An Interview with Paul von Ward

by Brent Raynes

Right: Paul von Ward.

Photo—Brent Raynes

PAUL VON WARD, independent scholar, author, ordained Baptist minister, served consecutively for three decades as a U.S. naval officer, U.S. diplomat, and international educator, with graduate degrees in government and psychology from Harvard and Florida State University. The author of Dismantling the Pyramid: Government by the People, Our Solarian Legacy: Multidimensional Humans in a Self-Learning Universe, and Gods, Genes, and Consciousness, Ward honored us with a visit to our home on March 20th to discuss his fascinating and thought- provoking information and views. Ward makes his home at Monteagle, Tennessee. He is a MUFON consultant in psychology. Check out his website: www.vonward.com.

Editor: How was it Paul that you became interested and active in the UFO field?

Paul Von Ward: Well Brent, it seems when I look back at it, that I’ve always been interested in it. Sort of subconsciously, or consciously. I don’t remember a specific dividing line where I wasn’t interested and now I am. I mean there was not that kind of event. When I look back, in retrospect, to when I was 4-5 years old, we lived out in the country and I would go out into the woods and play by myself. I was the oldest of the kids and I would go off by myself and I would come back and tell my mother and father and everybody else that I had been talking to my two playmates in the woods. Wok and Wokem. And I would tell them stories about what they were telling me and apparently they were teaching me things that a little 4 or 5 year old country boy didn’t know about because as I got into school and began to learn more about other cultures and comparative religion and myths and legends about the gods of old and so on, all of those things to me just seemed to be natural. From a very early stage, I felt that this is not something that is somebody’s imagination. They didn’t make it up, and when I read Freud, for example, in college, many years later, he talked about religion being an illusion and so on. I never thought it was an illusion. I just thought that it was misinterpreting what had actually happened to people. I couldn’t get away from the idea that all of these stories, even from the Native Americans with so and so coming and giving the bow and arrow and giving the gift of fire, or hearing the Cherokee stories of the spider being that came and gave them knowledge of fire, or groups out in Seattle, Washington area that talk about the god that came and helped them escape from the flood. That seemed to me like the flood in the Bible. The Indian tribes were told to get ready, and get to higher ground. Now in the Native American story the gods didn’t come and help them out when the flood was over. The difference is in the Bible story the gods came back.

Now that’s another story, because why did they come back? Because some of the gods, if you read the Bible carefully, and if you read some of the other texts that the tale of Noah came from, because it came from Sumerian texts and other sources, from Babylon and so on.

The Native Americans, the aboriginals in Australia, tribes in Africa, and even Inca traditions say that a god-like ET or entity, or a god from the sun, gave them their knowledge and cultural information, but it is really in the Middle East, in Sumeria and Mesopotamia, that you have the story that describes ongoing intervention by advanced beings after the flood, and continuing for thousands of years. And that’s what I have tried to take as the central story in the book. Not that I think that that’s the only place in history where advanced beings interacted with humans or came to help humans. I think there’s evidence to suggest that maybe even in China, that after the flood. the high plateau (region) up towards Mongolia...that’s the cradle of Chinese civilization and there’s evidence of objects that look like artifacts from UFO aliens in the caves up in the mountains.

Editor: Now we’re learning more and more about pyramids there too.

Paul Von Ward: Absolutely.

Editor: And the Australian aboriginals have traditions going back, they say, 50,000 to 60,000 years about their Sky People.

Paul Von Ward: The Dogons in Africa go back 60,000 years too. They have traditions about the Dog Star Sirius. I actually went to Mali and they talk about it as a 60,000 something year old tradition. It’s interesting because the 60,000 years is the same as the aboriginals in Africa. When I was writing my second book about ten years ago in Washington, D.C., hanging in the World Bank was a painting from the aboriginals in Africa showing the star beings descending. They said that this was the dream information that was passed on.

The reason I focused on what we call the cradle of western civilization which is what’s now Iraq, Egypt, Greece, Palestine and Israel, and that part of the world, is because the stories of continued involvement are so explicit from the Sumerian texts, which Zecharia Sitchin has written on that, and many other people are now beginning to translate Egyptian materials and Babylonian materials, going back to the Greek myths, to Roman myths, the gods of Olympus, all of those again, looking at them afresh. So from that part of the world we can see a continuing influence of what I call advanced beings.

