In March 2009, Brian and I did our Project Camelot interview, which will likely always be my favorite, as I won’t do another with Brian. I originally thought that Brian was responsible for the Camelot interview, but Bill Ryan had also been following my work for about a decade by then.
After we made that Department of Energy proposal in June 2009, Brian worked on what became his final book. He wanted me to play editor, but it was really his show and I only proofread one of his final drafts. I still have several of his early copies in my library. I was a prominent character in his final book, and we influenced each other over the years.
Brian’s health never recovered from that “heart attack” the year after we met. White people who live in sunny climates get skin cancer. I saw it with my relatives. Brian got skin cancer in Ecuador and was about to have surgery when he was cured by an alternative treatment that an American who lived in Ecuador administered. In 2009, the FDA kidnapped that practitioner from Ecuador, to face the medical racket’s wrath in an American prison. That is standard procedure for the medical racket, in flagrant violation of international law. As Ed Herman wrote, violating international law is as American as apple pie.
Unless they are psychopaths, spooks and Special Forces soldiers often drink themselves to death, as my relative did who worked for Henry Kissinger. The CIA’s halls at Langley are filled with zombies who pour themselves into a bottle each night. For people who discover how the world really works, beyond the barrage of propaganda and conditioning, conquering the urge to get inebriated regularly is no easy trick. I battled the bottle for 20 years before I quit, and I might not be here if I had not.
I can’t speak for what was happening, but Brian liked his wine and weed. His weed use surely went back to the wild 1960s. His pal Carl Sagan was a big marijuana advocate, and they must have smoked many bowls together during Brian’s Cornell days. In 2010, Brian had a second heart attack, after an ayahuasca ceremony. I can’t recall the exact sequence of events, but Brian and I knew that the end was likely near, so I suggested that we get some biography work done. I wrote one for my site in December 2010, and planned to get his Wikipedia and NASA biographies done.
Brian was the only astronaut without a biography at NASA. NASA deceived the public about why Brian did not have a bio. NASA told the public that Brian did not have one because he did not sign a release form. It was true that Brian did not sign a release form, but it was not the real reason. Brian was a NASA gadfly, and the bureaucrats were going to erase him to the extent that they could, in their pettiness. When I got Brian’s NASA bio published, we didn’t have to complete any forms.
I had an adventure in getting his NASA biography published, and after I did, a leading space debunker challenged Brian’s Martian credentials, and he did it incompetently, which is standard for the “skeptics.” I was concerned that I would have to do battle at NASA, I asked Brian for some ammo, and he gave me his von Braun and Shepard anecdotes. Fortunately, the debunker did not escalate the issue at NASA. He could have, as he had been a famous NASA employee.
My strategy was to get Brian’s NASA bio done first and then tackle Wikipedia, as I had already had an unpleasant encounter with Wikipedia’s racism. When I began on Brian’s Wikipedia bio, it was a stub and had a paragraph on the Moon-landings issue. Brian did not want to be known as the astronaut who doubted that the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon. I then engaged in months of edit wars and Brian wrote what became his final statement on the issue. I tried to get a “notable” site to publish Brian’s final word so that I could link to it at Wikipedia, but nobody was interested. Finally, another editor removed the Moon-landings paragraph as the article become more professional, as part of an effort to professionalize all astronaut bios. Brian’s Moon-landing skepticism was not a very relevant issue.
I could live with Brian’s Wikipedia bio as it stood, but several years later, the rude admin who erased my changes to Ed Herman’s libelous bio went after my work on Brian’s bio and whacked it down. Today, there is no mention of Brian’s free-energy efforts in his Wikipedia bio, which Brian thought was his most important work. I was able to work some of that back in by making a Wikiquotes page for him, and I am still the only contributor to that page.
I am contacted about the Moon landings to this day, by scientists and others. That is partly because Bart Sibrel is still banging the drum. The Apollo 11 footage that Bart obtained was definitely not shot in low-Earth orbit, which is easy to see if somebody exerts only a little effort, so Bart’s entire hypothesis collapses. But Bart still makes the rounds on conspiracy shows that do not perform any diligence. I hope that the hoaxed-Moon-landings issue goes away when we land more people on the Moon, maybe in this decade. It is a wearying issue for me, to be continually asked about the Moon landings. ET encounters on the Moon may have been covered up, and other astronautic ET encounters have been, but Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who came after them really walked on the Moon. There is no reasonable doubt to be entertained on that issue, if people do their homework.
But I can understand Brian’s doubts, however sketchily informed they were. There was plenty to be paranoid about in his life. He asked me if I thought that one of the New Energy Movement’s (NEM) board members worked for the CIA, and I replied that I considered it unlikely. I had encountered contract agents who were infiltrated into our organizations (1, 2), and Dennis Lee suspected who they were from the outset. Not to say that there were not others, but the combination of naïveté and low-integrity can lead to events that seem like they were orchestrated by agent provocateurs. They are definitely common in the free-energy field, but I doubt that they were among NEM’s founders.
In Brian’s last year, a lot of publicity was given to the idea of colonizing Mars, especially by Elon Musk, who planned to send people to Mars in 20 years. Brian joked that he would be 90 by then and would not mind finally getting his trip to Mars. In all of the Mars talk since then, I have yet to see Brian’s name mentioned even once. It should have been.
In the spring of 2011, Brian invited me to visit him in Ecuador. I have never made a trip like that and do not plan to, but I considered it. But I also flew my mother to my home in June for what became the last time that I saw her before she died the next year. Brian died the next month. I eventually saw videos of Brian in his life’s last year, and saw a video made about a week before he died. It was shocking to see his condition, as Brian was at death’s door. I might have gone had I seen how far gone he was. He was diagnosed with intestinal cancer a few days after a conference held at his home, and he died a few days later. When I notified Chris Ferguson of Brian’s death, it was during the morning of July 28, 2011. I did not specify to Chris what Brian’s date of death was, and it might have been on July 27th, Ecuador time. But Brian’s NASA bio says the 28th. That seems to be what officialdom has to say on the matter, and Brian will be forever remembered as dying on July 28th.
What a great man Brian was, and oh, how I miss him. Brian and Dennis were nearly the only two people that I trusted in the free-energy field, and I was about the only person in the free-energy field that they trusted. I will wrap up my discussion of Brian’s preposterous life in the next post.