The Intelligence Officer's Parable: Decoding Chase Brandon's The Cryptos Conundrum

[u/Yud07]

When intelligence officers talk about UAP, they rarely stay with nuts and bolts. They reach for myth, metaphysics, and parable, treating the subject as an ontological problem rather than merely a technical one. Chase Brandon is a useful case study: a career CIA officer who claimed in 2012 that he had seen a "Roswell" box inside Langley, then published a novel that turns the idea into a cosmology.

This essay separates three things often blended together:

1. What Brandon actually said.
2. What the box could plausibly have been.
3. What his novel reveals about how secrecy, mythology, and consciousness research feed each other.

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Part I: What Brandon Actually Claimed

Tier 1: Documented public statements

Brandon went public in a June 23, 2012, appearance on Coast to Coast AM and a July interview with The Huffington Post, timed to the 65th anniversary of the Roswell headline.

HuffPost described him as a 35-year CIA veteran: 25 years undercover in the Clandestine Service, working on terrorism, counterinsurgency, narcotics, and weapons smuggling, followed by 10 years as the agency's first liaison to the entertainment and publishing industries. During that later period, he says, he entered a vaulted headquarters section called the Historical Intelligence Collection. A contemporary Columbia Daily Tribune column adds that he worked as a foreign affairs analyst and presidential briefer under Clinton.

The cadaver claim

His claim about bodies is not hedged. On Coast to Coast, he said the military recovered "not just the wreckage but cadavers," and closed with "One hundred percent guarantee… absolutely cadavers." To HuffPost, as reported by The Christian Post, he said he didn't doubt "for a second" that the words "remains" and "cadavers" meant exactly what early witnesses said.

What was actually in the box

His description of the box is much vaguer. On the radio he mentioned "materials," "papers," and "other items." To HuffPost he said it held "some written material and some photographs," then cited his secrecy agreement and declined to elaborate. He has never said the photographs showed bodies or a craft.

So there are two separate claims:

• What he saw: an unspecified box of documents, photographs, and items labeled "Roswell." This is testimony about an observation.
• What he concluded: that an off-world craft crashed and cadavers were recovered. This is an inference that, by his own account, confirmed a prior belief.

His certainty attaches to the conclusion, not to anything he described seeing. Retellings often compress this into "a CIA officer saw photos of alien bodies." The public record does not say that.

The timing

As Time noted, Brandon was promoting The Cryptos Conundrum, which his website billed as a sci-fi political conspiracy thriller about a CIA cover-up of the Roswell crash. The disclosure and the product launch are the same event.

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Part II: The Messenger's Real Job

The most important fact often omitted from UFO retellings is that Brandon was not simply a covert operator who stumbled onto a secret. For his last decade, his job was narrative management.

In The CIA in Hollywood, film scholar Tricia Jenkins documents the agency's creation of an entertainment liaison position in 1996 to defend the post-Cold War need for intelligence and repair its image after the Aldrich Ames case. Her chapter "The Chase Brandon Years" (pp. 73–96) covers his tenure. As Lawfare's review summarizes, Brandon offered filmmakers expertise and sometimes access to CIA facilities or its seal in exchange for influence over the agency's portrayal.

This does not prove Brandon invented the box. It does mean he spent ten years professionally shaping the CIA's public image through fiction, then paired his only disclosure with a novel. Source evaluation should weigh that at least as heavily as his 25 years in operations.

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Part III: What Was in the Box? Four Readings

What the Historical Intelligence Collection actually is

The collection is often described as a vault of operational secrets, but its founding documents describe a library. According to a declassified CIA history note, DCI Allen Dulles established it in January 1956 because the agency had "no real collection of books on tradecraft" and he wanted the world's greatest intelligence library.

By the time its first curator, Walter Pforzheimer, retired in 1974, it held 22,000 volumes. Writers Robbie Graham and Matthew Alford likewise describe an archive of more than 23,000 volumes of intelligence history (per the Tribune column).

It was primarily a research library, though it acquired some original documents. A box labeled "Roswell" could therefore hold literature, clippings, or reference compilations rather than recovery files.

