voice in Butler County, my history with local issues like Lakota schools, tax fights, and broader America First advocacy—I have long assumed surveillance. Decades ago, in a previous neighborhood in Mason, Ohio, I confronted a drug ring operating too close to families. That brought FBI interviews and scrutiny that carried over for years. Local and federal eyes have been on me, my family, and my work. When you dare powers—visible or invisible—to reveal themselves while criticizing government overreach, you invite responses. Whether this was a genuine non-human craft, advanced human technology (perhaps reverse-engineered or projected), or something meant to rattle me, it landed with precision. 

I took it as a message. Not the kind that turns you into Richard Dreyfuss piling dirt in the living room from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but one that demands deeper reflection. I have visited Roswell. I have investigated the Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia—right across the river from Ohio territory familiar to me. There, UFO sightings were rampant alongside the Mothman reports in the 1960s. John Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies (later a film with Richard Gere) details how lights in the sky, strange calls, and Men in Black phenomena intertwined with the creature sightings leading up to the Silver Bridge collapse. You cannot grapple with Mothman without confronting the UFO dimension. I went there for personal research, on a birthday trip no less, and came away convinced that these events form a pattern far older than modern disclosure narratives. 

Watching Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day recently brought it all into sharper focus. Spielberg, who has fielded countless UFO stories from the public over decades while making films like Close Encounters, treats the subject with a humanistic lens. The movie explores ordinary people pushing back against secrecy. I found it compelling, even if some critics dismissed elements. It reminded me of my own journey. Spielberg has no personal UFO encounter, by his account, yet he has shaped public imagination on the topic. I have had them, and they propelled me to write. 

My thoughts also turned to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Many reviewers scoffed at the interdimensional beings, calling it the weakest entry. I saw sophistication in it. The film uses Indy to explore ancient alien influence on human civilization—archaeologists from another realm, imprints on societies, crystal skulls tied to Roswell-like events and portals. It gave popular culture the moral license to think seriously about these ideas. It opened doors for shows like Ancient Aliens. The Peruvian connections, snakes as symbols (echoing the Garden of Eden), and hidden-in-plain-sight craft at the end resonated. I dedicated a chapter in my book to serpentine imagery and interdimensional influences. 

Broader Context: UFOs in Ohio and Butler County

Ohio has a rich history of sightings. The 1952 “Flatwoods Monster” event in nearby West Virginia involved a bright object and a strange entity. In 1994, Trumbull County saw police-chased lights. Middletown itself has a history of reports, including cigar-shaped objects. The 2023 green lights fit a pattern of rotating formations and rapid departures defying conventional explanation. Some dismissed it as a prank or drone, but the speed and multiple witnesses suggest more. Butler County’s location—near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, long rumored in UFO lore for reverse-engineering—adds intrigue. Reverse-engineering Roswell tech? Congressional testimony and retired officials hint at it. I know enough insiders to take such claims seriously. 

These aren’t new. Ancient texts, archaeology, and global myths describe sky beings, watchers, and technology influencing humanity. The Book of Enoch, Dead Sea Scrolls (which I viewed at the Museum of the Bible on my birthday), Nephilim, and giants speak to this. My book, The Politics of Heaven, dives into spiritual warfare, divine rebellion, population agendas, and the ways non-human intelligences have shaped history. Biblical conspiracies, demons, and interdimensional entities aren’t “crazy” when disclosure normalizes the conversation. Spielberg’s film and real events make mainstream what was once fringe. 

Government, Power, and the Politics of Disclosure

I have built my life around self-reliance, discipline (symbolized by my whip iconography from my family’s Kentucky heritage), and skepticism toward centralized power. The UFO debate often serves as a pretext for more government authority: “Trust us to protect you from them.” Yet the same institutions lied about COVID, mandates, elections, and more. Black budgets, compartmentalized programs at places like Wright-Patterson, and associations with supernatural tech-seeking make the government threat more immediate than hypothetical aliens. If entities have visited since civilization’s dawn, then history makes more sense—temples, sacrifices, and beliefs born of observed phenomena. 

My dare and the subsequent sighting felt like a ritual response. Call it out, and it appears. Whether it was a government projection (holographic or drone tech) to discredit me in political circles, actual craft, or something responding to frequency/intent, it happened. Proximity to my pointed location, in an area with patterns (Middletown, Monroe, West Chester), wasn’t a coincidence. It reinforced my view: information is power. Secrecy builds empires on lies. As a grand jury foreman, I saw institutional failures up close. Two-tier justice, surveillance of citizens like me—these are real. 

I don’t fear aliens landing and applying for jobs (though I joked I’d hire hard workers who crossed interstellar distances). The real danger is unaccountable power using the phenomenon for control. My political consulting, school advocacy, and anti-tax work matter. Associating with “fringe” topics risks credibility, yet truth-seeking demands it. Overman philosophy—imposing will on chaos, as in model rocketry with my grandson in bad weather—applies here. Face the unknown with resilience.