I say advanced not because they’re necessarily always more ethical or moral, but at least they’re more technologically advanced and they can show themselves to us or not. To me that’s the difference. They can determine whether they’re going to talk to us or not. And that’s what’s comparable to say the Biblical accounts of the gods walking with men and the gods inter-marrying the daughters of men. That’s comparable to the UFO abduction reports today. The abductee doesn’t choose himself or herself. They’re chosen.

My interest has not been so much did it happen and not so much is that evidence valid or not, as I’m making the assumption that it is valid and that there’s ample evidence to support it. My interest is how did humans react to this intervention by advanced beings. So I look at it historically and see how cults were formed, the worship of the advanced beings. All of these groups in the Middle East had so many cults. You had Egyptian, Babylonian, Sumerian, Phoenician, Greek, etc. Because when the gods, these advanced beings, pulled away, for whatever reason and the stories differ, but at some point, about 4000 years ago, they seem to have pulled away. So because humans had been dependent upon them for setting up institutions and making the laws and giving them technology and teaching them how to write and teaching them medical practices, teaching them agriculture, giving them advanced seeds to plant crops (maybe even genetically domesticated animals because there’s some indication that food stuffs and animals were genetically modified, that they didn’t evolve that way).

So because humans had gotten so accustomed to these advanced beings providing all of the goodies, the manna from heaven, (when) they were gone they (the humans) were very grief stricken and (felt) lost and left behind. Why didn’t we get taken into heaven, and why didn’t we learn about the long lives. In those days it was the long lives, thousands of years of life by these advanced beings, and we humans didn’t live very long at all. So there was all of this grief and mourning, and what happened, in my view, is that because all of these advanced beings had had a group of interpreters around them, telling the humans who were working, like we do in military bases where we go overseas now and we hire all of the local folks to do all of the dirty work, to clean up and do the administrative and the support work. The advanced aliens had us doing that, and there was always this group of interpreters between the rulers and the people, and those interpreters were the beginning of the priesthood because they could say we know what happened, we can tell you why they left, or we can still communicate with them, if you will give us your sacrifices and your ties and the rituals we will pray to them on your behalf. So the priesthood then became this intermediary and the cults grew and then they were competing for one another for membership. The Isis group was competing with the Mithra group and so forth, so as the cults were competing with one another they had to figure out ways to keep their members. So they began to say, “Our god is the most powerful one. Your gods are not.” And in fact if you look at the Dead Sea scroll material, that was written around 2000 years ago, before the time of Jesus (but around that time) they talk about Yahweh being one of the gods. At that time there was still no belief in the Hebrew tradition that Yahweh was supernatural, the god of the universe. He was their god. He was the Hebrew’s god, and he was more powerful than the others because he could whip the Babylonians, or he could whip the Cannonites and let the Israelites move into Cannon. So there was this competition among the gods, among the cults, and from my point of view those were the origins of our religious conflicts and divisions. I mean, the humans began to take on the same wars and battles that the gods had when they were fighting among themselves.

Editor: So we get a glimpse of this when in the beginning of Genesis where it says, “We will make man in our image.” People have always debated about what that means.

Paul Von Ward: “Our image” in Genesis, as far as I am concerned, is the genetic manipulation. In other words, I think, and I think the evidence suggests, that humans were arising naturally on earth as homo erectus, that group of beings that were on the planet from 5 to 14 million years ago, but about 500,000 years or so ago they disappeared and all of a sudden we have the fossil records of homo sapiens. Now the early homo sapiens were not quite as refined in body structure as we think we are, but it includes the Neanderthals and the Cro-magnon groups, more brutish people, but they’re much like us so we appeared about 300,000 to 500,000 years ago, the fossil record shows that, and I see that as being the time that Genesis refers to. In other words, the gods didn’t come and create humans from nothing. As Genesis says, “Let’s create them in our own image,” meaning let’s take these brutes and make them more like us. So from my point of view, if you want to speculate about who those E.T.’s or aliens, advanced beings, whatever words you want to use, were 300,000 years ago, they were more like we are today than we humans were as homo erectus. So you can hold those two models up and compare them, which says to me that the advanced beings were taller, straighter, longer limbed, thinner skinned, fairer skinned, different eyes, different facial structures and features, and had much more permanent sexual characteristics (frontal sexual positioning for intercourse). So you can almost, if I were an artist, you could sketch out how mixing (evolved).

Editor: So next time you want to see an E.T. just look in the mirror?

Paul Von Ward: Look in the mirror and extrapolate a little bit. In other words, take away some of the grossness of our homo erectus features. Now there may be other categories of advanced beings and I think that the evidence suggests that there are. We obviously have so much in terms of the greys, but essentially the greys were the minions, were and still are, and (in) the Bible itself you’ve got the angels, the archangels, the cherub, the seraphim, and these different categories of beings. Which I think is a way of describing these beings that we have in a lot of UFO literature.

