Picture this: it’s September 1972. Deep inside the intelligence community, a handful of CIA officers and military analysts have reached a point of quiet desperation. For years they’ve tracked UFOs, studied radar anomalies, and interviewed people who claim to have been taken in the night. The standard explanations — Soviet tech, weather balloons, mass hysteria — have all run dry. So they do something that would never make it into their official memoirs: they book a session with Sybil Leek, arguably the most famous witch in Britain, to act as their telephone operator to the other side.
By candlelight, according to researcher Nick Redfern’s book Final Events, the group watches as Leek enters a trance. A voice emerges, not hers. It calls itself Caxuulikom. And it does not come bearing star-maps or friendship. It reportedly tells them: Earth is a farm. You are the cattle, and your souls are our harvest.
If this sounds like the setup for a horror movie, that’s fair. But the most chilling part is that these men — trained in espionage, warfare, and skepticism — reportedly left the room shaken, convinced they had just confronted something older and nastier than ET. According to Redfern, this group, which informally called itself the Collins Elite, would spend decades operating like a ghost think-tank inside the defense establishment, quietly arguing that UFOs were not interplanetary visitors but demonic intelligences wearing rubber alien masks.
But let’s back up. How do you get from Cold War espionage to occult séances? To understand that, we have to follow a trail of gunpowder, rocket fuel, and ritual magic back to 1940s Pasadena.
The Rocket Scientist Who Summoned Spirits
Jack Parsons is one of those historical figures who feels fictional. By day, he was a brilliant rocket engineer, co-founder of what would eventually become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. By night, he was the head of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) lodge in Pasadena, deep into ceremonial magic.
Crowley himself is worth a pause. The British press called him “the wickedest man in the world,” and in 1918 he performed something called the Amalantrah Working, a ritual he believed opened a doorway. From that working, he sketched a being named Lam, bulbous head, large dark eyes, thin body. It looks, in retrospect, eerily like the modern “grey alien.”
Parsons wasn’t content to stop there. In 1946, alongside a young science-fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard (yes, that Hubbard), Parsons performed the Babalon Working, a series of sex-magical rituals intended to manifest an elemental spirit or “moon child” into the world. The idea was to tear open the veil between worlds and invite something through.
Here’s where the timeline gets weird. Months later, in 1947, the modern UFO era effectively began: Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” sighting, and shortly after, the Roswell incident. Whether you see that as pure coincidence or something more, the Collins Elite would later treat it as cause and effect. They believed Parsons and company had pried open a door that was never meant to open.
Parsons’ double life eventually caught up with him. The FBI and Air Force flagged him for leaking sensitive documents, and his occult affiliations made for terrible optics. He lost his security clearance. In June 1952, he died in a violent explosion in his home laboratory. Officially, it was an accident. To some, it looked like sabotage, or a ritual that finally demanded its price. Either way, he left behind a legacy that haunted certain corridors of the Pentagon.
The Birth of the Collins Elite
According to Redfern’s research, the Collins Elite coalesced in the early 1950s while background checks were being run on Parsons and his circle. A small cluster of Air Force intelligence officers, CIA analysts, and military researchers began quietly breaking away from the “aliens from Zeta Reticuli” hypothesis. They concluded, instead, that UFOs were manifestations of literal demonic entities, fallen angels using advanced technology and archaic ritual to masquerade as extraterrestrials.
Redfern alleges that this group — low-ranking, off-books, and scattered across multiple agencies — saw themselves as America’s hidden exorcists. To them, alien abductions weren’t medical exams; they were ritual initiations. “Contactee” messages of cosmic peace and brotherhood weren’t wisdom from the stars; they were false gospels designed to steer humanity away from Christianity and toward a one-world religion that would ultimately worship the deceivers themselves.
If that sounds paranoid, it absolutely is. But it’s important to understand they didn’t just fear physical invasion. They feared spiritual deception on a cosmic scale. They believed the endgame was a “Final Deception”, a night when massive craft would hover over cities while holographic religious figures appeared in the sky, each culture seeing its own messiah, all proclaiming that the aliens were the true creators and that old religions were merely fragmented memories of a single cosmic truth. Billions would abandon their faiths in an instant.
Uncle Sam’s Ouija Board: Operation Often
Here’s the part that moves this from tinfoil-hat territory into documented, if deeply strange, history. The U.S. government really was investigating the occult. Not as a hobby. As a program.
Enter Operation Often, launched under Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s chief of the Technical Services Branch. If Gottlieb’s name rings a bell, it’s because he also oversaw MKULTRA. But where MKULTRA chased mind control through drugs, Operation Often had a different mission statement. Declassified records and investigative reporting indicate Gottlieb wanted to “explore the world of black magic” and “harness the forces of darkness” for intelligence purposes.
