Nick Cook, Insider on UAP/UFO and Ingo Swann |514|

Nick Cook, has a new book on Ingo Swann and lots to say about the UAP Preliminary Assessment.

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Speaker: [00:00:02] Call to serve. It has no sound, yet I have heard it. It has no form, yet I have clearly seen it. America’s Navy, a global force for good.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:15] You got to admit they do great ads. I also think it’s really interesting. You know, those American Navy ads used to be a force for good. And they changed it to a global force for good. What [unclear 00:28] up with that? So I have an interview coming up with a guy, excellent guys, so fortunate to get this guy to come on. His name is Nick Cook. And he’s written a terrific new book about Ingo Swann, the famous psychic part of the remote viewing program, and really one of most gifted psychics kind of ever, in terms of the documented things that he did absolutely amazing. But what’s really interesting about Nick and the reason I kind of changed this clip up at the beginning is Nick has been in the aerospace and defense industry for a long time, highly regarded as a writer slash reporter, and has a ton of stories about that some of which he shares in the interview. But also he just brings a different perspective in a different sensibility. It’s one that we need to hear because we want you on that, well, we need you on that wall. There’s some truth to that. I mean, we do need defense, even though it’s always a mixed bag. So like, for example, one of the things we got into is the latest phony baloney, UAP report, or maybe it’s not phony. Here’s Nick’s perspective.

Nick Cook: [00:01:40] If we bring that up to date, now, we’ve got a UAP report that has recently been handed into Congress, nine pages in the unclassified version, the things that are really left out, or the elephant in this report, are the exotic anomalous sightings data set.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:01] But Nick hold on. I mean, the elephant in this room is so fucking big. There’s no room for anything else. I mean, they kill people, or threaten to kill people, threaten their family, if they ever, ever said a word about this. And then December 2017, let’s roll it on the New York Times. But there’s no way this ties to the reality that we’re talking about?

Nick Cook: [00:02:27] Well, for me, what I try and do is I’m trying to transpose my mind into the mindset of the military here. I was in that world when I was a Jane’s editor. If I wanted to write about out their stuff, I had to write on a line. And it took me a while to work out where that line was. But once I knew where it was I stuck to it. Absolutely what those guys are doing in that UAP report, the writers of it are sticking to that line.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:58] So we get to talk about that and other things at the end of the interview. But most of the interview was really dedicated to Ingo Swann and the remote viewing program that he was a part of, and there’s just a lot of interesting anecdotes that go along with that, including kind of a missile gap, psychic spying gap thing that we got into and the reality of all that. Here’s another clip. So part of the mind game was, hey, those Russians might be spying on us. And then we all find out that Yeah, actually, they were and they were kind of more into the human intelligence kind of stuff. What if we can plant thoughts in that Reagan’s head? What if we can kill them remotely with psychic energy? I mean, they had a different spin on it. And they weren’t altogether unsuccessful… Yep. Go ahead.

Nick Cook: [00:03:47] Sorry. It’s [unclear 3:47] you like that. But yeah, he found himself caught up in all of that. It sounds ridiculous. That part of the Russian threat was deemed to be that they could plant suggestive thoughts, psychic thoughts, they can influence people.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:04:06] Stick around the interview’s coming up. Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore contrast to science and spirituality, with leading researchers, thinkers and their critics. Today, we welcome Nick Cook to Skeptiko. Nick is a super interesting guy. If you’ve been around this stuff, this kind of skeptical stuff and related stuff. You will certainly remember 2001 title, The Hunt for Zero Point. And that book was not just like a super duper bestseller, real bestseller now, like some people’s bestselling, but it was highly, highly influential. It’s still referenced. I mean, I think Nick is probably one of the people most responsible for this whole term, “zero point” like everyone knows zero point now. Well, this book from What is it now 20 years ago, Nick?

Nick Cook: [00:04:59] Exactly. 20 years ago, yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:05:01] Wow. I mean, that’s hard to believe that book is really what started all of that. And just to round out, you know who this guy is, very successful career. Now, as a writer, consultant, speaker, in the aerospace and defense industry, we’re certainly going to want to talk about that kind of belly of the beast part of that, that I don’t know, we just going to have to parse that out and see what that means. But the primary reason for connecting with Nick today, and I’m so thankful for my terrific friend and the guy greatly admire El Borealis at Forum Borealis for making this connection. But the reason to talk today is a book about Ingo Swann and that book’s title is Resurrecting the Mysterious Ingo Swann’s ‘Great Lost Work’. And if you need to get a little refresher, Ingo Swann, remember Ingo Swann, the just unbelievably, super psychic guy, we’ll talk a little bit about that, to tell the truth, I love that story. It’s on the TV show like world’s greatest psychic kind of thing, but also where you probably know him from if it jogs your memory is the whole remote viewing program. SRK, Stairgate Russell Targa how put off and the guy who remote viewed Jupiter before our probes got there and he got it all right. And then what really freaked people out, what really freaked people out in military and in military intelligence is like he psychically spied on their super-secret because they asked him to but he spied on their super-secret magnetometer whatever the thing is, Nick can tell us that’s buried in six feet of cement surrounded by a Faraday cage. And he goes in and says, “Oh, yeah, I could do it. And by the way, I can stop it from working”, which has these far reaching implications for, I mean, if you can start the stop that what else can you stop? Like maybe, somebody’s heart or something else, which we’ll talk about more. So anyways, if you needed the refresher on Ingo Swann, that’s Ingo Swann. And here we are, Nick Cook is writing kind of a really important book that pulls together some of these unpublished works of Ingo Swann. So I hope that long introduction can kind of orient you if you needed to. And with that, Nick, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me.

