Brian O’Leary’s Preposterous Life
A summary of my posts on Brian
As I just did for Ed Herman, I will do the same thing for Brian O’Leary and summarize my Substack posts on him in this post, as part of my Substack experiment. This will also only link to my Substack posts.
Brian was born in 1940 in Boston to a politically conservative Irish-Catholic family. He developed an interest in astronomy as a child and avidly read Wernher von Braun’s Collier’s articles on space exploration. When Sputnik went into orbit, Brian planned to become an astronaut and scientist. His early college days were kind of wild and Brian was a mediocre physics student. But he climbed the Matterhorn and ran in the Boston Marathon in those days, achiever that he was. He got his masters in astronomy at Georgetown but was expelled from the program for writing a satirical play on the faculty. Under the mentorship of Donald Rae, Brian finally blossomed as an astronomer in his doctoral studies at Berkeley (the decade after Ed got his doctorate at Berkeley).
While still at Berkeley, Brian applied to NASA’s astronaut program, and in his astronaut interview in 1967, Brian was asked/ordered to go to Mars, for the first time that a human was publicly asked to visit another planet. Brian later learned that von Braun was behind his astronaut selection, as part of his longtime plans for Mars. But NASA lost the budget battle with the Pentagon over the Vietnam War, the Mars plans were canceled, and Brian soon quit NASA. Nobody from his selection group went into space for 15 years and several quit before going up.
After NASA, Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell. Brian and Carl were leading Mars experts and they studied mascons, which are mass-and-gravitational anomalies. Brian worked for NASA for the Mariner 10 probe, and he predicted and named Caloris Planitia on Mercury. In 1970, Brian led a protest at the White House over the war in Cambodia, and was invited into the White House to air his grievances. That began Brian’s politically active years, although he advised George McGovern for his 1968 presidential campaign. Brian became a NASA gadfly, publicly calling it out. Brian became Mo Udall’s speechwriter and energy advisor for his 1976 presidential campaign. That campaign wrecked Brian’s marriage. His astronaut-interview roommate, Gerard O’Neill, recruited Brian into the Princeton physics faculty, where they studied the feasibility of space colonies.
While at Princeton, Brian had a remote-viewing experience in a human-potential class in 1979, which ruined him as a mainstream scientist, as he could no longer believe in the materialistic perspective that dominated mainstream science. Brian had a near-death experience in 1981, soon left Princeton, and got a job with a space contractor in LA. Brian got Buzz Aldrin a job there and shared an office with him. But Brian refused to work on military applications during Reagan’s Star Wars days and lost his job in 1987, which ended his career of working for the scientific establishment.
Brian began navigating the fringes of science and he advocated the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena. Brian called for a new science that relinquished its materialism. I met Brian while chauffeuring him to a fringe-science conference in 1991, and we had a great deal in common, including free energy. The next year, Brian co-hosted a UFO conference. High-ranking military officials arrived to try to take over the conference. They also offered Brian work on classified UFO projects. Brian rejected their “offer” and nearly died of a heart attack immediately afterward, in what Brian believed was a murder attempt. His health never recovered from that incident and it shortened his life. Brian endured attempts by the Establishment to defrock him after he left the fold, to the degree where they denied that Brian had been an astronaut.
Even with his impaired health, Brian traveled the world, visiting psychics, fringe-science labs, free-energy inventors, and he did a great deal of public speaking. His third “fringe” book, published in 1996, was about his free-energy investigations, and Brian began his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy. I became that book’s biggest fan and our collaborations began then.
Brian ended up sucking me into the Apollo Moon landings issue in 2001, when he said on national TV that he was not sure if astronauts landed on the Moon. I had already been looking into it, I spent several months examining the evidence, and I was satisfied that the Moon landings happened as presented, although there may have been a cover-up of ET encounters on the Moon. In the wake of my Apollo investigations, Brian invited me to California in August 2001, where he was trying to interest California’s governor in free energy, as Enron was in the midst of raping California. We had an epic note-trading session. I told him of my friend’s underground exotic-technology show, which included free energy and antigravity technologies. Brian was not even surprised, and he was more interested in my close relative who was a CIA contract agent who worked for Henry Kissinger.
In the spring of 2003, as the dust was settling from the USA’s invasion of Iraq, Brian asked me to help him found the New Energy Movement, which was a disaster, and Brian was eventually kicked out of the organization. Brian’s free-energy and UFO colleagues had violent deaths around our New Energy Movement conference in 2004. Brian was understandably spooked and soon moved to Ecuador, where he spent the rest of his life.
A few years later, Brian came back into my life. I carried his spears and began doing interviews. The fringes could be a nutty place to be, and Brian was regularly dragged into fringe topics by people who sought to capitalize on his fame.
Brian’s health continued declining, with a cancer bout and second heart attack. We both realized that the end was likely near. I wrote his NASA bio and got it published, and improved his Wikipedia bio. Brian died a few months later, in July 2011.
Brian was a great man who lived a preposterous life. If free-energy technology makes it past the organized suppression and humanity’s inertia, Brian will become a significant historical figure.