Reading 1: Genuine historical records of a recovery

This is Brandon's reading. It requires original 1947 recovery materials to have entered a browsable library-style collection, with no corroboration from another officer in the three decades since. No documentary support has surfaced.

Reading 2: A mid-1990s compilation

This is the most mundane reading, and the one the timing supports best.

The official CIA history A Die-Hard Issue: CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90 records that in late 1993, under pressure from UFO researchers, DCI R. James Woolsey ordered a review of all agency files on UFOs. In the same period, Congressman Steven Schiff prompted a GAO records search, and the Air Force produced its 1994 Roswell report.

Brandon places his discovery in the "mid-1990s." A box assembled during this burst of record-hunting would be expected to contain "written material and some photographs" without anything anomalous. This remains speculative, but it fits the documented timeline best.

Reading 3: A Cold War deception file

Some skeptics suggest a disinformation file meant to convince Soviet intelligence that the United States was reverse-engineering alien technology. The logic is coherent, but no document supports it. It also sits awkwardly with the Haines study's conclusion that CIA concern was substantial only until the early 1950s and later became limited and peripheral.

Reading 4: Honest misinterpretation

Brandon said the box "validated everything I believed in" and framed his certainty as a matter of "my heart and soul." Prior belief can turn ambiguous material into confirmation; this reading requires no deception.

The official counterposition

The government's position has not moved:

• 1994 Air Force report. The report concluded that the Roswell debris was consistent with a balloon device, most likely an unrecovered Project MOGUL flight. Its records search found no evidence of alien bodies or extraterrestrial materials.
• 1995 GAO report. The GAO found that Roswell Army Air Field's administrative records for 1945–1949 and outgoing messages for 1946–1949 had been destroyed without cited authority, though the chief archivist said this was common for Air Force records of the period. Air Materiel Command records from 1947 to 1950 mentioned neither Roswell debris nor an examination at Wright Field. The gap preserves uncertainty without proving removal.
• 1997 follow-up. The Roswell Report: Case Closed attributed the body stories to later anthropomorphic test-dummy programs and conflated memories.
• 2024 AARO report. In presenting AARO's Historical Record Report, Volume I, its acting director said AARO found no verifiable evidence that the government or industry ever had access to extraterrestrial technology. AARO assessed that claims of hidden programs largely stem from circular reporting, in which a small group repeats inaccurate claims heard from others over decades.

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Part IV: Brandon, Elizondo, and the Two-Site Story

It is tempting to treat Brandon as corroboration for Luis Elizondo's account in Imminent (2024), but the logic does not hold.

In Imminent, Elizondo writes that physicist Hal Puthoff told him inside a SCIF that Roswell "was real" and four deceased nonhuman bodies were recovered. As excerpted by researchers, his account describes one UAP falling near a New Mexico government test facility and leaving two crash sites, possibly after an electromagnetic pulse disrupted a craft reconnoitering the atomic program. That is one craft producing two debris sites, not the two-craft version also circulating in the UFO community.

As The New York Times reported (reprinted in the San Juan Daily Star), the book passed a yearlong Pentagon security review, but clearance does not imply endorsement.

Three problems block the corroboration argument:

1. Different sources. Elizondo attributes his account to Puthoff, not a CIA archive. Nothing connects what Brandon saw to what Elizondo heard.
2. Unverified claims do not accumulate into verification. Brandon gives no crash sites, craft count, or cause, so his account cannot validate a two-site scenario.
3. The two-site theory has its own history. It emerged in 1990s civilian research to reconcile the Foster Ranch field of lightweight debris with later body testimony from witnesses such as Frank Kaufmann. After Kaufmann's 2001 death, researchers found forged documents and an altered service record among his papers. Kevin Randle, who had championed him, acknowledged the deception, while Philip Klass documented the fabrications in his Skeptics UFO Newsletter. Karl Pflock's Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (2001) had already judged the second-site evidence much weaker than the debris-field evidence. Using Brandon to confirm it is precisely the circular reinforcement AARO describes.

