The Airships of Prometheus
“I point to something new: certainly for a democratic type there exists the danger of the barbarian, but one has looked for it only in the depths. There exists also another type of barbarian, who comes from the heights: a species of conquering and ruling natures in search of material to mold. Prometheus was this kind of barbarian.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
On the night of November 17, 1896, many residents of San Francisco, and other nearby parts of California, observed a mysterious craft with bright lights. The airship was at times flying at such low altitude that some of the witnesses reported hearing the voices of its pilots and crew as they loudly discussed a rapid adjustment of course and elevation in order to avoid obstacles in the city. At one point, this airship cast its searchlight down onto the Cliff House, startling multiple witnesses who were quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle. The mystery airship came back on December 2, 1896, with notable public figures being among the witnesses of this Jules Vernesque contraption, as reported by The San Francisco Call. The news story dominated local media coverage for weeks. Hundreds of people in tens of states across America saw these large, seemingly sophisticated, and high-speed airships in the sky years before the first planes and dirigibles were flying.
In Closer Encounters (2021), my argument had been that the Mystery Airships represented the initial phase in the engineering efforts of a nascent breakaway civilization forged by elites in the Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Germanic world. I suggested that the Sonora Aero Club of California may have played a part in their development and construction. I connected the data points of a putative Prussian corporatist airship venture and Anglo-American Eugenics to J.P. Morgan and the Dulles brothers financing the rise of the Third Reich, together with the Harriman railroad empire, which was already buying vast tracts of land in Argentina, to which fugitive Nazis eventually escaped, even before the start of World War II. The key breakthrough or Aufbruch becomes the engineering of die Glocke or “the Bell” in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in the early 1940s.
The problem is that, in the wake of disclosures by the US government whistleblower David Grusch, we now know that the 1933 UFO crash at Magenta in Fascist Italy actually happened. Once one considers the details of the Magenta crash retrieval story, especially with a view to the almost immediate involvement of Nazi Germany, it becomes very clear that the Bell was the result of a reverse engineering project based on study of the Magenta craft, the core of which was bell-shaped. Now it makes sense why the project was based in Czechoslovakia, a third-party Axis country, rather than in Germany itself, and why Giuseppe Belluzzo, an Italian, was part of the Project Chronos engineering team under the leadership of Hans Kammler (aka., the Kammler Staff). This is because it was a joint project of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, albeit with the Germans taking the lead from a technical and scientific standpoint. But the project was initiated by Benito Mussolini, who brought the Germans in to begin with in 1933.
So, if the Mystery Airships were not an earlier stage of breakaway technological development by the same elite who masterminded the Bell breakthrough, then what were they? Who built and flew them? Were they even built? There is no question that these Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) were witnessed all across the United States from late 1896 through 1897, and not just by civilians. Some of the most prominent judges, sheriffs, attorneys, and mayors of towns interacted with the pilots of these airships and in certain cases were even given tours of these Jules Verne style contraptions. But did the craft exist?
The problem with claiming that the supposed “technology” witnessed and reported on by so many Americans during this early UFO flap was far in advance of anything aeronautical engineers were working on at the time, is that there appears to be no coherent or consistent technology involved in these sightings at all. Some people just saw phantom lights when looking at the same phenomenon that others saw as one type of airship, and yet others described as a different type of airship, even in the context of the same sighting at a given place on a certain night. When we expand the scope to the entire flap, the plethora of airship descriptions is truly bewildering – especially considering how close up some of them were observed, including by individuals who got to stand next to the “craft” or even look inside them while they had landed on someone’s farm to supposedly “resupply.” The descriptions of how the airships work was just as variant, and in each case impossible. Jules Verne era science fiction, rather than anything that could ever be made to fly. This might be understandable if we were dealing only with descriptions given to ordinary citizens by secretive inventors or pilots guarding a new technology.