Nick Cook: [00:07:43] Thanks, Alex. It’s fantastic to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:07:46] Well, like I said, this is going to be a good one. Tell us more about you, your background. Like I said, you’re very accomplished, not just with these books, which are very important, but also as a filmmaker, but also as a corporate successful guy working with industry, which I think is a tremendous grounding. So tell us more about your background, before we get into the book.

Nick Cook: [00:08:10] Well kind of hard to know where to begin, actually, Alex, but I suppose I can take it back to university, and I had no idea what to do. When I left university, I took a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies, my parents divorced, but one side of them were diplomats. And they traveled a lot in the Middle East. So that made me want to sort of study Arabic and Islamic Studies, which I did do. But then having done that, I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do. I guess lots of people can say this, about the way their lives track out. At the time, I felt like, as a sort of deep black hole, what on earth am I going to do, but you look back, and it kind of all makes sense. So my dad was an engineer and an inventor. And I had always been very interested in aerospace and sort of technology. And I thought that I wanted to enter the aerospace industry. That’s what I thought I wanted to do. My dad said, “What don’t you write about it?” And I’d never occurred to me once but I owe my dad a lot. But I really owe him that one. Because that opened up my whole world. I joined a trade publication. And then I moved from that in 1986, to a magazine called Jane’s Defense weekly, which has a sort of very sort of passport like kind of opening function into the industry and into government and the Pentagon and so forth.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:09:48] It is the Bible the go to the …

Nick Cook: [00:09:52] Yes, it has that reputation and deservedly so it’s been around a long time, Fred Jane had started out sort of like 120 years ago, so there was, there was a lot to sort of uphold and a lot of tradition to bear in mind as I went knocking on people’s doors. But that was a fantastic sort of grounding for me again, I got to know, the industry, I got to know it’s good side and its bad side. And then in 1991, as you alluded to, in your introduction, I sort of decided that with all of this access, what I really wanted to do was figure out what is the Pentagon’s or what is America’s? America was the most interesting place that I always went to when I was doing my Jane stories. So what’s the biggest thing that America might be sitting on technologically that it’s not telling?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:10:53] You know what, since we’re there, fill people in, like, who’s reading Jane’s? What stories are your kind of breaking? What are people reading? And then what are those people are really the influencers? Who are they influencing? Who are they talking to? What is this whole kind of mill you that you’re putting yourself in?

Nick Cook: [00:11:15] So it’s an insider’s publication. It’s a trade publication. It’s not a what we would call a high street newspaper or a tabloid newspaper, it doesn’t kick down doors. It’s very subtle. We build, we built contacts. I was very lucky. I was there at a time, the Berlin Wall was not yet, in fact, there was a hint that it was going to fall when I joined Jains, and then it of course, crumbled in 1989. That gave me an opportunity to go and check out all the technology had been speculating about in the magazine on the other side of the former iron curtain. So we got into Russia at a time that it was sort of glasnost and opening up fascinating time. So the sorts of stories we’d write, I mean, I remember going on this amazing sort of industry river cruise down the river Volga, there were literally it was that the Soviet Union hadn’t opened up yet. It was the end of 1991. The boat was stuffed full of spooks, and a couple of lucky journos who’ve managed to wangle a trip on it, and I was one of them. And we visited all of these MiG factories, and I was able to get a performance manual of something called the Caspian Sea monster, which was half boats, half plane, it was the size of a small ship, it was huge. And it flew a few feet off the ground. And this thing had been sort of speculated by the Pentagon as existing, but there were only kind of rumors of satellite shots anyway, I bribed a guy with half a bottle of whiskey. And I got the manual. And we came back and we blew that story on the cover of Jane’s. And then it got into insiders. And so it was that very much that sort of publication, but influential within its own field.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:13:18] Yeah, that’s fantastic. And a lot of ways, it kind of sets a backdrop for a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about, particularly because, as we’ll talk about, you are also personally very interested in consciousness, extended consciousness, I love the story about your wife having a shared near death experience, and you’re on board with all that. So we’re going to walk a very interesting road here with you. Let’s talk for a minute, let’s go back 20 years and talk about The Hunt for Zero Point, because as I mentioned, it’s a very important book. And in a way, it kind of bridges this world that we’re going to talk about these two worlds. In a way it points in that direction. Tell us the origins of that the impact it had, how it changed things for you what happened after that?