Editor: I know that Dr. Greg Little had found a reference, in the Book of Enoch, in one of its translations, a reference to the Watchers. They were the guardians to the threshold of Sheol. They were gray and they were small like children, and they had very large heads. Which is a pretty striking match to a description of the greys.

Paul Von Ward: I think that’s right. So see from our point of view we think that God represents ancient history, but in galactic time what is a couple hundred thousand years. You know, it’s immaterial in terms of long-term life cycles of a star system, of a galactic system. We’re Johnny Come Lately’s.

Editor: A lot of this knowledge and information Gordon Creighton, the former editor of England’s Flying Saucer Review, had made comparisons between the Celtic stories and the Moslem Jinn. They were abducting people. There were sexual components. In total there were six clear comparisons between these ancient accounts and our modern alien abduction cases. Six major commonalities. In taking a really comprehensive global and historical perspective, because a lot of people think this is an Americanized, modern phenomenon, and in looking at these stories from ancient cultures in the past there seem to be a lot of similarities.

Paul Von Ward: I think that’s the case, and I tried to do that in the first part of my book to just show some of those similarities and to make the point that the names have changed, the labels we use have changed, and the interpretations too, but the phenomenon is the same, the phenomenon is comparable, and once we grasp that then we realize that we’re not discovering something new in our UFO/ET research today. We’re only collecting data on the current manifestations of that same historical phenomenon, and what I try to do in the book is say, “All right, let’s look at it as a whole. What has been our reactions to those interventions?” And, of course, the biggest intervention out of the Middle East has been our development of the religions of the supernatural modern triad of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Because these are the ones that won out from among those 200 or more cults at the time. And why did they win out? Well, some people would say they won out because that was God making them win.

I think they won out for political reasons because of the Roman Empire and Constantine deciding to settle on a certain group of people. Not all of the folks who were talking about Jesus and talking about Yahweh and so on, but certain groups of people who were writing and trying to promote their teachings. The writings that were compatible with his idea of making a state religion out of Christianity and Rome to have more political control over the masses. I think that was a huge historical development. But we see it continuing today in terms of smaller groups. Look at the Mormon Church, for example. This was the same thing. It was a revelation of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith which was no different and phenomenal than those six characteristics than you’re talking about than Yahweh appearing to Moses and passing on material and dictating books and telling how to set up the religion. I mean, it was exactly the same thing. Then you come to today and there are groups of people gathering around people who are “giving revelations.” A Course in Miracles, for example, is a very popular study course in spirituality. That was material dictated by one person who said “I’m receiving it from a being. They’re telling me what to say. I’m writing it out.” There are people like J.Z. Knight of the Ramtha group in Washington and Oregon. Exactly the same thing. In other words, you have “revelations” from “advanced beings” and then people are beginning to form a religion around it, although J.Z. Knight says, “Oh Ramtha is not saying this is a new religion. He’s saying, ‘Learn, learn.’” Well hell, that’s what Jesus was saying. ‘Learn, do it yourself. Heaven is within you. God is within you.’ Take the responsibility. But humans, you see, want to get the answers from somebody else. From some other being. And I think that goes all the way back to the time of the Anunnaki in the Middle East, where they became so dependent on the advanced beings that they developed the idea that humans are not the ultimate responsible people or beings on the planet...that they’re supposed to be guided by a more advanced being. We’ve developed religions on that basis and we’re still doing it. Even people who are in the UFO community. Let’s take Billy Meier for example. I mean, there are people who would like to turn that body of material that he’s produced (I don’t know how many volumes it is now), messages, information, texts and so on, and turn it into a cult. And this is happening over and over again because this is the human reaction when faced with more advanced knowledge and more advanced beings.

So the whole point of Gods, Genes, and Consciousness is to say to humans let us recognize that this is a natural phenomenon. It’s not voodoo. It’s not any weird thing. It may be strange to us because we don’t understand it very well, but it’s natural. It’s part of the universe in which we live. It’s part of reality, and lets just accept it and then decide how we’re going to respond. Let us be the ones to make the judgement that we’re going to react to the information this way or that we’re going to react to the information that way, and let us take the responsibility for our own reactions.

So that’s the message in about two sentences about Gods, Genes and Consciousness ...is that humans will become more powerful psychologically themselves and more responsible and accountable as the stewards of this planet whether we recognize that all of this other is out there and we’ve made gods out of it, we’ve called it divine, we’ve called it supernatural. It’s not supernatural, it’s natural. It’s just outside of the box of our present science.