Where the story becomes deeply disturbing is when we turn to the case of the patent attorneys. Two very prominent patent attorneys of the time gave statements to the press claiming to be the legal representatives of the enigmatic airship inventor. Their descriptions of even the basic technology and scientific principles involved not only contradict each other, we now know in retrospect that each is equally absurd. What is far more disturbing is that the first of these two patent attorneys, a certain George D. Collins, gave a second interview to The San Francisco Chronicle on November 24, 1896, wherein he claimed that the extensive statements he had made just a couple of days earlier, on November 22, including claims of having seen the airship in operation, were made while in a trance state. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Collins “has just been aroused from a hypnotic condition into which some unknown Svengali plunged him a week ago.” His “inventor” client, a certain Dr. E. H. Benjamin, turned out to be a dentist who had invented a new type of dental bridge and who had come to Collins with nothing more than a toy model of an airship that he had long “dreamed” of inventing! Collins was a very prominent patent attorney. He certainly had no reason to make such a fool of himself. We have to believe that he was actually possessed. We also have to look, as John Keel rightly does in Operation Trojan Horse (1970), at the entire Phantom Airship phenomenon in the context of the craze of Spiritualism that had broken out in America in the late nineteenth century when seances were the rage and “physical mediums” were demonstrating both materialization and levitation.
Despite how deceptive and deviously manipulative the Mystery Airship manifestations were, they seem to ultimately have been benevolent in their intent. Benevolent, that is, in a Promethean sense. At a time before the first plane built by the Wright Brothers, when most people still believed that “if men had been meant to fly God would have given us wings,” and the first aerial inventors were being ridiculed for struggling to go beyond hot air balloons to pursue the dream of what, decades later, eventually became the Zeppelin, these manifestations seem to have been intended as encouragement. The many tens of newspaper articles about the airships, their crews, and their enigmatic genius inventors, were cheering on innovators – as if to say, “you can do it!” It is not for God to decide whether men are “meant” to fly. Where there is a will there is a way, and the sky’s the limit.
The US government and certain industrialists who saw a huge economic threat to the railroad industry from a potential airship invention probably got seriously involved in investigating these phenomena. The US government would have been most alarmed by claims from certain of the airship pilots that they planned to use the craft to completely obliterate the city of Havana “in forty-eight hours” in an aerial bombardment of Cuba (as reported by The San Francisco Chronicle Volume LXXX. No. 178). These pilots claimed that they were keeping the airship secret mainly because they were going to use it to advance certain foreign policy and military objectives of America without clearance from the Congress or any other branch of the elected government. If that were true, it would have consisted of both Treason and a serious threat to US National Security by potentially provoking a retaliatory attack on American soil by a foreign power such as Spain.
There is no doubt that the Feds would have “interviewed” poor Mr. Collins at great length only to eventually realize that he had been – from their conservative Christian perspective – subjected to “diabolical deception” and “demonic manipulation.” I venture the speculation that this is actually when an inter-agency group called the Collins Elite was formed – not in 1947, but in 1897 – and that the reason why it is called the “Collins” Elite (which no UFO researcher seems to know) is because it was named after the case of the prominent patent attorney who was subjected to possession and public humiliation. Already by the turn of the century, circa 1900, I think that there was a secret group of UAP researchers in America consisting of high-level government officials and corporate magnates from the Brown Brothers Harriman railroad empire, who later played a key role in setting up the CIA together with the Dulles brothers.
My suggestion is that these men came to believe that what produced the Airship Mystery was “the Prince of the Air.” From that moment onward, about 120 years ago, at the highest or deepest levels, the Close Encounter phenomenon has been considered a spectacle produced by Satan. This continues to be their position today. Anyone familiar with mediumistic trances, materialization, and the collective unconscious, would also see it as hardly a coincidence that the Phantom Airship manifestations took place in 1896–1897, and H.G. Wells was writing his War of the Worlds from 1895–1898. This diabolical “synchronicity” (to use the term of C.G. Jung) could not have been lost on the Collins Elite either.
In his 1959 book, Flying Saucers, the Swiss-German psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, offered an alternative to the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis: that UFOs are materializations psychically projected from out of the collective unconscious, and that they signal some apocalyptic juncture in the human relationship with a technological science that had, for the first time, reached the point of being able to destroy the natural world. For reasons that will become clearer as we proceed, it is likely that Jung’s hypothesis about the phenomenon had already been considered by the Collins Elite, and that as part of a broad campaign to prepare the public mind for an emergency Disclosure forced upon the government by the side of the phenomenon itself, a dramatized form of this hypothesis had been leaked into the screenplay for the 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet. We will come back to this masterpiece with its “monsters from the Id.” It is a movie that is still disturbingly relevant. Throughout his study, subtitled A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Jung puts UFOs on a historical continuum of aerial phenomena that have taken many shapes and forms at various times and places, and that have deeply impacted the religious consciousness of the human race. Jung warns of the Trickster archetype taking a new quasi-technological form from out of the collective shadow of humanity.
