Brian O’Leary’s Preposterous Life – Part 2

His academic and politically active life, before he woke up

After Carl Sagan recruited Brian to teach at Cornell in 1968, they studied mascons, which is short for mass concentrations, especially on the Moon.  Several years later, Brian was part of the Mariner 10 image-analyzing team.  That probe immediately preceded the record-setting Voyager probes.  Because of his mascon studies, Brian predicted the location and suggested the name for Mercury’s Caloris Planitia. 

Brian became a restless academic vagabond, bouncing around between several universities over the next 13 years, including Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Princeton.  Brian was raised to be a Republican, but he quickly shed that part of his upbringing.  He spent Thanksgiving 1962 with Bobby Kennedy, and they listened to Vaughn Meader’s hit record, which was a satire on the Kennedy family, as Bobby laughed uproariously at it.  In 1970, Brian led the famous protest over the war in Cambodia, when Nixon had his famous talk with the protestors.  Brian was at the White House’s front gates with fellow protestors.  Brian and some of his colleagues were invited into the White House to air their grievances.  Brian tried to take his protest straight to Nixon, but was stopped at the Oval Office door by Haldeman.  Brian was on the national evening news that day, and later admitted how those days in the bright lights tended to inflate his ego. 

The year after he resigned from NASA, just as men were landing on the Moon, Brian became a NASA gadfly, publishing op-eds in the New York Times and publishing his account of his NASA days.  Brian then became very politically active.  He was Mo Udall’s speechwriter during his run for president, during one of Brian’s “codependent” encounters with Washington, D.C.  Udall was the early Democratic frontrunner, and then David Rockefeller’s hand-picked candidate, Jimmy Carter, came from nowhere to win.  Brian had two children, and the strain of the Udall campaign ended Brian’s marriage.  But Brian became very active on Capitol Hill, working closely with Udall, and helped defeat Nixon’s goal of having a thousand nuclear reactors in the USA by the year 2000.

Just as Brian’s marriage unraveled, his astronaut-interview roommate, Gerard O’Neill, recruited Brian to teach at Princeton, where they studied the feasibility of space colonies and asteroid mining.  I was contacted by one of Brian’s space-colony colleagues after I began doing interviews, and we became friends.  He was happy to have known Brian and Brian remembered him fondly. 

The Princeton physics faculty had several Nobel laurates on staff, and every two weeks the department had a luncheon where they sipped sherry.  The dominant topic of conversation was ridiculing all accounts of the paranormal.  They were priests who defended the tenets of their religion.  Brian smugly sipped his sherry with them until a fateful day in 1979 when he attended a human-potential class and performed what today is called a remote viewing.  It was the same exercise that gave me my mystical awakening five years earlier.  It ruined Brian as a mainstream scientist, as he could no longer drink the scientific establishment’s materialist sherry.  He later had a near-death experience, which further removed his heart from establishment science.  Two years after his remote-viewing experience, he left Princeton.  Brian never had a soft academic berth again, and he later half-joked that if he knew what he was in for, he would have kept sipping his sherry. 

But Brian was not yet through with the establishment.  In 1982, he got a job at the famous space contractor SAIC, in Hermosa Beach in LA.  I lived in neighboring Redondo Beach during Brian’s SAIC years, for more of the strange overlaps of our journeys.  Buzz Aldrin was so rudderless after his NASA days that he tried to sell cars before Brian got him a job at SAIC and shared an office with Buzz.  Armstrong and Aldrin may well have encountered ETs on the Moon, which may have contributed to Buzz’s mental health issues.  While at SAIC, Brian briefed the neocons Wolfowitz and Perle, and Brian thought that they acted strangely. 

At SAIC, Brian still pursued space colonies and asteroid mining, but Reagan’s Star Wars was the hot ticket in the MIC.  Peace-activist Brian refused to work on Star Wars, and he was laid off from SAIC in 1987, just before his retirement benefits would have vested.  That marked the end of Brian’s establishment days, and he scrambled for the rest of his life as he explored the frontiers of science.  His greatest adventures were just beginning.