Editor: Right. We’re just rediscovering a lot of things that thousands of years ago...

Paul Von Ward: Thousands of years ago they already knew and they incorporated it in their art. They incorporated it in their buildings and their technology.

Editor: It has shaped our society and culture to what it is today, but we don’t recognize it.

Paul Von Ward: We don’t recognize it, and see one of the reasons that I focus on western civilization is because we have become technologically the dominant culture in the world. And how did we become technologically the most dominant culture in the world? We got help from advanced beings, and we may still be getting some help, and we are certainly getting help from reverse engineering of advanced being technology.

That’s why other parts of the world are not as highly developed as we are technologically speaking. It’s not because we’re more intelligent or that we’re God’s chosen people, or we’re the select, the elect, or the few, but because we got a jump start. After the Flood, after that worldwide cataclysm, our ancestors got a jump start, and to me that puts us into, at least psychologically, more of a level playing field with all of the other cultures of the world. We believe we were chosen and deserve what we got, but it was the luck of the draw. That’s where they happened to provide assistance, and then to me the fighting we’ve been doing about who’s right and who is wrong...it’s only possible if we suppress this real history, if we deny that advanced beings appeared, and that’s why I think that the church and the government are so opposed to letting any information out about E.T.s and UFOs today. Because if you were to admit it then you are admitting a whole history, and then you’re admitting that we rigged the situation, we rigged the development of institutions in our society by suppressing this information.

See I think if it was just a matter of E.T.’s and UFOs being discovered since 1947, the time of the Roswell crash, you could start letting that information out and dealing with it and you could say, “We just started. Now we’ve got to do something about it.” But because the cover-up has been some thousands of years old then it means if you officially legitimate any of this information today then you’re going to de-legitimate the institutions, the church and government, and financial superiority that certain families benefitted from this access to advanced technology.

That’s what would cause a revolution. To learn that E.T.’s just appeared on earth 50 years ago that would not cause a revolution.

Editor: But taking the whole historical perspective...

Paul Von Ward: Would. I really think it would. Because people would say, “What in the hell,” you know. “They’ve been hiding this for their own benefit for thousands of years.”

Editor: I think that’s one of the most interesting kind of conspiracy theories I’ve ever heard.

Paul Von Ward: Well I didn’t start with that theory. Because I started, like you and I think a lot of others that I assumed who were introduced to UFOs and E.T.’s in the last 40 years or so, and we saw it as “Gee, we’re just discovering this. Look what’s happening on the planet at this point.” I started out with that assumption and because I’m interested in history, because I was a minister and studied the Bible, and I thought “Well I’ll go back and study the origins of religion to see if I can figure out why we’re so involved in religious wars for all of these centuries.” So they were separate things in my mind. My modern UFO interest on the one hand and my historical and religious interests were on another hand. I didn’t see a connection with them.

I’ve had people who read my book tell me things like, “You know, after reading that book and really understanding what you say, I can no longer think the same way about the priests and religious bishops and leaders and so on.” I’ve had some of them say, “I can’t go into a church service now without questioning every bit of the liturgy and the ritual because I’m thinking it may have come from another source than I was taught.” So once you open your mind you can’t go back and dismiss it.

Editor: I guess that may be it right there. Often when you’re talking with people about these things they put up psychological barriers and they know that once they start really looking at it they might start thinking like you. They’ve got a resistance to it. They don’t really want to go there.

Paul Von Ward: That’s right.

I had an email from a guy who read an article that I wrote recently on the origins of religion and terrorism. He came back with “you’re a blithering, liberal anti-Christian, anti-American,” and all of those things you know. “You ought to study the origins of Christianity and you’d know about it,” and blah blah blah. So I went back and answered him and said, “Well actually I have studied a little bit about Christianity. I’m not anti-Christian, I am a Christian. I am not anti-American. In fact, I think that my views are more compatible with the founding fathers of this country than your views and if you’d like to sit down with me and lets go back and look at specific information then we can have a discussion. I told him that one of my ancestors, earlier back, was a minister who developed the idea of a pledge that he was very much in favor of separation of church and state, and in his pledge there was nothing about the flag, about the nation under God. It was “I pledge allegiance to the United States”, to this ideal, to this vision, and that is a Baptist minister who wrote that. And I said, “If you want to look at the history of these things with me then we can have a dialogue.” And I gave him a copy of my questionnaire, containing 32 questions, each with four answers where you pick out what is closest to what you believe. I told him to click on the ones that he believes, and then we can talk about our differences. We can be specific without labels. To this date I haven’t heard back from him and I don’t think I will, because what you said was that they will not deal with you on the information. It has to be on the level of stereotypes and assumptions and labels. “You’re this” “I’m right and you’re wrong,” and they will not look at it. And I think that the reason they won’t look at it is that there is fear in their own hearts that they’ll find they’re wrong.