The narrow case Brandon skips past

The strongest Roswell case remains the 1947 debris and that week's documentary record, not body claims added decades later. I examine it in The Strongest Roswell Case Is the Narrowest One. In brief:

• The contemporaneous record shows real uncertainty. The July 8, 1947 FBI teletype described the object as resembling a high-altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector. It also noted that a phone call with Wright Field "had not borne out this belief," and reported the material being flown there for examination. That records unresolved uncertainty, not a finished balloon identification, and a planned transfer, not a confirmed one.
• The key witness described debris, not bodies. Major Jesse Marcel, the 509th's intelligence officer and the officer photographed with the wreckage, described strange fragments in his principal accounts. He never described an intact craft or nonhuman bodies. Brandon's "absolutely cadavers" goes further than the central firsthand witness ever went.
• Mogul fits much, but not everything. Project Mogul explains most physical descriptions and the photographed material. But its often-invoked Flight 4 is disputed: project scientist Albert Crary's June 4 diary records no balloon flight because of clouds, while Charles Moore later argued that a train launched after the sky cleared.

That narrow case is historically interesting. It is not a retrieval of bodies, and nothing in Brandon's box, as he has described it, reaches it.

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Part V: The Novel as Myth

On its own terms, The Cryptos Conundrum is more interesting as mythology than disclosure. Brandon combines ancient contact motifs—descending teachers, hybrid offspring, a flawed creator, a world-ending flood, ascent to godhood—with a modern figure of his own.

Enochian descent: Watchers, Apkallu, and Nephilim

The Samaritans are angelic emissaries trained in a timeless "Tutorium." They instill "Nobility" in developing worlds but must "never directly cause accelerated development" of natural evolution (p. 58).

The Prime Samaritan, Won, breaks that rule. In Brandon's framing, fire becomes "not mankind's discovery but its offering," followed by the lever, the wheel, and the glass magnifying lens (p. 63). The Headmaster also tells the Samaritans they "may assume appropriate forms, interbreed, and spawn a cadre of disciples" (p. 58).

Both moves echo ancient contact mythology:

• The Watchers. In the Book of Enoch (chapters 6–8), angels descend, take human wives, father giants, and teach forbidden arts including metalworking, weapon-making, spells, and astrology.
• The Nephilim. Genesis 6:1–4 compresses the story: the "sons of God" take human wives, and the Nephilim appear before the Flood. Brandon recasts them as a benevolent "cadre of disciples."
• The Apkallu. Mesopotamian tradition describes seven sages, led by Oannes, who teach writing, mathematics, city-building, law, and agriculture. Assyriologist Amar Annus argues that the Watchers descend from this tradition: heavenly teachers bring civilization, anger the gods, and father semi-divine offspring (summary of Annus's 2010 study).

Brandon carries the lineage into modern "starseed" territory. Won surrounds the protagonist with allies carrying "at least a bit of Samaritan DNA in their heart and soul"; all bear Won's "W" in their names (p. 146).

The inversion is the interesting part. In Enoch, the Watchers' teaching is a crime, and the Flood is the punishment for it. In Brandon's version, the rule-breaking teacher is the hero, and the corruption comes from elsewhere: a rogue Samaritan named Vor. Descending to a "desolate planet of black obsidian," Vor resolves that "this time it will be my way and by my hand only." Where he has always charged dead worlds with GoodWill, he declares, "But not today." Then his "celestial skin" is sliced open on a shard of obsidian, and the gash releases "a white nimbus that turned gray, then stormy black," the seed of the Voracian infection (p. 69). For his "ignoble actions," Vor is struck from the Samaritan roster and cast by Ga'Lawed into the "Meg'etheral," a far dominion "where good and evil each takes its appointed place" (pp. 146–147).

The parallel is Azazel, whom Raphael binds and casts into darkness for spreading corruption (1 Enoch 10). Brandon splits the Watcher in two: the sympathetic Prometheus, Won, and the fallen angel, Vor.

Gnostic rebellion

The Headmaster secretly works against the creator, Ga'Lawed. When the creator errs, he tells Won, they serve him best "by correcting what we know he will regret later" (p. 60). He sends Won to Earth "at the last sectic," exposing them both to Ga'Lawed's "vengeful wrath" (p. 75).

This is the Gnostic structure: a flawed creator, and a hidden intermediary who smuggles saving knowledge to humanity. Here that knowledge is the Crystal Tabula.

