This is not quite a transcript, but it is more of a summary of the audio. Substack provides transcripts of the audios that are not too bad. Also, you can turn on closed captions while listening to it by using Google’s Chrome browser and turning on Live Captioning (under “Settings” and “Accessibility”). You can also select any part of the transcript and Substack will play that sound clip. I am continually amazed at how these kinds of technologies are progressing. This is decidedly a less formal way of presenting my work, and we will see if people find it helpful.
I am going to make more oral posts on the great people that I have known. I did a series on my days with Dennis Lee (there is more to come), I just did one on Gary Wean, whose advice helped me rescue Dennis, and this one will be on Brian O’Leary. It is kind of interesting that I met Gary in 1989, was introduced to Ed Herman’s work in 1990, and met Brian in 1991. It was like my “friends” who led me to Dennis kept sending people to me, and me to people. I met Dennis in 1986, my wife the next year, and I eventually realized that I don’t have that much free will in my life, but just have to handle what my “friends” throw at me. I have no regrets, but I would not wish my journey on anybody. We all have our paths to walk, and I had too much adventure in my life. Fortunately, I did not have to survive murder attempts, like Dennis, Gary, and Brian did. I have been happy to carry spears and torches for them, instead. OK, off to Brian’s preposterous life.
Brian was born in Boston in 1940, with Irish heritage and politically conservative parents. On the night that Truman defeated Dewey, Brian looked through the telescope at Harvard, and that influenced the rest of his life. Brian became fascinated with astronomy, and a few years after his Harvard experience, Wernher von Braun began writing articles in Collier’s magazine on space flight and especially a mission to Mars. Brian avidly read them. When Brian was in high school, before Sputnik launched, he wrote an essay for school in which he became an astronaut, which befuddled his classmates and teacher, as it was such a bizarre idea then. After Sputnik, it was no longer so strange.
Brian’s parents had planned a military career for Brian (so familiar), but he instead had a wild time in college and was a mediocre student before he finally began to settle down. He was expelled from Georgetown (his first of several stints in Washington, D.C.), while still earning his master’s degree, before he pursued his doctorate at Berkeley – the heart of American radicalism – and he finally began acting like a true scientist under the mentorship of a planetary scientist, and Brian became one. His doctoral thesis was on Mars, and while he was finishing up at Berkeley, Brian saw a NASA ad for scientist-astronauts and naturally applied. I lived in Houston at the time, for the first of my many parallels and intersections with Brian’s life. The Apollo 1 fire drove my father from NASA, and I left Houston a few weeks before Brian had his astronaut interview there.
Brian’s astronaut interview is one of the strangest interviews in the human journey, as he was the first person publicly asked/ordered to visit another planet. Brian later learned that von Braun was behind Brian’s hiring as an astronaut, as part of von Braun’s longtime Mars ambitions. But between his astronaut interview and his first day on the job, NASA lost the budget battle with the Pentagon, as the Vietnam War had to be paid for somehow. On his first day at NASA, Brian and his fellow scientist-astronauts were told by Deke Slayton that NASA did not need them anymore, and Slayton encouraged them to resign. That group called themselves the XS-11 (Excess Eleven), in their nerdy humor. Brian was the first of the four who eventually resigned, and of the seven who stayed, nobody went into space for 15 years, as they sacrificed their scientific careers to train as astronauts.
After Brian resigned (after any ideas of going to Mars were canceled), Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell. Carl and Brian were arguably the world’s most prominent Mars experts for a time, and Brian studied mascons at Cornell. Even in 1968, Brian began becoming politically active, and advised George McGovern’s 1968 presidential campaign, as the first of several Democratic campaigns that he advised. Brian led a protest at the White House in 1970. He was Mo Udall’s speechwriter and energy advisor for his 1976 presidential run, when Rockefeller-lackey Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to win. That campaign wrecked Brian’s marriage. Brian published his first book in 1970 and became quite the NASA gadfly. That eventually resulted his being the only astronaut without a NASA bio, until I rectified that soon before he died.
Brian’s roommate for his NASA interview was Gerard O’Neill, who ran Princeton’s physics department and recruited Brian to work there in 1975. Brian was quite an academic vagabond after his astronaut days. At Princeton, Brian worked with O’Neill on the feasibility of space colonies and asteroid mining. On the Princeton physics department staff were several Nobel Laureates. Every two weeks the staff would have a luncheon and sip their sherry, and the number one topic of conversation was ridiculing accounts of the paranormal. Brian smugly sipped his sherry with them, in his soft berth in the Ivy League, drinking the materialist Kool-Aid, until a fateful day in 1979 when Brian took a human-potential class and had a remote viewing. Five years earlier, I had a nearly identical experience while performing the same exercise, which ruined me as a scientist before I began. Brian never really came back to the academic fold after that. He had a near-death experience a couple of years later, and in 1982 he left Princeton and got a job at a space contractor in LA. Brian and I were unwitting neighbors in those days, as I began my career in LA. Brian got Buzz Aldrin a job there and shared an office with him, but Brian refused to work on Reagan’s Star Wars and was laid off in 1987, never worked in the scientific establishment again, and scrambled for the rest of his life.