Editor: You mentioned earlier about being over in Africa and meeting some people over in the region that Robert Temple writes about in his book The Sirius Mystery, and since that book has come out some two decades ago there’s been some recent writing where someone stated that they went over there and that these people didn’t know anything about this. Since you were there, did you have an opportunity to find anything out?

Paul Von Ward: Well it depends. I would not say that I was able to have a conversation that specifically confirmed his writing, but I satisfied myself that when I asked questions about the general story, and I speak French, and people in Mali speak French. I couldn’t address them in their own language, but I addressed them in French. And I got what I would consider to be assurances that these are the stories of our elders, in general. I was not able to sit down and go over it in any specific kind of way. I met the folks, they were Dogons, I was able to talk to them a little bit. And it was very nice because they’re very open to Americans and I was the only white guy there, and so people were very open and hospitable. I suspect that for me to have gotten to their central elders, I don’t think I talked to them, I think I was only able to talk to the people who would speak to the foreigner. But I’m satisfied that this is an authentic type of tradition.

I’ve done more of this kind of thing in Peru. I speak Spanish too. I’ve gone to do research on the Stones of Ica in Peru, and I’ve talked to the physician who has the museum and has collected the things. But I’ve also gone to the village and met the guy that Cabrera says gave him the first stones back in 1966 and I talked with that guy. It has been alleged that he and some of the people in that village actually carved the stones, and he and a woman that worked with him told me that yes they carved some stones for Cabrera and fixed them up like old ones, and they said that Cabrera asked them to do that. Then he said that more than half of the stones that Cabrera has in his museum are real. “I got them from the caves at the river.” I said, “Oh, Cabrera said he would not take me there.” This guy told me, “If you’ll come back I’ll take you there.” But because I was on a two week trip there I didn’t have time to do that.

So it’s difficult in terms of the language to really be precise and I can’t say that I proved his earlier book. I can’t. But I felt that the people recognized the story and what I was asking about, and I think generally that one ought to take it as credible. Just as this guy who wrote the article questioning it I would question his. Who did he talk to and what is the language being used? It is very difficult.

Anyway as I say I spent only a couple of weeks in Peru. I went to Machu Picchu, Cusco, and flew over the Nasca Lines because I wanted to see these things myself, talk to local folks, and draw my own conclusions. Once you go there and you look at these lines as they go across up and down hills and then you realize how symmetrically perfect they are you say, “These guys couldn’t have walked along the ground and kept it this symmetrical up and down the hills.”

I stayed with a family in Lima for a few days. He was a retired medical doctor and one of his daughter’s still lived there. Anyway he had invited his son and his other daughter and her husband to come to dinner with their kids so that we could all have a big, you know, they were celebrating the American visitors stay, and it was just wonderful. But in talking to the other sister and her husband, they’re both accountants by profession, but they are amateur archeologists and on the weekend they go out looking for ruins, and he said there are more ruins in Peru than they can give names to. He said that they had been to places that had been whole towns of ruins, out in the desert, that haven’t even been given names because the government doesn’t have the money to do it and the big American universities who go down and study these things, they’ve already got sites. You know, Yale’s got Machu Picchu, the University of Pittsburg’s got it’s site.

I would suspect, in thinking about that, that Peru, that Andean region, northern Chile, maybe Equador, maybe into the west side of Brazil, I’ll bet that that area was literally covered with towns and cities and agriculture and acquaducts and villages and underground tunnels for irrigation and so on. Cabrera showed me, when I was in his museum. I spent time with him for several days. I got to know him well enough that on my last day there he took me into his inner sanctum where he showed me things he didn’t show anybody. Now I thought some of them were fake, but some of them looked pretty authentic. My point is that while I was there he showed me some pictures that he had taken down on the lower southern coast of Peru where the waves come in and the seashore is there, and there are literally walls of ancient ruins where the walls have just broken and sunken into the sea. You can still see part of it on the shore.

So what I’m saying is that I suspect, and that’s why this book focused so much on the Middle East. We really need to have a kind of synthesis of the Andeans, because I think you’ve got at least three major post-cataclysm advanced being assisted cultures.