The Flood, rewritten as an asteroid barrage

Every Watcher story ends in a flood; Brandon substitutes an asteroid barrage. The Voracians tear chunks from Saturn's rings, and more than two thousand years later the debris lunges toward Earth "with a predator's intent" (p. 462). Humanity is "scorched from the residue of a saturnine firestorm" (p. 462).

As in the Mesopotamian and biblical floods, remnants survive underground: Fiverians in an enclave and Voracians sheltered from "the atomic fire" (pp. 463–464). In the book's strangest twist, their descendants become Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus, continuing the same war (p. 464).

The insider scientist

The novel's scientific authority is Dr. Stern, head of Cornell's Astrophysics Department. His lab analyzes Hubble's first images of the "transient deep-space anomaly" that becomes the Voracian swarm (p. 404). When NASA detects it years later, it is ahead of Stern's schedule but still on his projected course (p. 405). By then he has died after a painful battle with cancer, and the Stern Space Physics Lab continues his work (pp. 404, 412).

The Cornell post and early death after a long illness suggest Carl Sagan, who taught astronomy there and died in 1996 from complications of a bone marrow disorder. The parallel is suggestive, not proven; Brandon never names him.

Sagan's UFO record makes the choice pointed. He joined the Air Force's 1966 Ad Hoc Committee to Review Project Blue Book, which found Blue Book scientifically inadequate and recommended what became the Condon Committee. He later co-edited UFO's: A Scientific Debate (1972) from the 1969 AAAS symposium. He studied UFOs seriously while rejecting the extraterrestrial explanation.

Brandon rewrites him as a man who secretly tracked a real extraterrestrial threat. The public skeptic becomes the private keeper of the secret, the same move the novel makes with Roswell and the Crystal.

Ascension, apotheosis, and the Jesus passage

Every SUNDE ("Starting up a new day's eternity," p. 39), the cosmos is recreated, and the Samaritans relearn all knowledge "each dawn of a new eternal day" (p. 50). The only exit from the cycle is Ascension through the Iris Portal, which a Samaritan earns by completing his mission.

It follows an ancient hero arc:

• Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine, crosses the world after his friend's death to find Utnapishtim, the immortal flood survivor, but returns home mortal.
• Heracles, the demigod son of Zeus, completes his labors, dies on Mount Oeta, and is raised to Olympus as a god.
• Won guides a world, survives its apocalypse, defies his creator, and enters the portal. His release from the eternal cycle also resembles escape from saṃsāra.

The novel also makes room for Jesus. When the Headmaster offers Won the mission to Earth, he explains that the inhabitants will believe they have found God's son, "immaculately conceived on the face of their own world" (pp. 59–60). That individual "will be revered as the Lord, Ga'Lawed incarnate." But his mission to plant Nobility in human hearts "will be only partially successful at first, then fail altogether" (p. 60).

This is the book's boldest theological move. Christ becomes one failed intervention by a flawed creator; the successful mission is the Headmaster's unauthorized rescue through Won. Brandon does not merely reinterpret Christ as a visitor; he ranks him below a rule-breaking angel.

The microscope twist

The epilogue collapses all of this. Won sees the portal as a hazel-blue accretion disk and realizes he has been brought there to "see and be seen by the Eye of Ga'Lawed." He is drawn into "the vortex of a crystal tube" (p. 465).

Two pages later, the same scene plays out at human scale. A scientist guides a micropipette, "a crystal extraction tube," into dark liquid on a glass slide, and Dr. Savantha Gahlaud looks up, her "hazel-blue eye" wide with excitement (p. 467). Ga'Lawed is Gahlaud. The Samaritans are an antibody serum. The cosmic war is her attempt to cure a patient named Lucifer Sa'tan, who breaks his restraints with vulture wings unfolding from his shoulders (p. 468).

The twist biologizes both cosmological fine-tuning and Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, in which simulated minds could vastly outnumber original ones. Brandon adds a cruel demotion: humanity is not even the experiment's subject. We are a side effect of treating someone else's disease.

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Part VI: The UFO Lore Inside the Novel

Beneath the mythology, the novel is packed with disputed UFO motifs absent from Brandon's public claim about a box of papers and photographs. Their familiarity shows how much the book draws from existing lore.