Writing The Politics of Heaven

This encounter, revisited through Disclosure Day, crystallized my decision to finish the manuscript. I weave personal stories, including this one, with biblical archaeology, ancient civilizations (Axum, Britain BC, Windover bog people), giants, and modern spiritual warfare. Chapters explore how UFOs, interdimensional beings, and government secrecy intersect with heavenly politics. Reviewers call it wild, but grounded in my experiences and research. It answers questions Disclosure Day raises: What next? What does it mean for faith, power, and humanity? 

Bibliography (Selected; expanded in full manuscript with footnotes)

•  Keel, John A. The Mothman Prophecies. 1975. (Core text on Point Pleasant events, UFOs, and interconnected phenomena.)

•  Spielberg, Steven, dir. Disclosure Day. Universal Pictures, 2026. (Film exploring disclosure and government secrecy.)

•  Spielberg, Steven, dir. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Paramount, 2008. (Interdimensional beings and ancient influences.)

•  Biblical Archaeology Review (various issues; lifelong reading source).

•  NUFORC and local news reports on Ohio/Middletown sightings (WCPO, WLWT, 2023).

•  Enoch, Book of (Dead Sea Scrolls context).

•  Additional sources: Clark, Jerome. UFO encyclopedias; reports on Wright-Patterson; ancient-astronaut theories grounded in archaeology (e.g., Peruvian sites, crystal-skulls lore); congressional UAP testimony. 

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.

UFO Disclosure: Historical Context, Cultural Impact, and the Interdimensional Reality

Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), now officially termed Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), have transitioned from fringe speculation to mainstream discourse in recent years. The concept of UFO disclosure refers to the systematic release of information by governments, military agencies, and credible institutions regarding unexplained aerial phenomena. This shift has profound implications for science, security, and culture. While the notion of extraterrestrial visitation has long captivated the public imagination, recent developments—including congressional hearings, Pentagon reports, and high-profile media coverage—suggest that the phenomenon warrants serious consideration beyond conspiracy theories. The question is no longer whether UFOs exist, but what they represent and how society should respond to their disclosure.

Historically, UFO sightings surged in the mid-20th century, coinciding with technological advancements and geopolitical tensions during the Cold War. The Roswell incident of 1947, often cited as the genesis of modern UFO lore, sparked widespread speculation about crashed alien spacecraft and government cover-ups. In response, the U.S. Air Force launched Project Sign in 1947, followed by Project Grudge in 1949, and ultimately Project Blue Book in 1952. Project Blue Book became the most extensive government program investigating UFOs, collecting over 12,000 reports before its termination in 1969. While most cases were attributed to natural phenomena or misidentified aircraft, 701 remained unexplained (Britannica, 2025; Wikipedia, 2025). The official stance concluded that UFOs posed no threat to national security and lacked evidence of extraterrestrial origin. However, critics argue that the Condon Report, which justified the program’s closure, reflected institutional bias rather than scientific rigor (History.com, 2025). These early investigations established a pattern of secrecy and skepticism that shaped public perception for decades.

The modern era of disclosure began in 2017 when The New York Times revealed the existence of the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). This revelation, coupled with the release of declassified Navy videos depicting objects with extraordinary flight characteristics, reignited global interest. Subsequent reports by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Department of Defense’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) have documented hundreds of UAP incidents, some defying conventional explanations (ODNI, 2023; DoD, 2024). The 2024 consolidated report noted that while many sightings were attributable to balloons or drones, a subset exhibited anomalous behavior, including transmedium travel and acceleration beyond known propulsion systems (DoD, 2024). Congressional hearings featuring whistleblowers such as David Grusch further intensified the debate, with claims of crash retrieval programs and non-human biologics entering the public record. Although these assertions remain controversial, they underscore a growing consensus that UAPs merit scientific investigation rather than dismissal.

Media figures have played a pivotal role in amplifying the disclosure narrative. Tucker Carlson, once reticent on the subject, has devoted extensive coverage to UAPs, interviewing lawmakers like Rep. Tim Burchett and discussing classified briefings that suggest underwater UFOs—so-called USOs—capable of moving at 200 mph in ocean trenches (Carlson Interview, 2025). Carlson has hinted at a “spiritual component” to the phenomenon, describing aspects so disturbing that he hesitates to share them publicly (Newsweek, 2023). Similarly, Megyn Kelly has hosted discussions with historian Victor Davis Hanson and former intelligence officials, exploring claims of reverse-engineered alien technology and the cultural ramifications of disclosure (Kelly Show, 2025). Joe Rogan’s podcast has featured prominent voices such as Bob Lazar, Jacques Vallée, and David Grusch, delving into theories ranging from extraterrestrial visitation to simulation hypotheses (JRE Library, 2025). These platforms have not only normalized UFO discourse but also framed it within broader philosophical and scientific contexts, challenging audiences to reconsider humanity’s place in the cosmos.