Editor: I’ve read that many ancient ruins in Peru were apparently built to be earthquake resistant.

Paul Von Ward: Machu Picchu is in a way very earthquake proof. It’s withstood a lot of them. But I think the ruins outside of Cusco, called Sacsahuaman, where these huge stones are that have no mortar, and are odd shaped stones all fitted together. They have withstood earthquakes too. They knew how to cut, size, fit all of these stones together in ways that would withstand the shaking of earthquakes. Now people say if they were so advanced why aren’t all of those stones all symmetrical. Well they’re not symmetrical because symmetrical ones are not as flexible to withstand earthquakes.

Editor: But how did they do it? They say you can take the blade of a knife and you can’t even get it in between them.

Paul Von Ward: I took my Swiss Army knife and I tried to get it in there. You couldn’t do it. You might get it in a quarter of an inch. But you couldn’t get it in there.

Editor: And that’s something that anyone can see. The question is: how did they do it? They say that they didn’t have steel or metal instruments, and yet they managed to chip away slowly and slowly.

Paul Von Ward: And put them all together. And how did they pick them up? If they only had lamas to haul things with? Some of those stones are tons and tons. Just so huge.

Well I think that we just have to keep chipping away at it. Whether you need to go back and talk to the Dogons, or the aboriginals in Australia, or back to Ica and talk to them. We need to talk to all of these different people and check on each other, because I get carried away and probably exaggerated on something I’ve studied on my interpretation on something. We all do, so we need to check on one another. My point is that there’s so much evidence that’s been looked at by so many different people that you can’t dismiss the whole thing out-of-hand. Sure, I may have made a mistake here and there, or you may have made a mistake here and there, we may have misunderstood. That happens to us all of the time.

Editor: It always seemed to me, as I was growing up, here read the Bible, here’s the answers to everything, because this is the day and age of modern science and I thought, you know, I was just becoming aware of all of these things that were similar to what was described in the Bible and wondering why we’re basing our beliefs on things written 2000 or more years ago, why not also, in addition, look at what’s being reported today, in our own day and time?

Paul Von Ward: Exactly.

Editor: Whether it’s apparitions of the Virgin Mary or..

Paul Von Ward: All of those things should be looked at. What I’m trying to do in this book is to de- mystify these stories. What the church tries to do is label them as a divine miracle, so that means that everybody who doesn’t believe in the divine miracles of the Catholic Church will say, “It didn’t happen anyway. It’s just fantasy.” And the people who are scientists are going to say, “Oh, those guys are hallucinating.” Or they’re having some kind of mental aberrations, or altered state. So they’re going to dismiss it out-of-hand. What I’m trying to suggest is that we ought to take all of these so-called paranormal things and treat them as natural, which means that we treat them to our scientific protocol.

Now one thing that pisses me off is the Skeptical Inquirer. Those guys are not skeptics. Those guys are dogmatists. In other words, they have their minds made up and they say if you don’t agree with us then it’s bunk. So they’re not scientists and they’re not skeptics. What I’m suggesting is that we all need to be true skeptics which means open minded and questioning and testing.

Editor: Being a believer can be just as error ridden as being a skeptic.

Paul Von Ward: Absolutely.

Editor: What they need to be is objective and look at both sides.

Paul Von Ward: And get other people to work with them and be willing to put your evidence down on paper and let somebody look at it and check it out themselves. What I was thinking about today is that historians have looked back at history misinterpreting, correct interpreting. Historians don’t do a perfect job. But the thing that strikes me as disturbing is that in terms of the history of religion, and I’m not talking about historical studies within the religion, because historical studies within the religion only look at the assumptions of the religious institution, but there ought to be academic studies that challenge the whole set of assumptions of religious scholars, and we don’t have historians doing that. Even Karen Armstrong in England, who has written a book and running around the world trying to explain, and basically what she is doing is she is an apologist for the traditional concept of God and trying to get people to go back to the kind of theology that she has. What she does is she goes back within the literature of the church rather than questioning the literature of the church.

Editor: As to its origin?

Paul Von Ward: What was it’s origin? What was the motivation for that material being written that way? See we’ve sort of given the church a free ride in terms of our scholarly, scientific inquiry, either because the scholars and so on are trying to cover up or they have just swallowed the propaganda of the institutions. I think that people want to say the things that’s going to get them money and prestige from the powerful institutions of today, and there’s only some of us, a few of us, who are willing to be outside of those systems and say, “I don’t want to be a professor of an avowed chair. I’m not looking to get my degree here or my book published by that publisher. I just want to study the facts as I know them.”