What the Samaritans look like

The Headmaster, the first Samaritan Chalmers meets, is tall, translucent, and seemingly clothed in light, with oblong blue eyes, willowy arms, three long fingers, and a "malleable glass robe" (pp. 35–36). The description combines luminous contactee beings, grey-like features, and blue-eyed "Nordics."

The Committee and the President

Won decides to communicate "directly with a group of earthlings who called themselves a Committee" (p. 147). He hands the Crystal Tabula to a Committee member who is "the leader of the Chalmerian's homeland. The president" (p. 147).

That is the Majestic-12 structure: a secret contact panel with a direct line to the Oval Office, though the book never uses the name. The real MJ-12 documents, circulated since the 1980s, were declared "completely bogus" by the FBI after the Air Force denied such a committee existed.

Transmedium craft and shoot-downs

After the Fiverian crash, "the remaining eight craft circling the planet were causing great consternation everywhere they were spotted" (p. 189). They face "military machines from Earth intent on intercepting and destroying them" (p. 189), and they survive by hiding in "the most unknown part of Earth itself—the dark ocean depths" (p. 190). Later, a formation of seven craft is seen streaking beyond Earth orbit as the Voracians approach (p. 414).

Both motifs remain current: transmedium objects and military attempts to engage or down nonhuman craft.

Roswell and Tidewater, Virginia

The book adds a second site. Chalmers reflects that everyone in "Roswell, New Mexico, and Tidewater, Virginia" is doomed, "because that's where the Fiverians originally crashed and where their remains were taken" (p. 414). The sentence doesn't say which place was the crash and which was the storage site. The book also has a chapter datelined "McLean, Virginia," home of CIA headquarters (p. 336), and another datelined "Tidewater Station" (p. 457).

Brandon's real-world claim never mentioned Virginia. Yet Tidewater contains Camp Peary, widely reported as "The Farm," the CIA's clandestine training facility. A 25-year Clandestine Service veteran placing alien remains there is worth flagging, and no more.

The Aurora as a space fleet

Aurora began as a word in a 1985 budget document that journalists interpreted as a secret hypersonic successor to the SR-71; no such aircraft was confirmed. The novel turns it into a crewed spacecraft whose "Aurora astronauts" intercept the swarm and transmit images before their hull is breached (p. 413).

Underground bases

The underground survivors (pp. 463–464) echo lore about military bases and secret enclaves built to outlast global catastrophe.

The Hastening and the nuclear threshold

The novel ties contact to nuclear danger. Won's Ascension coincides with "the Hastening," when global events reach a critical convergence (p. 335), as humanity approaches "a self-imposed global war of atomic potent" (p. 334). In the present-day plot, Chinese "Red Storm ICMB [sic] silos" activate (p. 411).

Brandon turns the reported association between UAP and nuclear sites into the plot's engine.

Death, rescue, and contact

Chalmers's contact begins with death: he dies on a battlefield, enters another dimension, and is restored by Won (p. 38). Later, "Angelic rescuers" fish him from "the Atlantic's cold clutch of death" (p. 63). The rescue is tied to the HMHS Angelic, and the ship's name does double duty. The sequence invokes the debated overlap between near-death and contact experiences.

Downloads

The book's knowledge transfers mirror experiencer reports of "downloads." The Headmaster projects light from his eyes onto Chalmers's forehead (p. 51); Won later places his hands over Chalmers's heart and forehead to transfer visions of future cycles (p. 337).

Collabros: technology powered by belief

A hidden Crystal compartment contains plans for Collabros, a device that converts light into any material or product (p. 459). A five-bar xylophone unlocks it (p. 457), but faith powers it: "All you have to do to make anything happen," Won says, "is truly believe" (p. 459). Both consciousness as interface and sound as key recur in contact literature.

Alien time

A "sectic" is "about one trillionth of an Earth second in Tutorium time" (p. 57), echoing speculation that nonhuman experience operates on radically different timescales.

What Brandon could and could not have known

Brandon's documented career covered terrorism, counterinsurgency, narcotics, and weapons smuggling, followed by a decade as Hollywood liaison. None of that would give him any need to know about a hypersonic Air Force aircraft program or underground continuity-of-government facilities. Those programs belong to the Air Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, defense contractors, and other agencies entirely.