According to Jung, the Trickster is a mercurial “shape-shifter,” a “daemonic” being known for “his fondness for sly jokes and malicious pranks.” Jung explicitly connects this mischievous behavior with poltergeists and other phenomena studied by parapsychologists (who usually do not have an appreciation for the psychology of the Trickster). Jinxes and various other bewitched happenings, often of an at least vaguely menacing character, are expressions of this Trickster, which Jung in turn defines as the collective analog of the personal “shadow.” Just as we each have a shadow side to our psyche that contains unconsciously repressed contents, which find their ways to the surface in behavior that is beyond our conscious control (and often at odds with the personality that we want to present), our society as a whole has something like a shadow on the level of the collective unconscious. The Trickster is one of the archetypes operating from out of the collective unconscious, and according to Jung it is the only one that rebels against the repression of an overly rule-governed, civilized pattern of life. The personal shadows of individuals in society become channels for the collective emergence of the Trickster in situations like this.
In our contemporary global society, unlike in that of biblical antiquity, the form of rule-governed repression is not a theocratic state, but a technocracy or scientific dictatorship that controls peoples’ lives and their ways of thinking at a level much higher than that of their putatively representative governments. Consequently, in this materialistic age dominated by the power of technology, the Trickster must manifest in a technological form. That is where the connection to Close Encounters comes in.
…The Trickster is always an expression of barbaric or archaic unconsciousness revolting against the increasing consciousness of civilized life…
Jung claims that the Trickster is always an expression of barbaric or archaic unconsciousness revolting against the increasing consciousness of civilized life, and he suggests that somehow, if we were to achieve full consciousness, not just individually, but societally, we would be free from the “evil” qualities of this disruptive force. Jung does not seem to realize that his own suggestion that the UFO phenomenon is a manifestation of the Trickster problematizes this postulation. Jung can only think that perhaps the collective unconscious is producing Close Encounters with UFOs and their occupants in order to overpower the materialistic mindset and will to instrumental control of modern man, so as to bring him back to nature in some romantically primitive and naively ecological sense.
…Prometheus is a consciousness-raising civilizer – that is the nature of his rebellion, not a revolt of the unconscious against civilization...
Despite the fact that one of his own disciples, the psychologist Carl Kerenyi wrote an entire Jungian archetypal analysis of Prometheus, it is lost on Jung that there is at least one image of the Trickster – one avatar of the Trickster – that is a radical counter-example to his general characterization of this archetype. Prometheus is a consciousness-raising civilizer – that is the nature of his rebellion, not a revolt of the unconscious against civilization. What if the technological manifestation of the Trickster in the form of Close Encounters is a gift-giving Promethean modality of this archetype? The locales of UFO crash retrievals have been referred to be government insiders as “donation sites.” What if it was the airships of Prometheus in the night sky over San Francisco in the winter of 1896?
When the promulgators of putative UFO – or should I say UAP – ‘Disclosure’ began using the term Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) it really got on my nerves, just as replacing the term UFO with the jargon of UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) did. But I am starting to see it differently. There is in this world an Intelligence that is so far superior to human intelligence, and that in some ways seems to be cognitively structured more like an octopus. This NHI is capable of producing UAP – together with apparent pilots or occupants – in a plethora of shapes and sizes. I can see the utility of not referring to a broad spectrum of these phenomena as “UFOs” because they are not objects in the reductive physicalist sense.
They are what Psychical Researchers or Parapsychologists would call “veridical hallucinations” so solid as to be “psychic materializations” akin to the things that took shape out of “ectoplasm” during late 19th century mediumistic trances, which were scientifically studied by some of the leading minds of the era, such as Sir William Crookes at the British Society for Psychical Research. But this “psychic” jargon is also hopelessly obsolete in its implicit metaphysical assumptions. Only our own latest developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence have provided us with a somewhat accurate analogy for what this thing is and how it can do what it does.