Nick Cook: [00:14:11] Well, I was reluctant to do it. In many ways. I was dragged into it, but I didn’t know by circumstance. I don’t know what in the end sort of really pulled me into it. But I just realized in this rather sort of cynical way, in a sense that I had this fantastic access through Jane’s. I could, that through the good name of the company and the magazine, I could open doors that access extended pretty much to the sort of upper echelons of government. So whilst I was going around, in my day job my every day, filing stories for the magazine, I thought actually I want to use this for something more, that’s when this question occurred to me, which was, what’s the biggest thing that I could investigate? And I figured that the biggest thing would be a new energy and propulsion source that perhaps hadn’t been revealed. I mean, that struck me as a sort of technologist as the biggest thing that the Pentagon could hide, or any agency could hide.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:22] Just to put a point in time in 2001. This was in the air. Is there some advanced technology? Do we have access to that technology? But it’s not like science fiction stuff? I mean, it’s right.

Nick Cook: [00:15:35] Well, good point. I have to say it, it’s in the air now. And in corners of bookshops and magazines kind of free internet.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:15:47] Totally, right.

Nick Cook: [00:15:48] It was utterly taboo in my world. All the things we talked about today. And we take for granted that we can discuss about UFOs and consciousness and intelligences and all of that stuff. Totally verboten in my button-down, trade industry journal world. So I had to do this in secret. And I sort of write about it in the book. And sometimes, it’s tongue in cheek, but it wasn’t at the time. I was very aware that if I put a step wrong, if I asked the wrong question, to the wrong person, I would be fired from my job. It was as simple as that. It was that taboo, no one in my sphere mentions UFOs. In fact, interestingly, and if we get to talk about the UAP report that came out a few weeks ago, my contemporaries now in the trades, and aerospace and defense trade journal press, they’re still not talking about it. It’s still that taboo there. But it’s opened up in other areas, thank goodness. But yeah, so I had to tread very, very carefully. But I just said to myself, I’m going to keep my eyes and my ears open. And I’m going to ask questions that sort of don’t seem to out there. And I’m going to see what I get back. I’m going to like a sort of fishermen and cast a line out, I just want to see if I get any nibbles. And anyway, I never even set out to write a book, by the way, I was just curious. But after about seven or eight years, so I started in 91, researching, probably by 1998, I think I’d got enough material I suddenly realized for a book and that’s its genesis.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:17:44] When did the hunt, really begin for you? There had to be a moment where you were like, “Wow, this is the Volga River, bottle of whiskey kind of moment.” I’m sure there are many but when did it really turn into “Oh, my God, this could change the world” because you had to have that sense of it.

Nick Cook: [00:18:05] I was making a documentary in 1998. We filmed it in 1998, it was called Billion Dollar Secret and it went out on the Discovery Channel. And it whilst on one level, you’d look at it and go, this is the guy who’s investigating UFOs actually, it wasn’t so much as me treading a line between that divide between deeply classified aircraft programs and UFOs. And I was feeling it very much as I’m treading on the deeply classified aircraft side of the line. But in the middle of that, in the course of that investigation, I went to Lockheed Martin at Fort Worth a very familiar beat to me, where they’ve got a mile-long plant that churns out or did churn out then F 16 fighters. And I did an interview with their senior scientists there a chap called Boyd Bushman, who went on to be quite controversial, actually, because he released photographs of some dead aliens and stuff. And that wasn’t the Boyd I knew. The Boyd I knew then that was his sort of really, I think, his first sort of emergence into the limelight. And he pointed me to a guy called John Hutchison. And John Hutchison is a Canadian inventor who was investigated by the Pentagon for his well, John would like to say it was for his technology. Actually, I think what it boiled down to was the power of his mind, we might talk about that a little bit later. But I think it was Boyd Bushman, pointing me in that direction that said to me inside, ‘wow’. So the aerospace and defense industry that I’ve been reporting on most of my career up to that point, whether exclusively reporting on in my career up to that point has an interest in this stuff. It really does have an interest in it. And it’s looking into places that I never thought it really looked. And that gave real impetus to my sort of them slightly flagging research powers.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:20:25] So folks, we will eventually get back to Ingo and this fantastic new book, but the path is super interesting, because the path that your kind of laying out gives us a whole different perspective on Ingo Swann, SRI Stairgate Remote Viewing, because it’s another version of the same kind of thing. So continuing to kind of backtrack, because I can’t resist it. You know, the interesting thing about Hutchison is, he faked some of that stuff. And I don’t know what to make of that. I don’t know what to make that because there’s people I know, I really respect who were super spy enabled a bill and they say, “I think he’s real, I’ve met the guy think he’s legit.” And I’m like, “Why do fucking fake the YouTube videos?” You know, what I mean? Is it the trickster kind of thing? Or is it more of the same? It’s the yellow thing, which will pop up when we talk about Stairgate too, same thing? Uri Geller? No doubt he can do this stuff. Unbelievable. You have stories you’ve personally met with Uri, had your kids there. And he did. Oh, he’s going to get a smooth.

Nick Cook: [00:21:31] And that’s my Uri Geller spoon. Actually, it’s written out to my daughter, in fact.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:36] So we’re going to talk about that in a second. Because the other place like I got [unclear 21:41]. And he has a similar kind of story, did it right in front of my face sat there, we did an experiment in the cafeteria of SRI, did the mind reading thing, all that? So hold on to that spoon because we’re talking about a minute. But then the Bushman thing just so if people don’t remember or have a strange kind of sense, because I haven’t had to double check and look it up. I thought this was the guy. But this is the deathbed confession guy. This is Richard Dolan sitting down in the bed of the, it looks like a hotel room and this guy saying, “Okay, how can these on the ventilator or the oxygen whatever come fairly”, he’s about to die for real deathbed. And we’ve always in our society, we’ve always given special treatment to deathbed confessions, we realized somebody doesn’t have a lot to lose, and he blows the whole thing. He says, “Yeah, area 51. I was there. I saw the bodies; the whole thing is real. I don’t have any reason. I’m releasing myself from the confidentiality agreements.” This is what happened at here, we’re talking to a guy, Nick met the guy. When it was just kind of standard business as usual. What are the F-16s look like coming off the line thing? I mean, that’s a that’s an interesting point. Right?