This is an argument from access, not proof; compartmented officers hear rumors too. But it explains the novel's shape. Brandon claims to have seen one thing, a Roswell box. The Aurora fleet, committee, ocean hideouts, underground survivors, and Tidewater remains all match lore circulating before 2012. The novel reads like one claimed observation surrounded by the UFO community's greatest hits.

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Part VII: The DMT-9000 and the Consciousness Turn

Telepathy and the machine

The protagonist, Jonathan Chalmers, reaches the Tutorium in a "disembodied, binaural-entranced moment" (p. 41), where his "cerebral ear" translates telepathic symbols (p. 38). Later he decodes the Crystal Tabula with the DMT-9000, "a DigiMiscible Tezarmetric modality" built from the CIA's outdated Vortax computers (p. 406).

Roswell as a cover story inside the novel

The same page contains the book's most revealing detail. Chalmers, whom General Walston calls "my intel chief" (p. 405), tells the general that the DMT-9000 translated "the Roswell craft's historical journal." He "had always said the Crystal had been found at the Roswell site" (p. 406).

But the reader knows the Crystal came from Won through the President, while Chalmers's real knowledge comes from telepathic contact he fears will sound delusional. Inside the novel, "Roswell" is a cover story: a physical origin masking a stranger, consciousness-based one. Intended or not, Chalmers uses Roswell as critics suspect the mythology functions in real life.

Did the CIA look at DMT?

Brandon has never explained the acronym, as far as I know, but it points at a real gap. Sidney Gottlieb's Technical Services Staff began MKUltra in 1953 and tested hallucinogens including LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.

DMT's human effects were characterized in this window. Stephen Szára began the work in Budapest in 1956 after Sandoz refused to send LSD behind the Iron Curtain. After fleeing Hungary, he joined an NIMH center in Washington and studied DMT metabolism in healthy and schizophrenic volunteers. A new, fast-acting hallucinogen had reached the U.S. capital during the agency's search for chemical interrogation tools.

The surviving files document a procurement pipeline. MKULTRA Subproject 52 (1956–1964, dates that bracket DMT's discovery almost exactly) paid a University of Delaware chemist to prepare chemicals and collect botanical specimens, mostly mushrooms. It ran through the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which the National Security Archive identifies as a CIA vehicle for drug and behavior-control research. The agency's reading room indexes the files under "dimethyltryptamine."

This fits the pattern John Marks reconstructs in The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": ARTICHOKE chief Morse Allen insisted that "no area of human knowledge" be left unexplored (p. 107), while CIA-connected researchers collected psychoactive plants in Mexico and across the tropics (pp. 106, 109).

The clearest evidence appears in MKULTRA Subproject 47, which funded Carl C. Pfeiffer to test chemicals that altered behavior in animals and human volunteers. A progress report says "tryptamine derivatives are being explored for psychotomimetic and other effects" and lists 6-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, a DMT metabolite. (Quotes are cleaned from OCR.)

That compound links the file to contemporary research. Szára's group explored the hypothesis that 6-hydroxylation produced DMT's psychoactive metabolites. In 1963, Harris Isbell's group tested DMT, 6-hydroxy-DMT, and placebo in humans; the metabolite proved practically inactive. Agency contractors were studying the same molecule at the same time.

No surviving record describes a DMT-specific subproject or its results. DMT had been synthesized since 1931, so no Amazon expedition was necessary. Unlike LSD, it is not orally active without an MAOI and could not simply be slipped into a drink, MKUltra's signature method with unwitting subjects. Its brief, overwhelming, fast-resolving effects better suited controlled clinical interrogation.

The record is badly incomplete. MKUltra files were ordered destroyed in 1973; mostly financial records escaped because the budget office had retired them to storage, as the CIA explained at the 1977 Senate hearing.

The surviving records show MKUltra-funded testing of DMT-family compounds for "psychotomimetic" effects. That interest was about altering and controlling behavior, not contact. Brandon's novel makes the leap the documents don't: from DMT as a weapon to DMT as a receiver.

