Richard Dolan Interviews Peter Levenda about Nazis, "To the Stars," and the So-Called "Alien" Metal Fragments

​Last week Ancient Aliens talking head and ufologist Richard Dolan interviewed Peter Levenda, the writer on occult matters who is definitely not an occultist (despite participating in the occult scene for decades) and definitely not the author of the fake Necronomicon known as Simon (despite telling the U.S. Copyright Office otherwise). In the interview, Dolan and Levenda discussed Levenda’s work writing Tom Delonge’s ancient astronaut book for To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and Levenda’s views on the former rock musician’s efforts to disclose the truth about space aliens by profiting from it. 

​The interview started in a telling way, with Levenda telling Dolan that he was one of only two people to take Nazi occultism seriously, and so he spent many years as one of only two talking heads on “every” History Channel show about Hitler discussing esoteric Nazism. Levenda explained that the producers of History Channel shows were too willing to push him to try to take the evidence for the Nazi occult far beyond the evidence into the realm of the speculative. Already we have established in the first minutes that the History Channel is the vector spreading the disease of pseudohistory and the cancer of turning writers on the fringe of mainstream scholarship into minor celebrities.
 
Levenda described how he got involved with DeLonge, and it turns out that DeLonge emailed Levenda out of the blue in the fall of 2014, and Levenda was taken by DeLonge’s plans for novels and nonfiction books about ancient astronauts and UFOs. “We would speak on the phone for hours at a time,” Levenda said, and he told Dolan that he became infatuated with DeLonge’s “passion” for UFOs, which he felt matched his own interest in why modern politicians appear to be deeply involved with UFOs. Levenda told Dolan that he did not join To the Stars and is not employed by DeLonge. Instead, he is writing for them for a “standard author’s royalty,” which he said is the only payment he receives.
 
“Tom is the prime mover in this thing,” Levenda said. “I think that people don’t understand quite as well. They think he’s some kind of a puppet or figurehead and everyone else is doing their thing. But that can’t be further from the truth. I’m in constant contact with everybody there at TTSA and that’s the thing that everybody realizes right away - is that Tom is the guy running the show.”
 
Dolan and Levenda agree that DeLonge is not a puppet of the intelligence community. Levenda does, however, choose to discuss the fact that TTSA interviewed politician and UFO nut John Podesta, who emailed with DeLonge about UFOs (Podesta’s responses were not among the hacked emails published by Wikileaks) and later appeared on Ancient Aliens to discuss the same.
 
Levenda echoes Hal Puthoff’s speech from last week in alleging that government employees have no idea what one another is doing and therefore most have never encountered the UFO phenomenon, or recognized that they are working on it in whole or in part. Yet at the same time, after Dolan finished rhapsodizing over his discovery that UFO information exists in a parallel super-secret realm “beyond the classified world,” Levenda slaps him down by alleging that UFOs are not top secret! “This doesn’t mean that the UFO phenomenon is, like, ultra-top-secret, you know, stratospheric level or something,” he said. “It may just simply be a basic classified project.” Way to define down the mystery of UFOs!
 
There is a little tension in the interview between Dolan’s deep belief that UFO disclosure would be “revolutionary” and disruptive and Levenda’s blasé attitude toward UFOs, which he seems to treat with the bemusement of the outside observer.
 
But to be honest, Levenda’s interview was boring. And that tells you something in and of itself. This is just repackaging of old material under a new name, recycling old ideas and promising revelations that never come. At one point, Levenda started talking about Project Bluebook as though it were a contemporary influence on military ufology, and Dolan had to remind him that Bluebook was a lifetime ago—in the 1960s! At another point, he talks of the Rendlesham Forest UFO incident as a contemporary sighting, though it took place four months before I was born. The specter of midcentury ufology hangs heavy over Levenda, who seems to be more comfortable remembering the past than looking toward the future.
 
I was, however, interested to hear that Levenda was present in 2016 at the creation of To the Stars and that he was there with both Hal Puthoff, who joined To the Stars as an executive after serving Robert Bigelow as a subcontractor on UFO matters, and also Jacques Vallée, a paid consultant for Bigelow who has pretended no to have been involved with To the Stars even while promoting the same “mysterious” apparent industrial waste that To the Stars claims is “alien” metal. Now why was Vallée there? We know from To the Stars researcher Garry Nolan that Vallée continued to work with To the Stars on these “alien” metals for a year afterword, while failing to disclose this. Levenda confirmed that Vallée’s “metamaterials” are the same ones that Bigelow and TTSA are looking into. There is something going on beneath the surface, and I do wonder what that is. Dolan suggests that Bigelow is part of a “Cabal” within the government and industrial elites that has “proof” of space aliens, but Levenda doubts that a “Cabal” exists.
 
Levenda denied that Bigelow had any direct involvement with To the Stars but he did not deny the close relationship. “Obviously, there’s, like, a lot of crossover with personnel, of people who were involved at one point or another with Bigelow as subcontractors or friends of Bigelow who were looking at stuff,” Levenda said. Levenda said that he adopted Vallée’s term “Invisible College” to describe the Bigelow circle and their connections. He believes that the Bigelow group move through ufology together because they share the same beliefs, the same interests, and have the same government clearances.
 
Perhaps the most telling part of the interview was probably at the end, when Levenda celebrated the New York Times for promoting the narrative of To the Stars and revealing the existence of the Pentagon UFO program. Dolan took issue, claiming it was “gratuitous” for reporter Ralph Blumenthal to include “skeptical” opinions about UFOs in the article. “Who cares, honestly?” he said. He also blasted Blumenthal for writing about “alloys” instead of “metamaterials,” although the supposed “alien” materials have appeared in Bigelow group discussions as “metamaterials,” “alloys,” and just plain metal with “100% off” isotope ratios. I’m not sure that at the time that the Times published To the Stars had settled on one particular narrative for the industrial waste they have declared to be UFO wreckage.
 
What’s telling about this exchange is that Dolan went on to speculate about why the Times made the error and to say that he didn’t trust the newspaper. Now, as it happens, after discovering Hal Puthoff’s discussion of the “metamaterials,” which led me to discover that earlier ufologists had already dismissed them as industrial waste from lead refining processes, I had a similar thought, namely that the Times ought to report on this to correct the mess they made with their allegations about alien alloys. But unlike Dolan, I did the obvious thing: I told my contact at the New York Times about the information, and he put me in touch with Blumenthal, the reporter who wrote the original story. I gave Blumenthal all of the information that I have on the subject, and suggested that it would be a good idea to report on the Bigelow connections and the fact that To the Stars apparently can’t tell the difference between industrial waste and alien super-technology.
 
So, the New York Times has been told, twice. What they do with that information will tell us a lot about the role of the media in creating and sustaining sensationalized UFO narratives.