The cultural impact of UFO disclosure extends beyond media sensationalism. It intersects with epistemology, theology, and sociology, raising questions about authority, trust, and existential meaning. Historically, UFO narratives have mirrored societal anxieties—from Cold War fears of Soviet technological superiority to contemporary concerns about government transparency. Today, disclosure challenges entrenched paradigms, compelling institutions to reconcile empirical anomalies with scientific orthodoxy. Popular culture, from Hollywood films to streaming documentaries like The Age of Disclosure, reflects this tension, oscillating between skepticism and wonder. As anthropologist Diana Walsh Pasulka observes, UFOs function as “technological angels,” embodying both scientific mystery and spiritual symbolism (Pasulka, 2019). This duality explains why disclosure evokes not only curiosity but also apprehension, as it destabilizes ontological certainties that underpin modern civilization.

Speculative theories about UAP origins further complicate the discourse. The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH), positing that UFOs are spacecraft from other planets, remains the most popular explanation. However, the interdimensional hypothesis (IDH) has gained traction among scholars and ufologists. Pioneered by thinkers like J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, IDH suggests that UAPs may originate from parallel realities or higher dimensions, exploiting quantum anomalies to traverse spacetime (Patheos, 2024; Vallée, 1975). Contemporary research in quantum physics and multiverse theory lends conceptual plausibility to this idea, even if empirical validation remains elusive. Tim Lomas (2023) argues for “epistemic humility” in evaluating such hypotheses, noting that UAP behavior—such as instantaneous acceleration and materialization—defies classical physics and may indicate non-local phenomena (Lomas, 2023). If true, the implications are staggering: reality may be far more complex than the materialist paradigm assumes, encompassing layers of existence beyond human perception. This perspective resonates with ultraterrestrial models proposed by physicist Harold Puthoff, which entertain scenarios involving time travelers, ancient civilizations, or entities operating outside conventional spacetime (Journal of Cosmology, 2024).

The philosophical and theological ramifications of these theories are profound. If UAPs represent interdimensional intelligences, traditional dichotomies between science and spirituality collapse, inviting a synthesis of metaphysics and empirical inquiry. Such a paradigm shift could redefine humanity’s understanding of consciousness, agency, and destiny. It may also catalyze ethical debates about contact protocols, planetary stewardship, and the moral status of non-human intelligences. As Vallée cautions, disclosure is not merely a scientific event but a cultural transformation with unpredictable consequences for religion, governance, and social cohesion. Governments have reportedly convened think tanks to assess these impacts, with some concluding that full disclosure could destabilize global institutions—a rationale often cited for continued secrecy (NewsNation, 2025). Whether this paternalism is justified remains contentious, but it underscores the gravity of the issue.

UFO disclosure represents a watershed moment in human history, challenging epistemic boundaries and cultural norms. From the secrecy of Project Blue Book to the transparency of ODNI reports, the trajectory of UAP discourse reflects a gradual shift from ridicule to legitimacy. Media figures like Carlson, Kelly, and Rogan have accelerated this transition, framing UFOs as both scientific enigmas and philosophical provocations. While the extraterrestrial hypothesis dominates popular imagination, interdimensional models invite deeper reflection on the nature of reality and consciousness. Ultimately, disclosure is not an end but a beginning—a call to expand our intellectual horizons and prepare for a future where the unknown becomes knowable. Whether humanity meets this challenge with wisdom or hubris will determine the contours of the next great chapter in our cosmic story.

UFO disclosure has evolved from Cold War secrecy under Project Blue Book to contemporary transparency through ODNI and AARO reports. Media figures such as Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Joe Rogan have mainstreamed the debate, while documentaries like The Age of Disclosure amplify claims of crash retrieval programs and non-human biologics. Beyond empirical anomalies, disclosure raises cultural, philosophical, and theological questions, challenging materialist assumptions and inviting consideration of interdimensional hypotheses. Whether UAPs are extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial, or manifestations of higher-dimensional realities, their study demands epistemic humility and interdisciplinary inquiry. Disclosure is not merely about UFOs—it is about redefining humanity’s place in a universe that is likely far stranger than imagined.

—

References (APA Style)

• Britannica. (2025). Project Blue Book. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/topic/Project-Blue-Book

• Department of Defense. (2024). Fiscal Year 2024 Consolidated Annual Report on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena. Retrieved from https://media.defense.gov

• History.com. (2025). Project Blue Book: The US Government’s Secret UFO Investigations. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/articles/project-blue-book

• Lomas, T. (2023). The Ultraterrestrial Hypothesis: A Case for Scientific Openness to an Interdimensional Explanation for UAP. Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

• Newsweek. (2023). Why Tucker Carlson’s Scared to Report on UFOs. Retrieved from https://www.newsweek.com

• Patheos. (2024). UAP: The Interdimensional Hypothesis. Retrieved from https://www.patheos.com

• Pasulka, D. W. (2019). *

Rich Hoffman

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