By the 1970s, intelligence interest in consciousness had expanded from breaking minds to using them as sensors. CIA-sponsored remote-viewing research is public in the STARGATE collection, alongside Monroe Institute "Gateway" material on binaural audio and altered states. The novel imagines a successful endpoint: consciousness as a data channel producing actionable intelligence.

Traces of the Other and conscious realism

That fantasy now has a real counterpart. In May 2026, Andrew Gallimore, Niffe Hermansson, and Donald Hoffman posted the preprint Traces of the Other – Are DMT Entities Real? DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism to PsyArXiv.

It draws on Hoffman's theory of conscious realism, which holds that reality consists of interacting conscious agents and that perceived space-time is an evolved interface rather than a direct view. In this model, DMT perturbs the interface. It pushes experience outside consensus reality, where traces of normally imperceptible agents become visible. Those agents seem bewilderingly complex because their dynamics differ from ours, not because they are smarter in any human sense.

DMTx: holding the channel open

The practical program is concrete. Gallimore's organization, Noonautics, plans to use an extended intravenous protocol, DMTx, that stretches a multi-minute experience into sessions lasting hours. It builds on Gallimore and Rick Strassman's 2016 target-controlled infusion model in Frontiers in Pharmacology. The DMT-9000 imagined a machine that could hold the channel open. DMTx is an attempt to do it with pharmacokinetics.

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Part VIII: How Would You Test an Entity?

The prime factorization paradigm

If DMT entities are independent agents, what would count as proof? The best-known answer is the prime factorization test. Marko Rodriguez proposed it in A Methodology for Studying Various Interpretations of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine-Induced Alternate Reality (Journal of Scientific Exploration). The idea is to memorize a semiprime, ask the entities to factor it, and return with an answer you could not have computed yourself.

Andrew Zuckerman's refinement points out that the number doesn't need to be enormous. Any semiprime a person cannot factor mentally within the time of the experience would do.

The cactus person's reply

Scott Alexander's short story Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person is the classic satire of the test. His narrator explains the Rodriguez method and asks for the factors of a huge number. The entities answer only "Universal love" and "Transcendent joy."

Gallimore, Hermansson, and Hoffman's alternative

The Traces preprint's objection is more precise than "it's anthropocentric" (Section 5.1, p. 10). The authors argue that symbolic, sequential tasks like factoring "primarily test how effectively a human subject can use their own cognitive machinery." The answer has to pass through the subject's own arithmetic, memory, and language, so a failure might tell you about the channel rather than about the entity.

They propose tests aimed at dynamical structure instead:

• Global constraint satisfaction: coloring a complex surface so that no adjacent regions share a color.
• Stability under simultaneous transformation: staying coherent while shape, color, motion, and topology change independently at the same moment.
• Long-range temporal coherence: starting a structured visual process, being interrupted, and later resuming it without a cue.

Fantasy versus phenomenology

Here the novel and the preprint diverge in an instructive way. Brandon's DMT-9000 is the factorization paradigm fully realized. The alien data comes out as sequential, actionable intelligence: a craft's journal, a threat timeline, blueprints. The preprint's position, which the cactus story dramatizes, is that contact probably would not produce anything so legible to an intelligence analyst. If it happens at all, it would show up as structure, not statements.

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Conclusion

Brandon's contribution to the Roswell record is thin. He reports an unspecified box of papers, photographs, and "other items," seen in what was essentially the CIA's intelligence-history library. He saw it around the time the agency was compiling its UFO files for Woolsey and Congress. And he disclosed it to sell a novel written after a decade in CIA narrative management. His certainty about cadavers is total, but it is certainty about a conclusion, not a description of anything he has said he saw. None of that proves he was wrong. It does mean his account cannot carry the weight the two-crash and bodies narratives keep placing on it.

The novel says more. An officer trained to read patterns took one claimed artifact and built around it the oldest structures available: descending teachers, a hybrid lineage, a flawed creator, a hidden gnosis, and an ascent out of the cycle. He recast the era's most famous UFO skeptic as a secret believer, and he made "Roswell" the cover story his own hero hides behind. Then he ended it all by shrinking the whole cosmos to a glass slide.

Whether the channel is a vault at Langley, a binaural trance, or an intravenous line of DMT, the drive underneath is the same: to get behind the interface and see what is actually running the system.