Editor: I think a recent example in the field of archeology is the fixation North American archeology has had with the so-called Clovis Barrier, and a few years ago very credible evidence emerged that we had earlier cultures here in the Americas, and so then we had some of our archeologists returning to earlier sites and digging deeper, finding that those earlier excavated sites were older than previously thought, because they were operating under the assumption that there would be nothing deeper because they had accepted the Clovis Barrier as fact.

Paul Von Ward: See this is what we need to be doing, and one of the things that disturbs me about the war in Iraq is that we’re destroying more and more of those ruins, and I think the same thing happened. We haven’t dug deeply enough. We get down and we date something 6000 B.C. and we say, “Oh, this is it. Nothing could have existed before 6000 B.C.” Below that they might find 10,000.

Editor: There are many of those who are still entrenched as the professionals in established archeology. Change comes very gradually. There’s much resistance to new evidence and new theories.

Paul Von Ward: For years I tried to work within the system. I mean, I joined foreign service in the state department, where I was in the middle of the center of government, with an elite group of people who think of themselves as the elite of the elite, and I thought that I could work within those systems but what I found was that those systems are so tight that what their motivation is is to reinforce their own position, their power, and the perks and the benefits they enjoy. I mean, my colleagues have stayed in the state department for 30-35 years, I left after 15, no retirement. They have retired, very nice healthy retirement and enjoying their role as Mister Ambassador and this, that, and the other, because they weren’t motivated to question the status quo, to question the institution of which they were a part. So I got out of it and decided that I’m out of it now I’m going to write a book. My first book was Dismantling The Pyramid: Government by the People, and it was an analysis of how government has become self-contained, insulated, self-protective, self- perpetuating, and how we, as citizens, could change that.

Do you think it had any effect? No. Although I got an email from the country of Georgia, of the former Soviet Union, from a woman who wrote me, “Paul, I’m getting back in touch with you. I found your email on the Internet. Remember when you visited us 20 years ago and left your book, Dismantling the Pyramid? I’m now working on reforming education in the country of Georgia. I just pulled out your book and just wondered what happened to you?” So you never know when somebody is going to pick up on the ideas. So I think that what we have to do is like the work you’re doing with your book and website and research, and what I’m doing, what all of us are doing, is that we don’t expect Random House Publishers in New York to publish our book, because they’re part of the corporate status quo and we don’t expect to be on NBC, CBS or whatever. We’re not going to get a MacArthur Grant to do research on this subject because it’s questioning the status quo, and the only people who are going to do this kind of research...which is surprising about John Mack, you know, the psychiatrist at Harvard. I have a graduate degree from Harvard, but my fellow classmates up there, for the most part, I think I have one or two who still talk to me. (Laughs) The rest of them don’t care to read or know about what I’m doing because I stepped out of the mold. My state department people I’ve got one or two that will have lunch or dinner with me. Their reality excludes what we’re talking about.

Editor: So they really think you’ve gone off the deep end?

Paul Von Ward: Gone off the deep end. “Gee, we don’t know. Paul was very successful in the state department. He got promoted faster than we did.” Which I did. I got promoted faster than anybody in my class. So they don’t know what to think about it. They can’t say, “Well Paul is crazy,” because I’ve competed in the system and I was successful in the system, so they don’t know what to do with me. They think that something happened to me and I went off the deep end.

As far as I’m concerned, where you went to college doesn’t make any difference or what you’ve done in your life makes any difference. It’s what you do now. Not where you came from. But I do use sometimes when I’m speaking publically and talk about being in the state department. Why? Not because I want to impress those people, but to let them know that people who are part of the mainstream institutions, who have been successful, can also have these ideas and agendas. Which is why I like some of the former military people coming out and saying this is what we did, taking a stand, like Phil Corso’s book.

When I was in Moscow, in the Soviet Union, I met this woman who was “Juna” Jubanashivili, and got to know her and she was being researched in laboratories. She gave me an envelope with a packet of pictures taken of her hands making the severed legs of frogs jump in the lab using the energy from her hands. So she gave me those pictures and wanted me to try and get them published in the states. I tried but nobody wanted to publish them in the states. Now we’d be able to do it, but 20 years ago there wasn’t that openness.

Over the years, I’ve traveled in a 100 countries and I’ve found that people are more open. Not just in the UFO phenomenon but all of these different levels of consciousness, different dimensions of being, the healing energies, the psychic abilities. People are open to that much more than we are. You’d be surprised. We call ourselves this great and open modern and intelligent, scientific society, but we really are very much more closed than most developed countries in the world when it comes to these broader dimensions of reality. And we’re laughed at, in a lot of countries, because we are so closed.