Consider the reflections of computer scientist and astronomer Jacques Vallée. A resident of San Francisco for decades, he helped to develop the core architecture for the Pentagon’s ARPANET and has done other projects with the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). In his guise as the world’s foremost UFO researcher, Vallée was the basis for the character of Claude Lacombe – a French scientist in America – in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Vallée was a consultant for Steven Spielberg during production of the film. Currently, he is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. Throughout his many years of research and writing, Vallée has always seriously considered the psychic dimensions of Close Encounters. But with his background as an information scientist, he also contemplates whether an unidentified recovered “object” may have been designed to be an Easter egg of sorts, giving us a clue that we may be living inside of an informational cosmos that is symbolic – not physical – in its fundamental structure. In his recent book Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, about a 1945 UFO crash and recovery near the Trinity test site in New Mexico, Vallée writes:
What if the object was a product of a form of information physics (a science in gestation) rather than simply a physical vehicle? What if it was both physical and, for the lack of a better word, “psychic”? What was it doing, depositing weird telepathic creatures at an ancient traditional site, one month to the day after mankind’s first large-scale, historic liberation of the Atom? Going one step further… what we experience as the physical universe may be a giant simulation created by far advanced minds… humans may be characters in a very advanced kind of videogame… modern technology is already making it difficult to distinguish between physical reality and projected images impacting on our senses.
In his two most classic works on the subject of UFOs (or UAP), namely Operation Trojan Horse (1970) and The Mothman Prophecies (1975), John Keel demonstrates that many – if not most – so-called “UFOs” and their occupants are not nuts and bolts craft piloted by space aliens. They are materializations of a spectral energy that encompasses this planet, both in space and throughout time, but that is normally operating on frequencies beyond the range of human perception or outside the limits of intelligibility defined by human cognition. Most interestingly, and disturbingly, Keel attributes a singular intelligence to this polymorphous phenomenon, which despite taking the most diverse and absurd forms when it does deliberately drop into the range of perception of some unfortunate humans, has all of the characteristics of the mischief-making Trickster archetype found across most human cultures.
In The Mothman Prophecies (1975), Keel makes the following cynical remark with regard to the CIA and US Air Force’s campaign of denial and disinformation surrounding UFOs – a campaign the existence of which has been proven by now declassified memoranda attendant to the recommendations of the 1953 Robertson Panel:
The phenomenon is dependent on belief, and as more and more people believe in flying saucers from other planets, the lower force can manipulate more people through false illumination. I have been watching, with great consternation, the worldwide spread of the UFO belief and its accompanying disease. If it continues unchecked we may face a time when universal acceptance of the fictitious space people will lead us to a modern faith in extraterrestrials that will enable them to interfere overtly in our affairs, just as the ancient gods dwelling on mountaintops directly ruled large segments of the population in the Orient, Greece, Rome, Africa, and South America.
However they arrived at their 1953 decision, the CIA/air force plan to debunk, downgrade, and ridicule flying saucers was, in retrospect, the most responsible course the government could take. But they underestimated the scope of the phenomenon and its ability to manipulate humans and generate propaganda.
Surely, the men from the CIA and Air Force that Keel has in mind are members of the Collins Elite. Both institutions were well represented among the membership of this informal group. Evangelical Christians have long maintained that Close Encounters are demonic and that these demons who are being mistaken for “aliens” can be shut out of one’s life by “closing all the doors” of occult practices and beliefs through which they may enter, such as tarot card reading, astrology, meditation, yoga, and basically every spiritual practice outside of literalist readings of the Bible and the attendance of Churches with puritanically sermonizing pastors.
This brings us to the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, the production of which may have been facilitated by leaks from the Collins Elite. In the film, which is a classic that should not be missed by any science fiction afficionado, astronauts from a future Earth pilot an iconic flying saucer-shaped spaceship to a distant planet where, some years earlier, an expedition went missing. They find that the sole survivors are Dr. Morbius and his daughter, Altaira, who explain that the rest of the expeditionary crew were killed by unseen forces. Eventually it is revealed that Dr. Morbius discovered the titanic ruins of a vastly ancient and superhumanly intelligent civilization deep beneath the surface of the planet. This dead race, the Krell, apparently cultivated tremendous psychic powers and integrated these into their technology so as to produce psychotronic devices capable of amplifying, focusing, and projecting intentions. Except that psychic ability mostly functions on the level of the subconscious.
