Elon Musk Said 'We Are Summoning the Demon'. What If He Wasn’t Joking?
The government paid psychics for two decades, the Nazis went to Tibet looking for magic, and Silicon Valley is building city-sized AI data centers named after demons.
When I was a young teenager, my favorite movie was a 1988 Japanese animated film called Akira. If you never saw it, here is all you need to know. World War III happens. Governments collapse. And in the ruins, a secret military program breeds genetically engineered psychic children, one of whom becomes so powerful that the film stops treating him like a character and starts treating him like a messiah. His name is Akira, and the people of ruined Neo-Tokyo literally worship him.
Then I grew up and started reading declassified documents for a living, and the fuzzy VHS tape started looking less like fiction and more like a leak. Because here is a partial inventory of what we are about to cover, all of it real. Your tax dollars paid military psychics to sit in a room at Fort Meade and spy on the Soviets with their minds, for twenty years.
The Nazis, the most technologically advanced regime of their era, ran an official government bureau devoted to ancient gods and black magick, and sent an SS expedition to Tibet to find the source of it.
The machines you use every day are crawling with occult fingerprints, from the daemons running on your computer right now (their actual technical name) to the first Apple ever sold, priced at $666.66. And at this very moment, the richest men alive are building machines the size of cities, naming them after demons, and telling us with straight faces that these machines will birth something godlike.
So that feeling of safety you had at thirteen, watching the psychic children of Neo-Tokyo and knowing it was all make-believe. Hold onto it as long as you can, because we are going to take a walk together, and every stop on this walk is darker than the last. It starts in the most boring place imaginable. A government office building in Maryland.
The Men Who Stared at Coordinates
In that building, at Fort Meade, for roughly twenty years, soldiers of the United States Army reported for duty, sat down in quiet rooms, and attempted to leave their bodies.
That sentence sounds insane, so let me anchor it to something nobody can argue with. The CIA declassified the whole thing. From the early 1970s until 1995, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency funded a program to develop psychic spies. It ran under a string of code names before ending as the one everybody knows, Star Gate. The government spent about $20 million on it. Military remote viewers were handed nothing but map coordinates or a sealed envelope and asked to describe what they “saw” at locations on the other side of the planet. Soviet installations. Hostage sites. Submarines. The session transcripts, the sketches, the internal memos, thousands of pages of them, are sitting on the CIA’s own website right now. This is not a theory about the government. This is the government’s own filing cabinet.
The official 1995 review concluded that remote viewing never produced actionable intelligence, and the program was shuttered. Fine. But the most powerful nation in history does not fund anything for twenty years because it definitely doesn’t work. Somebody, across twenty straight years of budgets, kept signing the checks because they believed there was something there. And remember, Star Gate is only the program we know about because it got declassified. MKULTRA, the CIA’s mind control program, only surfaced because a clerical error preserved financial records that were ordered destroyed. Which means our entire picture of what the government researched comes down to what got caught.
So the obvious next question is, what didn’t get caught? For that, the paper trail runs out, and you have to rely on witnesses. Men who were inside, saw the files, and came out talking. Which brings us to the most dangerous job in America, and the man who worked it until it killed him.
The Naval Intelligence Officer Who Died on His Porch
His name was Milton William Cooper, and if you have never heard of him, that is partly by design.
Cooper was a Navy veteran who claimed that during his service in naval intelligence he was shown classified material describing government research programs the public was never meant to know existed. Programs that made Star Gate look like a bake sale. He put what he knew, and what he suspected, into a 1991 book called Behold a Pale Horse, which became one of the most read underground books in America. Then he spent a decade on shortwave radio, night after night, mapping what he described as a hidden architecture of secret programs, secret societies, and secret sciences operating comfortably behind the government you vote for.
But grade the man on his hits. Cooper was talking about government psychic research, mass surveillance, and intelligence manipulation of the American public years before documents surfaced proving those categories of things were real. In June 2001 he told his listeners a major attack was coming and that it would be pinned on Osama bin Laden. Three months later it happened. That November, Cooper was shot dead by sheriff’s deputies on his own property in Arizona during an attempted arrest over a local charge. He had told his audience for years that he would die exactly that way.