Editor: So that edge that we got centuries ago may not last?

Paul Von Ward: I don’t think the edge is going to last. In other words, I think that what’s happening now technologically speaking is that’s going abroad too, even more. China, Japan, India. I think we’re engaged in the process of dummying down the American society. I know I’m not the first one to say that, but I think it’s true. And part of the reason that it’s true is because of our narrow-mindedness about all of these things. We’ve enjoyed being the top dog in the world so long that we’ve gotten arrogant about how good we are.

My own sense, as you know from the book, is that there’s operating a kind of prime directive at the moment. I think that there’s still a lot of interaction between other beings, other species and humans. I think there’s some flow of information to us, whether it’s channeled material or directly passed on. The fact that some people have what they call negative experiences...but I see them as sort of the byproducts of observation and experimentation on us. I mean, think what we do on lab animals that we observe and experiment with. So I think there is likely some “collateral damage” (as the Justice Department is so prone to say) but I don’t think it’s because we’re being invaded or taken over.

Editor: That’s something that a number of people have brought up. If there was an extraterrestrial invasion, with the technology that it seems to have, they could have taken over just like that.

Paul Von Ward: Right. So that’s why I go back to the point that I made earlier that what is of interest to me is our reaction to what’s happening to us, and one of our reactions is the cover up. That is, the institutional cover up, and what that says to me then is that the institutions don’t care about the population in general being knowledgeable, having access to information, having the right to decide to make choices about its own future. So that human reaction tells us something about the nature of the world today, and the fact that so many of the masses want to deny it too, that also tells me that there is a great deal of fear and uncertainty about recognizing that the universe is different from what we thought that it was.

So where does that leave us as a human species? It means that some of us, in the human species, have got to be the prophets, the whistle blowers of a species. We’re saying the institutions, the government, religion, economic, finance, political, are manipulating everybody else, and we want to blow the whistle.

Editor: One speculation is that the ongoing contacts through these intelligences are letting their presence be known so that even though the government may try to cover it up, society keeps pushing the issue.

Paul Von Ward: Society keeps pushing it.

Editor: Just about everybody knows someone who has seen a UFO.

Paul Von Ward: Right. Exactly.

Editor: And there’s so many claiming not only that they’ve seen them, but they’ve been aboard craft, they’ve been given messages. It’s not something that can just be swept under the rug. Like we talked about back at the beginning. If we’re just talking about one person saying that they’ve had this experience then we could dismiss it, but when you take all of the testimony, the entire body of evidence into consideration you’ve got to rethink it.

Paul Von Ward: You’ve got to rethink it, yeah. That’s why we have so much government disinformation, which I think is a foolish move on their part because on the one hand they do get us confused about specific studies and specific cases, I think disinformation does that, but I think that as a group we recognize that it is disinformation and then it makes us even more certain of the cover up and then it makes us more determined to look for alternative explanations. So in a way, although in the short term it is successful, in the long term I think that disinformation is going to be less effective or even counter productive. Because we’re getting more and more capabilities to communicate with one another.

But I do think that there is probably a, we could call it a direct to the people strategy on the part of some of these advanced beings. I think you could make the argument that maybe back in the late 1940s and early 1950s that some of the advanced beings were interested in only dealing with the government, making contact with the military or civilian representatives. They may still be dealing with the authorities, but they’ve certainly started spreading it more publically.

Editor: Well I believe that we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything that you’d like to wind this up with? (Laughs)

Paul Von Ward: I guess that I’d like to stress one thing because those of us who are interested in the UFO/E.T. phenomenon and the historical/ancient astronaut material is that so often we restrict our books, our articles and our discussions to that material, and one of the things that I would appreciate being stressed is that I’ve tried to look at other fields of knowledge: archeology, the fossil record, genetic research, cultural history, linguistics, and look to those fields, which are totally unrelated to our mainstream UFO/E.T./ancient astronaut studies, and to see how information from those fields either support or deny this advanced being intervention hypothesis historically.

Editor: And as far as mainstream ufology goes how to deal with out-of-body experiences and that type of thing too.

Paul Von Ward: Right. I want to make that point too, that you’re putting those things together so that we’re expanding from within the ufology perspective to expand itself, and we’re looking to try and see what conventional areas of research have to relate to ufology, and I think there’s a lot. That’s why I’ve tried to sort it out.

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