Nick Cook: [00:22:58] Well it is, and actually, in a sense, I think it ties into what you were just saying about John Hutchison and that why fake it, John? And John’s, I think he’s come out clean and said, “Yeah, there was some experiments. I did fake.” So I’ll come on to the Boyd thing in a minute. But with John, and some of those other people who fake stuff who are deemed to be psychics, I read it as, I’ve become famous in my own right, in my own sphere, there is a certain expectation on me to perform. And I have to always be able to perform. If I can’t, I’ve got to think of something fast. And with John, that meant attaching strings to model flying sources, which he then rather unsubtly dangled in front of the camera. He’s the first to fess up and go, sort of “Why did I do it?” Getting back to Boyd. I love Boyd Bushman. And we kept in touch after I did this interview with him in 1998. He was I think, he said, he was sort of like half English on one side and half Navajo on the other side. So you had this amazing sort of vide. And he was quite prone to prodding the system at Lockheed Martin. And I was quite often getting found by their public relations people going, please don’t publish that story that Boyd Bushman gave you details of the other day, because it’s kind of really embarrassing to us. And then we’d have this sort of long, drawn out conversation about what could and couldn’t be published. But, you know, Boyd was this fabulous character, but I think, I met some quite unsavory people who sort of clung on to him along the way, and he was such an open spirit. He tolerated them and listened to them. He listened to everyone. But I think in the end, there were some people he got sort of influenced by and my reading of Boyd so deathbed confession was that, that wasn’t the Boyd that I knew. So I choose to remember with great fondness, other aspects of him, which were really, really genuine and remarkable. And he was a very probing curious, and inspirational scientists to a lot of people.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:25:22] That’s interesting. And I’m not, I don’t want to pursue that too much, because I don’t know that’s your world. But what you’ve just given there is a super interesting important and I got to say, I’ve never really considered it so much. But it’s just a very real part of the process. I’m not saying that that is an explanation for Boyd’s quote, unquote, confession or if it’s should be taken, literally, but I’m glad you added. I’m glad you added that, because that’s another element of it is that, we hear things and they become our memories, or they, you know, in just a very real way that we’ve all gone so interesting. So before I get too far afield, which I got to do, let’s talk about this new book, Resurrecting The Mysterious Ingo Swann’s ‘Great Last Work’. What are people going to find in this book?

Nick Cook: [00:26:16] Well, I hope a lot. I was so blown away really, when I read particularly the second volume, Ingo wrote quite prolifically. In fact, we found a few sort of lost manuscripts in his archive, his family and I when we were going through it.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:26:35] So, maybe, even that backstory is kind of interesting, so but I didn’t add to your bio, which is interesting. So you’re very good writer. You write successful books. And then people approach you and say, “Hey, why don’t you ghost write a book for me,” which you do, and then you’ll be in those become bestsellers. So your kind of known as a guy who has a voice and can produce. So the backstory of how you came to, quote, unquote, edit and write because I think your contributions to this book are key, and I even wrote to you in the email. And a lot of ways I found what you wrote. I don’t want to say more interesting than Ingo, but certainly on par, interested so that backstory is of interest.

Nick Cook: [00:27:19] Well, thank you, first of all, I really enjoyed working on that book, and then writing the introduction to it and the epilogue as well. So, how I got to know Ingo actually goes back to The Hunt for Zero Point. I mean, a lot of The Hunt for Zero Point was like a fantastic calling card for me. I tried when I finished it, to sort of move on, I wanted to move back into Jane’s, I mean, by some miracle, I was still employed by them after the book came out. And I wanted to get grounded again, in the sort of business of aerospace, but I kept on getting pulled back by the hunt. And it’s been a fabulous calling card for me, really ever since. Two people who rang me or approached me after the book came out, shortly after it came out. One was Uri Geller and the other was Ingo, and Ingo said, “The next time you’re passing through New York City would you drop by and so because I did quite a lot for work?” I did the next time. And it was, I think, in 2002, end of 2002. So we met then and talked and he was interesting, and his house 357 Bowery was just fascinating, full of sort of slightly spooky kind of artifacts.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:28:45] And Nick, pause for a second and paint that picture which you do so marvelously in the book of pulling up Lower East Side, Manhattan, brownstone sitting out front as a guy smoking a cigar, a gay guy, who is a fantastic artist is this amazing psychic, not that matters, but paint the whole picture. And he’s just kind of holding court in a very kind of blending into the background but observing the world kind of thing. And he’s checking you out when you come in, like is this a guy who gets into the inner sanctum of my world or not? That’s a great, great scene in the book.