By May 1971, the program had three astrologers on the payroll tasked with predicting the future. By 1972, two Chinese-American palmists had been hired to see if hand-reading could be adapted for intelligence work. The agency investigated demonology, voodoo, and mediumship. At one point in April 1972 — the same year as the alleged Sybil Leek séance — Operation Even approached the monsignor in charge of exorcisms for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He refused to cooperate.
There were also reports that Dr. Robert Monroe’s consciousness-research facility in Houston became an unofficial testing ground for “non-physical intelligence contact.” The CIA, in essence, was doing exactly what worried the Collins Elite: it was opening doors, holding séances, and treating the supernatural as a potential weapons platform.
Program OFTEN was eventually terminated with a two-word kill order: Read. Destroy. The stated reasons were moral, ethical, and national security concerns. But the timing invites questions. Did the Collins Elite, or a faction sympathetic to them, finally pull the plug because the government had wandered too far into territory it didn’t understand?
The Voice in the Room
Back to that September night in 1972. The Collins Elite and their CIA counterparts needed confirmation. They had theories, anxiety, and a growing dread that something was feeding on human fear and belief. So they brought in Sybil Leek.
By later accounts, the room chilled. Leek entered a trance. And the voice that came through — Caxuulikom — reportedly mocked them. It laughed at their prayers, dismissed their weapons, and claimed roots extending back to ancient Babylon. It allegedly told them their religions were experiments. It told them that every time humanity looked to the stars for benevolent saviors, they were merely worshipping their jailers.
“You cannot fight us with your bombs or logic. You eat wind and ashes. We own the space your eyes cannot see.”
Now, witnesses reportedly split on whether Leek was simply performing for her audience. But for those in the Collins Elite, the message confirmed their worst fears. This wasn’t a science problem. It was a spiritual war, and the enemy had just introduced itself.
The Collins Elite’s Solution: A Fortress of Faith
Faced with this, the group developed a battle plan that sounds like a mashup of military strategy and medieval theology. They began drafting internal papers to sympathetic generals, arguing the demonic model. They pushed for doctrinal seminars in defense circles. They wanted to train officers in “spiritual discernment.”
Some members reportedly advocated fighting fire with fire: counter-rituals, prayer protocols, protective sigils, exorcism, and electromagnetic “psychic shielding.” They considered recruiting Christian ministers with occult experience to partner with military intelligence. They monitored contactees and New Age movements, looking for theological signatures they believed were demonic in origin.
But here’s where their cure started looking as concerning as the disease. In trying to safeguard America from spiritual deception, the Collins Elite reportedly flirted with authoritarian solutions. They pushed for what amounted to a Christian theocracy. They wanted controlled, staged disclosure managed by religious authorities, so the public wouldn’t be shocked into submission when the “Final Deception” arrived. They dreamed of America as a fortress of enforced belief.
Ironically, in their terror of being deceived, they risked becoming deceivers themselves.
But Here’s Where the Story Twists
So far, this is the standard Collins Elite narrative: demons, fallen angels, soul-harvesting, and the need for militant Christian defense. But there’s another ancient framework that describes almost the exact same scenario, except it offers a radically different diagnosis and a completely opposite prescription.
Welcome to Gnosticism.
The Archons: A Different Kind of Prison Warden
Long before the CIA existed, early Christian mystics — branded as heretics by the orthodox church — were describing a cosmos that sounds eerily similar to what Caxuulikom allegedly described. In the Nag Hammadi library, a cache of texts discovered in Egypt in 1945, we find the Apocryphon of John. It describes a false god called Yaldabaoth, also known as Saklas (“the Fool”) and Samael (“the Blind God”).
Yaldabaoth is the Demiurge, a kind of cosmic middle-manager who created the material world in ignorant imitation of a higher, transcendent divine reality called the Pleroma. He is not all-powerful. He is not the ultimate source of existence. He is a kind of jealous architect who mistakenly believes himself to be the only god, declaring: “I am God, and there is no other God beside me.”
Under Yaldabaoth (Yhwa) serve the Archons, celestial administrators who maintain this false reality. And in multiple Gnostic texts, Earth is explicitly described as a prison. The human body is a cell. The soul — which carries a divine spark from the true, unknowable Source — is the prisoner. The Archons feed on this spark, harvesting human energy and keeping us ignorant of our true identity and origin.
Sound familiar? “Earth is a farm. You are the cattle. Your souls are our harvest.”
