Brian O’Leary’s Preposterous Life – Part 3

Brian began navigating the fringes, which shortened his life.

Anybody who has navigated the fringes much knows that it is filled with chaff, in numerous ways.  There is valid stuff there, but it is not easy to find.  Far more often, fringe stuff is invalid, to put it kindly.  I have written at length about my own adventures on the fringes, and I have presented my stances on many issues.  Brian went through a similar process, but as somebody with impressive credentials, so he became a political football by all sides of many issues, as people tried to place him in their camp.  I reread his Camelot interview as I wrote this, and it was a very good summary of aspects of his journey. 

Brian’s first three books after his initial paranormal experiences (1, 2, 3) chronicled his adventures on the fringes, and that third book, Miracle in the Void, was his first free-energy book, and I was the book’s biggest fan.  It was about the first time that I saw somebody write publicly about Dennis Lee and not lie about him.  Brian and I began our collaboration then, and I arranged for him to meet Dennis after Brian asked me to, where they both spoke at a New Age expo.  Dennis was barnstorming the USA just as Brian began his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy.  It was a heady time. 

Even before his establishment days ended in 1987, Brian was becoming known as a fringe thinker, and he got sucked into the Face on Mars issue.  Brian thought that the “face” merited closer investigation when probes returned to Mars and could photograph it at higher resolutions.  But on the other side of the issue was his erstwhile colleague Carl Sagan.  Brian saw that Carl cooked the data, as he played fast and loose in the debunking game.  I doubt that anything at Cydonia has an artificial origin, but we won’t know for sure until we land there. 

Cydonia was just one of many fringe areas that Brian snooped into.  Brian traveled the world, visiting psychics, fringe-science laboratories, crop circles, and so on.  He spoke publicly hundreds of times around the world and led many workshops. 

In 1987, just as Brian’s career ended, my free-energy wild ride began, when I became Dennis’s partner in Brian’s home town, for another overlap with Brian.  When I met Brian four years later, my life had been ruined but I had been radicalized.  Within five minutes of meeting Brian, I discovered that we had Sparky Sweet in common, and Brian was just getting his feet wet in the free-energy field. 

The next year, Brian co-hosted a UFO conference.  High-ranking military officials attended and made Brian an “offer” to do classified UFO work.  Brian instantly turned them down and nearly died immediately afterward from a “heart attack” that shortened his life.  Steven Greer wrote about the conference and those officials in his dead man’s trigger document.  Fearing repercussions if he discussed it publicly, the closest that Brian came to disclosing it publicly was in his last book.  He obliquely referred to it in his Camelot interview. 

With his health impaired from that incident, Brian nevertheless traveled the world, visiting free-energy inventors and labs, which led to his Miracle in the Void and his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy.  After several years of trying, Dennis finally got me to work for him again, but it did not last long and I nearly went to prison (or worse) for my trouble.  While Brian was riding and Dennis was barnstorming, I was studying and writing.  In the middle of that, Brian inadvertently dragged me into the Apollo Moon landings issue. 

To be fair to Brian, as Greer said, Armstrong and Aldrin seemed to have encountered ETs on the Moon.  Greer also said that fake footage of the Apollo 11 moonwalk was indeed shot on Earth, as a backup plan in case catastrophe struck.  When Brian explained his Moon-landings skepticism, it was partly because he asked Buzz Aldrin and likely Ed Mitchell what it was like on the Moon.  If you shared an office with Buzz, like Brian did, would you ask him what it was like on the Moon?  Ed Mitchell needed long-term therapy to come to grips with his lunar experiences, and Buzz ended up in a mental institution for a while.  When Brian asked Moon-walking astronauts what it was like on the Moon, he received strange and cryptic replies.  It fueled Brian’s skepticism.  Brian did not doubt that the Apollo craft went to the Moon, as many Earth-based telescopes photographed them on the way.  It was the landings, and especially the photographic record, that Brian wondered about. 

For another crazy overlap in our journeys, I had been looking into the Moon landings since about 1991, as I studied everything.  My father’s tenure at NASA had something to do with it, and I originally looked into them to see if anything had been covered up about them, not whether they happened or not.  I slowly became aware of people who argued that men did not land on the Moon at all.  I did not find their arguments persuasive, but in early 2001 I began to look into the issue again, and after a couple of weeks of study, Brian was on a national TV show, expressing his skepticism that we really landed on the Moon!  I had to dive into it then, and spent the next several months going deep on the evidence.  I had some help from Jay Windley, and by June of 2001, we jointly discovered Apollo 11 footage that convinced me that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon.  All of my nagging doubts evaporated, and I contacted Brian. 

He invited me to California and we hung out after nearly being run out of town for trying to interest the governor in free energy (who lost his job to Arnold Schwarzenegger over the energy issue).  Brian and I had an epic note-trading session.  I asked Brian how his ride as the Paul Revere of Free Energy went.  I really wanted to know, as he had access to the tops of the world’s scientific, environmental, and “progressive” organizations.  About all that he received were crazed reactions of denial and fear, so much so that he openly wondered if humanity was a sentient species.  In his Camelot interview, you can see that theme. 

I told him about my friend’s underground technology show, and Brian was not even surprised, replying with, “He got a show from the spooks.”  Brian was more interested in my relative who worked for Henry Kissinger (Kissinger visited my home, among other incidents) than he was my friend’s underground show.  Among the many topics of our note-trading session, Brian told me about his “heart attack” that was likely a murder attempt. 

There is far more to write about Brian, and it will take a few more posts.