Nick Cook: [00:29:27] Well, just to take it back a tad further picture now the slightly button down, Britt pitching up in New York, who is slightly in awe and nervous about his meeting with quotes the world’s greatest living psychic, what is he going to see in me that perhaps, I don’t want to share or I don’t want to know. So, all of this is going through my mind as I pitch up at 357 Bowery and as you say, the taxi draws up, I get out. It’s dark. It’s autumn. So it’s a bit sort of windswept and rainy. And as I’m walking up the steps of the brownstone, I’m aware that a guy, I’ve taken to be a down and out who is sort of puffing on the sort of the end of the shoe route is looking at me. And because it’s dark, I can’t quite make him out. He’s got a sort of combat jacket, Vietnam or a combat jacket on. And as I get closer, I realized, “Crikey, it’s Ingo.” And this is what he would do. He would as you said, Alex, he wouldn’t let people into his house if he didn’t like their energy. That was one of his tricks was sitting on the stoop and pretending to be down and out as he watched you roll up. Another one recounted by a friend of mine called Robert Knight, who is a rock photographer who also knows or knew Ingo, he had an experience where he was sitting on the stoop with Ingo before being admitted into the inner sanctum. And Ingo had said, “If that pigeon, which is next to you, I think it was hops onto your foot you’re in, if it doesn’t”, you’re not coming. Anyway, the pigeon did hop onto Roberts foot, and he was in. So it was these sort of quirky little kind of entry points into Ingo’s world that made him just a fascinating character. Then when I walked down the stairs, he just told me that he had it cleared by a Sharman of some kind of sort of weird entity that had rushed out of the basement in a howling, sort of gush of wind. So all of this sort of prepped me for sort of quite an alarming sort of an initial intro into Ingo’s world. But that was in 2002. He then actually asked Robert Knight’s come back and film him, film wee bits of his life. And we did that in, I think it was about 2009. So I then had a second sort of go at getting to know Ingo, in 2009. And then, of course, he died in 2013. And his family very kindly asked me, initially whether I would write a sort of definitive biography of his life. Well, we looked at all of his papers and stuff that already been written by him, including quite a lot by Ingo himself, he’d like to write about his life. And it was decided in the end, that we’d go for this other project, which was to do this Great Loss Work of his, this Resurrecting the Mysterious volume of his two, sort of quite seminal pieces of work that describe both the inner psychic mechanisms that plug us into the hologram or the consciousness sphere, you know, whatever you want to call it. That’s sort of part one in a very boiled down way. And part two, really is what Ingo called the matrix or the multiverse, which is depth consciousness, it’s the thing that consciousness, supporters would say, is the substrate of all that is and reality. So that is the second half of the volume. And together, they make up this one sort of take on, what I like to call really is, it’s sort of Ingo’s take, I think, on consciousness.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:33:50] Here’s the summary from the Amazon page offers a grand unified theory of the human experience, and in part of consciousness itself, asserts that Para normality is part of an expanded reality set rooted in the relationship between quantum theory us the observer, in something infinitely more profound.

Nick Cook: [00:34:17] Well, I think that I didn’t write that, by the way, but I think it captures that exactly. Two things really jumped out at me about Ingo’s world. One is that for all his extraordinary abilities, and I think those are well proven, I mean, we can talk about some of them, but you mentioned some, in your introduction, but for all his proven abilities, Ingo always maintained that these were latent abilities in us all, we all have them to some degree, it’s just that we’ve got to find them or they have to reveal themselves to us, point one. Secondly, is that there is no in Ingo’s mind or in Ingo’s mind, there was no division between paranormal and normal. This was an artificial construct that had been placed there by science or historians or philosophers, call them what you will. And as such we have through them come to think of these two worlds and a world of normal and the world apparent all, Ingo said, “There are no two worlds, it is just one world that has not revealed itself to us in all of its glory. Yes. And that is part of his and are and everyone’s exploration, their journey, and some of us explore it deeply, and others don’t. But it’s all consciousness.” So, I think those are the sort of two big takeaways from Ingo’s world.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:35:54] There’s a real paradox here that we have to resolve in terms of our need to know, our need to pursue, our need to explore, which is so much what Ingo is about and so much of what this book is about, and then this other sensibility of the Emerald Kingdom kind of sensibility that, “Hey, no matter what we do, we are severely disadvantaged by our viewpoint, we are looking through the wrong end of the telescope, and we’re talking about things we can’t possibly understand. So, just check yourself a little bit kind of thing.”

Nick Cook: [00:36:29] Well, absolutely, as you said, Ingo described this, he had many names for it, but at the Emerald Kingdom was one of them. It’s this idea of a greater reality, a substrate to existence that we don’t customarily see, because we’re not tuned to see it. In fact, there’s a sort of very small digression, I’ll come back to Ingo. As a writer, I’m always looking for sort of analogies that allow me to picture these very complex ideas, simply. You may well have I thought, actually, I think Alex, you might have interviewed Don Hoffman, have you interviewed Professor Donald Hoffman?

Alex Tsakiris: [00:37:13] Yes, yes.