Brian then began exploring the frontiers of science and became embroiled in controversies, partly because fringe figures used Brian’s fame to further their causes, which were often of dubious validity, such as the Face on Mars issue. In the early 1990s, Brian was just getting his feet wet in the free-energy field. I had already had my life ruined in the field, and we had our fateful meeting in 1991 in Ohio.
I was trying to recover from my adventures, in my days of study, and the year after we met, Brian staged a UFO conference, at which high-ranking military officials tried to recruit Brian into working for the spooks in UFO studies. Brian nearly died of a heart attack immediately after rejecting their “offer.” Brian thought that his heart attack was an attempt to kill him, and the closest that he ever came to publicly admitting it was in his last book. His health never recovered from that incident and shortened his life.
After his heart attack, Brian continued to travel the world. Brian was quite a globetrotter, and he began visiting free-energy scientists and inventors, which led to his Miracle in the Void, and I became his biggest fan. In 1996, as Brian promoted his book, my former partner Dennis Lee began barnstorming the USA, stumping for free energy. Brian called me one day, because he and Dennis were going to speak at the same New Age expo, and I arranged for them to meet. I doubt that they were too impressed with each other. Dennis had a right-wing bent, and Brian was a left-winger, but they became the only two people whom I trusted in the free-energy field.
While Dennis barnstormed the USA, to the displeasure of the sitting American president, Brian began his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy. After working on me for several years, Dennis got me to work with him again. I should have turned down his offer, and I nearly went to prison for my trouble, as the global elite targeted us in a huge and sophisticated sting operation. I soon went back home to Seattle and pursued my studies and writing.
Among the many subjects that I studied in the 1990s was the Apollo Moon landings, to see what might have been covered up, but I slowly became aware of a cottage industry that denied that we landed men the Moon. In early 2001, I decided to get to the bottom of it if I could, and only a few weeks into that investigation, Brian was on a national TV show, publicly questioning whether NASA really landed men the Moon. That spurred me to spend the next several months examining the evidence, before I concluded that that Moon landings happened as advertised, although the Apollo 11 astronauts, at minimum, may have encountered ETs on the Moon.
I presented my findings to Brian, especially footage of Neil Armstrong’s leap onto the lunar module, which was a feat that could not have happened on Earth. In August 2001, Brian invited me to hang out with him in California, as he tried to interest California’s governor in free energy. That began my days of collaboration with Brian in earnest, and we had an epic note-trading session. Brian told me about his run-in with the American military over UFOs and Sparky Sweet’s grim last days, and I told him about my friend’s underground technology show. Brian was not even surprised, and was more interested in my close relative who worked for Henry Kissinger. Brian talked about the crazed reactions of denial and fear that he received from the world’s leading scientists and “progressives” when he mentioned free energy, and Brian openly wondered if humanity was a sentient species. I mentioned Fred Singer and Global Warming, and it was the angriest that I ever saw Brian. Singer mentored Brian early in his career, and Singer became a hired-gun propagandist who led the effort to deny Global Warming on behalf of the oil companies. Brian felt very betrayed by Singer.
The next month the 9/11 terror attacks happened, which sparked an imperial rampage, and soon after the invasion of Iraq, Brian invited me to help him found a non-profit organization devoted to free-energy education. I was the only member of the board who had been through the free-energy meat grinder, I could tell early on that Brian’s crew did not have what it took to be successful in that effort, and I soon quit the organization. It was an ordeal that permanently cured me of all mass-movement approaches to the free-energy issue. I was involved with five mass-movement efforts before I finally understood: none of them aimed high enough, which eventually led to my current approach. When the first person who agreed to be a conference speaker for us was murdered a few days after he agreed, Brian immediately and understandably began planning his move to South America, where he spent the rest of his life. Brian was eventually kicked out of that free-energy organization by the other board members. It was not the first such experience for Brian, and it unfortunately did not surprise me.
In those early years of collaborating with Brian, I was in the throes of a monster of a midlife crisis, which did not end until after Dennis arrived at my house in 2006 to invite me to the White House. For the second time in my life, I got trauma therapy, the clouds soon parted on my midlife crisis, and I began engaging the public again.
Brian came back into my life the next year, and he was responsible for my first public interview. The year after that, we did the first of several joint interviews, and Brian began enlisting my help again. We wrote a proposal for the Department of Energy in 2009, and the next year I became his biographer. I improved his Wikipedia bio, wrote his NASA bio, and ran the gauntlet to get it published. Near his life’s end, Brian informed me that electoral politics is a dead-end. He would have known.
Brian was a surprisingly gentle man, who dealt with a great deal of adversity with aplomb, while being continually assailed, going bankrupt, and other outrages. He had far greater patience with the public than I did.
Brian’s health steeply declined in his last years, with a bout with cancer and another heart attack, before he died of cancer in July, 2011. Brian was a great, great man who lived an unbelievable life. Brian, Dennis, and Mr. Professor head my pantheon. Helping Brian was one of my life’s greatest honors, and I miss him.
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