Drawing from the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, somewhat legitimately since Freud considered “uncanny” psychic phenomena to be the key to “the unconscious,” Dr. Morbius explains that the Krell were ultimately destroyed by “monsters from the Id.” The same fate begins to befall the crew of the spaceship, especially in connection to their subconscious sexual attraction to Altaira who, as much as it can be hinted at in a 1950s era film, appears to be the object of more than fatherly affection from Morbius. Suffice it to say that the good doctor grows jealous of the astronauts, and they become victims of the Krell’s psychotronic technology. Morbius eventually comes to understand that in the life cycle of any civilization there is a defining existential crisis, far more grave than the one posed by the advent of atomic weapons, a crisis attendant to the scientific recognition and serious cultivation of psychic powers.
I think that this is something that the Collins Elite realized by the time they helped Hollywood deliver this message in 1956, some 68 years ago! It is one ofthe principal reasons why they have actively opposed UFO Disclosure, by every means from concealment and disinformation to murder. The extent of these crimes, many of which can hardly be called “white collar,” and all of which grossly violate the US Constitution, has itself become a barrier to Disclosure. The Collins Elite realized early on that the Close Encounter phenomenon was nothing more than a modern scientific interpretation of the same relationship that has existed, for all of history, between mortals and another class of beings variously referred to, at different times, in different places, and from different perspectives, as gods, titans, angels, or demons.
There is an interesting parallel between two different mythological traditions that later converge into a single narrative of religious revelation. In Sumerian mythology there are two feuding Anunnaki gods, Enki, who creates the human race with the benevolent aspiration of fostering its growth, and Enlil, a tyrannical and jealous lord who wants the humans to be no more than slaves to the Anunnaki. Enlil cuts down their defiantly rising civilization with catastrophic and genocidal acts of destruction. In Greek mythology this is paralleled by the story of the titan Prometheus who, as the creator of humanity, wants his children to become a race of new gods, and who steals the fire of the forge and the light of knowledge from Olympus as a gift for his progeny, to help them become self-reliant as any good father would. Prometheus is, however, opposed by Zeus, the God Father of the Olympians [the Anunnaki], a sadistic tyrant who spends his time toying with humans as if they were his playthings and who wants the human race to remain in a state of humiliating servility and enforced ignorance.
As William Bramley exposed in his study The Gods of Eden (1989), these entities have been behind most of the major wars of history, in order to divide and conquer, as well as other genocidal events such as the Black Death of medieval Europe, which revived religious fundamentalism and set back the Renaissance by a couple of centuries. These two mythic traditions, the Sumerian and the Greek, later converged through the Hebrew appropriation of Sumerian mythology and the Roman appropriation of Greek mythology during the formative phase of Christianity. This framed Prometheus, qua the antagonist against the Overlord Yahweh, as the rebel angel “Lucifer.” That is the crux of the largest sociological problem with UFO Disclosure. From the Mystery Airships of 1896-97 through to contemporary Close Encounters, the most creative, constructive, and empowering archetype to use as a psychical lens for focusing the preternatural power of the Trickster is the myth of Prometheus – and yet he has been demonized.
In one of the scenes of Ghostbusters (1984), the team can be seen running up Rockefeller Plaza with the statue of Prometheus right behind them. The lesson of that film is that any ‘god’ we project outside of ourselves can take the form of our destructor and that, instead, we should through our own ingenuity, innovative genius, and intrepid enterprise, fulfill our potential to become gods ourselves. It is an unabashedly Promethean message. In Ghostbusters II (1989), the Promethean parapsychologists enter the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor and find a way to bring her to life with their psychotronic technology. They do this because the city is on the brink of being devoured by negative energy, and Lady Liberty on the march – as a statue turned to a specter – is a symbol of optimism and beneficence that can break the dark spell cast over New York. The lyrics of the music that plays as the spectral colossus of Liberty marches is, “keep lifting me up, higher and higher.” In other words, the motto of New York, Excelsior (Ever-Upwards). This is essentially what we intend to do with the colossus of Prometheus in San Francisco Bay. We are not just building a statue; we are channeling and directing a specter of liberty and enlightenment. A second statue of liberty, raising the Promethean torch ever upwards.