Nick Cook: [00:37:13] Well, I too, spoke to him. I’ve read his works and seen a lot of his presentations on YouTube. Hoffman’s analogy that we view reality on a sort of screen that is defined for us by what he calls I think, conscious agency, in other words, that, that we only get to see the reality that we need, strictly speaking for our survival. And our survival boils down to some pretty functional things.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:37:49] Well, hold on, he throws that survival bullshit in there, because he has to kind of have any kind of credibility within his community. And then he has to throw in evolution too. But when you really push him, and we had a good conversation, you really push him towards the spiritual kind of all that falls away. And he goes, “Yeah, that’s bullshit.” It’s closer. I think, what he’s saying to what Ingo was saying, and what you I think, really beautifully brought into focus is this. I’m not sure tuning is the right word, but it’s close. But what you guys are saying you and Ingo are saying is that maybe there’s some relationship, some biophysical relationship between the quantum mechanics biology and this larger consciousness that allows us to kind of sync it up, in a way that makes it inexperienced that we’re having in the way that you’re talking about with Donald Hoffman?

Nick Cook: [00:38:43] Yeah, well. So just to sort of finish the Donald Hoffman thing, where it helped me was his description that on that screen that we have created for ourselves, the reality screen, our user interface, much like the user interface here I have on my laptop, there are icons, and it’s those icons that we interact with. We don’t need to understand the guts of the machine, the software and the hardware that make it work. I click on an icon that I need. And I think without wishing to paraphrase, Donald Hoffman too much that, that’s sort of the that’s what I took certainly as the sort of the main thesis or the main facet of his exposition that allowed me to understand that there are everyday icons, and there are an infinite number of them, and we interact with them. But occasionally, what I call a rogue icon appears on the screen. Now, Ingo, illustrated that, I think, really well, in a chapter he’s gotten the first half of the book Resurrecting the Mysterious about the Titanic, and I don’t know if you recall it, but in 1898, an author called Morgan Robertson wrote a fictional account of a book called Titan, of a ship called the Titan, the Titan hits an iceberg Mid Atlantic, it sinks loss of life, its dimensions are almost identical to the Titanic. And then Ingo goes into a whole lot of experiences that various people had building up to the sailing of the real Titanic that were very sort of premonition and forewarning of that incident. Ingo’s point was that there was a leakage, there is leakage between the Emerald Kingdom, the world that exists behind Donald Hoffman’s reality screen, and our world, our three dimensional four dimensional worlds. And those leaks are what we experience as paranormal phenomena. And those leaks are what I call, slightly corrupting Donald Hoffman, rogue icons. So and they appear and manifest in all sorts of ways as you and I know. So that for me was sort of the linkage but yes, Ingo’s Emerald Kingdom is that *death* reality that greater reality that we customarily don’t see, because we’ve just tuned it out, it’s not necessary for our survival. Our survival hinges on food, water, warmth, love, reproductive sex, and there are very few other things that we need outside of that. And if we saw the *death* reality, and the greater consciousness and all of its glory, it might just blow our minds.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:41:43] Well, there’s so much there, Nick. And that’s fantastic. I love the rogue icon idea. I actually love all the things you’re saying. And we could spend a lot of time talking about them, because they’re not talked about enough. They’re not explored. And there’s a lot to explore there. So I was kind of reaching for a little bit something else. And I’m going to pursue my little thing a little bit further, because I think it links me into this work that you’ve done this fantastic book, and the larger work that you’ve done, and then Ingo has done because Ingo writes young, go read, Penetration People by Ingo Swann first buy this book. And then secondly, …

Nick Cook: [00:42:24] What a book! penetration [unclear 42:25].

Alex Tsakiris: [00:42:27] Yeah, so but first buy this book, Resurrecting The Mysterious, write a review on Amazon, and I just got it, I mean, take the time to do that. Because, remember, Nick has to keep this stuff going in terms of this stuff. There’s a lot of choices that we have in terms of media and things that get attention. And you buying the book and writing review is like a vote saying, “Yeah, I want more of this kind of stuff.” So, I digress. But here’s where I was going with that building on what you’re saying, rogue icon stuff and all that, but I’m going to take a slightly different spin. Because what I hear you guys saying is that, it is the move from the Emerald Kingdom to this quantized reality that then locks it into time space space-time, right? Because so many of the things that we hear about in these extended realms that we’re going to talk about your wife shared near death experience, the out of body experience, all these things *ET* encounters, where people automatically say is, “Bam, I was outside of space time, I was outside of time, space.” Everyone around me said, “It was two minutes to me”, it was a year, outside of space time. Right away, if we think about that, we get that that is a larger reality, right? That our reality here inside a space time in this kind of consecutive shot that was before this is after the icons on the screen is kind of dumbed down for us to kind of process in a certain way. Maybe for a certain reason. Maybe this is, as a lot of people have said, this is our school, and this is the way this school works. And it’s chunked down to do it. So with all that said, and any comments you have on that would be welcome. The other thing that just intrigues me about Ingo Swann is, he gets so much shit wrong. I mean, he gets this stuff, right, that is like no way anyone should be able to get this stuff, right, you shouldn’t be able to remote view the moon and get back data that’s real, you shouldn’t be able to remote view Jupiter and get back to the exact data that the probe sees when it gets it, you should be able to do all that other stuff. And he can do it. So he’s right in this way that we can’t reconcile. But he’s wrong. The first words of the first chapter of the book, he’s got the near death experience thing completely wrong. And you know that because your wife had shared that near death experience. I know docs have talked to virtually every near death experience researcher and to the extent that we can use that data and I think we have to, if we’re going to have any kind of intelligent conversation about it. A Donald Hoffman quote that I love is, “The language of God is silence.” But if we’re going to talk, then let’s be as precise as possible. And the precision of our language is science and 200 peer reviewed studies on near death experience tell us, it isn’t what Ingo says, it is more what Allie, is that your wife’s name?