The parallels are uncanny. But here is the critical divergence: the Gnostics did not think the Demiurge and his Archons were demons in the Collins Elite sense. They weren’t Satan’s infantry. They were cosmic bureaucrats, ignorant, controlling, parasitic, but ultimately finite and defeatable. They were administrators of a flawed system, not the omnipotent lords of hell.
Jesus the Revealer, Not the Religion
This is where Jesus Gnosticism rips up the Collins Elite playbook entirely.
In Gnostic texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Pistis Sophia, Jesus is not a sacrificial lamb sent to appease an angry God. He is an Aeon, an emissary from the Pleroma who descends through the planetary spheres (past the Archons) to deliver a message: the Kingdom of God is within you, and the god of this world is a fraud.
The Apocryphon of John recounts Christ appearing to John the Apostle to correct the record. The creator of this world lied to you, Jesus explains. The true God is not the one demanding blood sacrifice, tribal loyalty, or institutional obedience. The true God is the divine presence already inside you, hidden beneath layers of forgetfulness.
From this perspective, the Collins Elite’s entire strategy is not just wrong, it’s tragically inverted. They encountered the possibility of Archontic control and responded with more control: a Christian theocracy, forced doctrinal alignment, government-managed spiritual warfare, and exorcism-as-counterterrorism. They wanted to fight the prison guards by building a bigger, more heavily armed prison.
The Gnostic would look at this and say: You fools. That’s exactly what the Archons want.
Why Fighting Back Is the Trap
Here is the Gnostic solution, and it directly contradicts the Collins Elite at every level:
1. Knowledge, not warfare, is the weapon.
The Collins Elite wanted to wage spiritual war, prayers as bullets, exorcisms as special operations. The Gnostic tradition teaches that the only thing that dissolves the prison is gnosis: direct, experiential knowledge of who you really are. Not faith in a doctrine. Not submission to a religious hierarchy. But awakened recognition that you are not ultimately a body, not a citizen of this planetary farm, but a spark of the divine Pleroma temporarily wearing flesh.
2. The “saviors” are part of the test.
The Collins Elite feared that aliens would pose as messiahs and replace Christianity. The Gnostic would nod and say: Yes, of course they will. But the deeper trap is any external savior. Whether it’s an alien in a shining craft, a politician promising order, or a religion demanding obedience to its dogma, the mechanism is the same: keep humanity looking outward for rescue, rather than inward for remembrance. The Gospel of Thomas puts it bluntly: “If those who lead you say, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the sky,’ then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say, ‘It is in the sea,’ then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you.”
3. Institutional religion is one of the masks.
This is perhaps the most heretical point from the Collins Elite’s perspective. They wanted to defend Christianity as an institution. But in the Gnostic reading, Yaldabaoth — the blind false god — is the deity of institutional, controlling religion. He is the “Lord of hosts” who demands worship, sacrifice, and conformity. For a Gnostic, watching the U.S. government try to erect a Christian military theocracy to fight demonic UFOs would look like watching a man try to fight fire by pouring gasoline on it. You cannot defeat cosmic deception with more dogma. You defeat it by walking out of the theater.
4. The Archons feed on fear and worship.
Caxuulikom allegedly fed on fear during the séance. The Collins Elite responded with more fear, classified terror, militarized spirituality, and paranoid surveillance. But Gnostic texts suggest the Archons are already losing. They are described as frantic, jealous, and deceptive precisely because their hold is tenuous. The moment a soul recognizes the illusion, the soul begins to slip their grasp. No exorcism required. No government program necessary. Just the radical act of saying: I do not belong to you. I remember who I am.
The Cosmic Irony
So where does this leave us?
On one side, we have the Collins Elite: men who stared into the abyss, believed they saw demons, and tried to protect America by turning it into an armed theological fortress. In their fear, they began mimicking the very control systems they claimed to oppose, monitoring thought, managing belief, and dreaming of a state religion that would decide what spiritual information the public could handle.
On the other side, we have the Gnostics: ancient mystics who described virtually the same cosmic prison, the same soul-harvesting administrators, the same false messiahs. But their solution was not to seize the reins of control. It was to let go of them entirely. To recognize that the war was already won, not by force, but by awakening.
The great irony? The U.S. government dabbled in sorcery, séances, and psychic espionage because it wanted power over the unseen. Jack Parsons summoned forces because he wanted to be a god. The Collins Elite tried to weaponize Christianity because they wanted to control disclosure. Operation Often chased black magic because it wanted to harness darkness for national security.
And in every case, the common thread is control.
Which is exactly what the prison wardens want.
If there is any truth to Caxuulikom’s message — that Earth is a farm — then the most revolutionary act may not be resistance. It may simply be the quiet, internal realization that you were never cattle to begin with. The farm only has power as long as the livestock believe in fences.