Nick Cook: [00:45:24] Yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:45:24] It’s what Allie describes. Exactly, which is its love its release of this, it’s moving to that higher realm. That is the light and the love and not that people are making that up. It’s just that’s the data. That’s where we’re at. So I don’t know, I battled with the fact that, how could he be so right in these fantastic ways? And then how can he be so wrong at the same time? And isn’t that a feature of this Emerald Kingdom thing that we have to constantly be aware of?

Nick Cook: [00:46:00] Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s a lot to unpick there. But, first of all, I mentioned earlier that when I was turning up at Ingo’s doorstep, you know, I had built a picture of him, where I had transposed him in my mind before I met him into a superhuman. Well, he wasn’t he was just like, everyone else, he is just a human being he had some emerald talents, as he would call them. And he sharpened those talents by an immense amount of research, he went on this massive journey to try and find out what it was that made human beings susceptible to psychic interaction. In fact, I’ve just been sort of rereading chunks of his autobiographies today, were these amazing tests that he did with the American Society of Psychic Research, I think in 1971, he wasn’t getting anywhere, he was bored. He was felt like, he was a guinea pig, a lab rat, in poked and prodded, he was getting fed up, he was doing these so called out of body tests these out of body trials, where they would put a tray full of objects above his head, maybe eight feet above his head, six, eight feet above his head. And then he had to go out of body and try and see what was in the tray above his head. And he was sort of not getting very far. And then there’s this wonderful description of how he comes up with a whole bunch of sort of, well, his script that he thinks is Arabic, and on a green sort of tube. And he got “Oh, I’m really out of here, I’m not getting this at all. Every time, I try and do it, I’m having a few successes, but largely speaking, I’m wrong all the time.” And then *Carlitoses*, who was the power psychologist who was running the trials, turns the tray around and says look Ingo, look at that. It’s a can of seven up. And the seven up had been transposed in mirror image style, so it looks like Russian or Arabic. And that was the moment Ingo went, “Okay, I’m in. I’m in because I know that this ability resides in everyone, or pretty much everyone. Now I’ve got to go and research the hell out of this, to find out what it is that makes us tick and engage with that Emerald Kingdom that greater reality, whatever you want to call it.” And that was sort of his life’s work.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:48:45] Nick, if we don’t talk about SRI and Stairgate, everyone’s going to be kind of mad, because there’s a lot to that whole story. Tell us about that chapter of Ingo’s life.

Nick Cook: [00:48:58] Well, two, I mean, it’s a load of things that are interesting there. One of them is Dr. Hal Put-off and Russell Targa obviously his co collaborator, but you know how I met when I was researching The Hunt for Zero Point, because the Zero Point at the title refers to zero point, energy amilia of fluctuating subatomic particles that flash in and out of existence and maybe, maybe the sort of dividing line between our 3d, 4d world. And whatever it is that exists beyond that. The furthest we can go in physics to see the material world is that substrate of zero-point energy, flashing particles, flashing in and out of existence.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:49:52] Just to put in perspective for people who maybe. don’t… So we’re talking about Emerald Kingdom we’re talking about consciousness, extended consciousness and God and all the rest of this stuff. But for the aerospace defense industry and just for society in general, the way it’s built military industrial complex, you’re always looking to one defend against someone else weapon zing it wink nod, how can I weaponized it? And if there is this interface, it’s kind of like a hydrogen bomb kind of interface thing, if you will, it’s like, once you tap into that very subtle little shift, there’s this enormous potential in it. And that’s why there is this interest in zero point, right?

Alex Tsakiris: [01:28:46] Ingo was Scientology. And Hell Put-off is Scientology. And then price is Scientology. And it’s not like Ingo reaches some point where we have to be careful here because it’s a life. And it’s a life lived, as we said, in this time, space reality, so he doesn’t have the advantage of looking back and knowing all that we know now kind of thing. And he certainly is … He’s a lot of different things, a lot of wonderful things. And he’s made all these incredible contributions. The Scientology thing is a cult man. I mean, he’s fallen into a cult and L. Ron Hubbard and his history. And L. Ron Hubbard is he’s rooming with Jack Parsons. Within a couple weeks. He shacking up with jack Parsons girlfriend steals his girlfriend and then later on says, “Hey, Jack, I got a great idea. You’re a rich trust fund kid. You know, give us some money. We’ll go buy a yacht in Florida. And we’ll sail it back here” and Jack Parsons, like, “Really? Okay, great.” And they rip some offers money goes out in the desert, does the Alister Crowley working, they’re in constant contact with Alastair Crowley. They’re going to bring forth the AntiChrist, because they have this kind of satanic sex magic sensibility that you know, all that kind of stuff. I bet that is like the that’s in play. It’s baked into the bread now, of Scientology. That’s what Scientology is about. So Ingo isn’t responsible for that. But then again, Inigo’s bullshit meter doesn’t work when it comes to Scientology. And he’s into avatar, and he’s into the rest of this stuff. And that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a spiritual reality to that, that he’s tapping into. But there’s another side of it that he isn’t tapping into either that should have put up his protector shields and said, “Don’t go there.” Again, a lot of opinion on my part, but tear it apart. Tell me what you think.

Nick Cook: [01:30:49] Well, I, having worked on those books of Ingo’s, having known him briefly, it’s what we said earlier, this was a flawed human. And I think he was …

Alex Tsakiris: [01:31:06] Do you mean flawed, or do you mean, just imperfect, like all of us are imperfect?

Nick Cook: [01:31:10] Imperfect, like all of us. And actually, if you go into the Swann archive in the University of South Georgia, you can see it, it’s all there. I mean, all Ingo’s correspondence with L. Ron Hubbard, all of his ideas about everything from Scientology to everything else is laid there. And I don’t think he …, you see him warts and all, I guess, is what I’m seeing. And I don’t think he ever really tried to hide too much of that, certainly in his later life. Certainly, when I saw him in New York, he never pretended to be perfect at all, but far from it. So that’s about as far as I went. My sort of vision was fairly sort of tumbled on the whole remote viewing and Ingo thing by then, and I wasn’t looking too much outside of it, to be honest.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:32:15] Remind people why you were so focused, because you’ve been super open, which is fantastic, and allowed me to take the conversation a lot of different ways. But tell us more about Resurrecting the Mysterious.

Nick Cook: [01:32:30] Well, as I mentioned earlier, the first volume, the first half of the book is really more about Ingo trying to get us to understand what he would call our psychic systems. And he talks about a triad that is based on it’s quite young in in some senses, Freudian too, but it is, there are sort of rational, intellectual aspects to us. There are emotional aspects to us. And there are these psychic aspects to us that are sort of subliminal. And all of these form into this psychic triad that he talks about he even… This is what makes it sort of like a game of three dimensional chesses, that is then overlaid by previous life, triads. So you can imagine how all of this sort of swirls and interacts. Ingo then introduces this to this idea that there are energies and forces as he calls them that swirl around us. And if we don’t get a grip on our psychic senses, we stand in danger of being blown around by these energies and forces towards the direction that Ingo rather ominously refers to as the fates, fate and destiny in Ingo’s parlance, a two very different things, Destiny is a positive thing. Fate is a negative thing. And he’s asking us really in that first volume to take responsibility for our psychic cells. And if we don’t, as I said, we stand in danger of being blown by the fates, and maybe not in a good way. So that’s the first volume. The second volume is really about how that, if we can for a second consider ourselves as a sort of node in this matrix or multiverse that is out there. It’s more about understanding the nature of the multiverse, and we talked about that as being an Emerald Kingdom. And characterized by many, many things, but that I think, the certainly the value that I got from having worked on that manuscript, was that it allowed me to see how a psychic think because Ingo really lays it there, certainly about what consciousness is from his perspective. Writing, I think he wrote it in the sort of mid 1990s timeframe. So he’d had plenty of time to think about what consciousness meant to him. And then overlaying that, on what science is beginning to say underwrites consciousness, the whole quantum mechanical aspects to consciousness, if that’s a real thing, how space-time as you referred to earlier, Alex is influential on us in our 3d, 4d lives, so, marrying Ingo’s worldview, in that book, to what science says, was something of real value to me, and I think has helped me go forward in my own research, where I want to go next, I suppose in in sort of looking at all of this.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:36:01] Great speaking of where you want to go next. Where do you want to go next?

Nick Cook: [01:36:08] Well, I don’t, I said don’t know. That’s not exactly like, I’m not Indiana Jones making this up as go along. But there is an element of sort of whimsy in all of this. Obviously, I’m writing novels, I mean, I have a second book that follows the grid to complete, that’s nearly done. I’ve got other things in the nonfiction field that I’m working on. I’m working on the whole aerospace industry as a force that can hopefully bring in a change to the planet on the sort of the climatic thing that we’ve sort of touched on. So, I’m left brain right brain, I do lots of different things. And they lead me into interesting areas. So for which I’m very grateful. So I plan ahead, but I I’m not to hide bound by my plans. I try and stay in the now as far as I can.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:37:11] Well, fantastic. It’s been just a great conversation. I so, so enjoyed it. And this is a great book. So do check it out. And check out Nick’s website where you can find all this stuff. nickcook.works. You’ll find all that stuff. So Nick, fantastic having you on. Thanks again so much.

Nick Cook: [01:37:30] Thank you, Alex. I’ve really enjoyed it times flown. Thanks for having me on the show.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:37:35] Thanks again to Nick Cook for joining me today on Skeptiko. The one question it up from this interview is what do you think about next line? What kind of line do we expect the Pentagon to really draw in terms of sharing information? And how does that relate to how we should process this latest UFO report? I resist, resist call it UAP I hate that phony baloney, fake change the acronym thing but what do you think we should make of the line they’re trying to maintain? Let me know your thoughts. Track me down any way you can. Lots of good shows coming up. Stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care. Bye for now.

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