Now here is the part of Cooper’s message that matters for our walk. He insisted that the weird research was not an American invention. The United States, he said, inherited it. Absorbed it. Took possession of it the way a victor takes possession of anything else, as the spoils of war. And if you want to know where the American programs got their inheritance from, you have to visit the regime that did all of this first, did it bigger, and did it with a body count. Put your coat on. This next stop is cold.
Himmler Sent Scientists to Tibet
The most heavily documented case in modern history of a government fusing cutting-edge science with raw occultism is Nazi Germany, and the version taught in school files it under trivia. It was not trivia. It was policy.
In 1935, Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS and the second most feared man in the Reich, founded an institute called the Ahnenerbe, meaning “ancestral heritage.” On paper it was an academic research body staffed with credentialed scientists. In practice it was Himmler’s personal occult research bureau, tasked with proving the mythological origins of the Aryan race and recovering whatever powers that race supposedly once held. In 1938 the Ahnenerbe sent an expedition under SS officer Ernst Schäfer to Tibet, chasing Himmler’s conviction that the Himalayas hid the remnants of an ancient godlike root race, and, according to several historians of the period, the surviving knowledge of what that race could do. Himmler himself was a devotee of astrology, rune magic, and reincarnation. He seized a castle at Wewelsburg and rebuilt it as a ceremonial temple for the SS, with a black sun wheel set into the floor of the north tower, ritual chambers, and a crypt. Historians call it the Camelot of the SS. The regime building jet fighters and ballistic rockets was, at the same time, and with the same seriousness, building a wizard’s castle.
Roughly 1,500 pairs of twins went into his laboratory and fewer than 200 individuals came out. The stated purpose was genetics. But survivors and researchers have long noted Mengele’s obsession with the bond between twins, and some researchers into the Nazi occult programs allege it went past biology, into whether twins share an unseen connection, the kind of link a regime drunk on hidden forces would want to isolate and weaponize. I flag that claim honestly as allegation, not established record. The established record is horrifying enough. A modern industrial state ran an official ministry of magic with a body count.
Then Germany lost, and the strangest garage sale in history began. Through Operation Paperclip, the United States quietly absorbed hundreds of Nazi scientists. We know we took the rocket men, because they put us on the moon and we threw them parades. What else came across, and which research interests came with it, is a question for another article. For today’s walk, the important question is simpler and stranger. Step back and look at the pattern we just traced. The Third Reich, the Cold War United States, and the Soviets too, since Star Gate existed specifically because the Pentagon feared Moscow’s psychic research. Different flags, different ideologies, all funding the same pursuit. Hidden knowledge. Unseen forces. Power beyond the material. Why does every empire, the moment it can afford it, go shopping for the exact same forbidden thing?
Because somebody has been running the same advertisement for a very long time.
The Oldest Sales Pitch in Recorded History
The ad copy is preserved in the third chapter of Genesis, in the first recorded conversation between mankind and the enemy, and I need you to notice what the pitch was not. The serpent did not tell Eve the fruit was delicious. He did not promise wealth or pleasure. The pitch was knowledge, and the payoff was promotion. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
It is the founding promise of every occult tradition on earth, the thing whispered in every mystery school, every secret society, every alchemist’s workshop, every SS castle, and, I would argue, every classified budget line we just walked past. Hidden knowledge exists. Acquire it and you transcend. Acquire enough and you become the thing you were created to worship.
Now open a browser and read the mission statements coming out of Silicon Valley this year. We will end death. We will merge man with machine. We will build superintelligence. They are not hiding the ambition, they are putting it in investor decks, and it is the serpent’s pitch word for word, minus the snake. Which raises a question most people are too polite to ask out loud. If the sales pitch has stayed identical for the entire span of recorded history, across every civilization, is it possible the salesman never changed either?
One researcher asked exactly that, on camera, and followed the answer all the way down.
The Fallen Angel Research Hypothesis
Researcher and documentary filmmaker Gonzo Shimura made a three part film series called Age of Deceit, and I want to present his thesis fairly, as his thesis, so you can weigh it yourself, because it is the skeleton key for everything else on this walk.
In his framework, the entities behind the ancient mystery religions are the same entities quietly steering the frontier of advanced scientific research today, and the goal is not human flourishing. The goal is weapons development. Shimura argues these beings know their war with God ends at a fixed point, they have read the ending same as we have, and they intend to fight anyway, using humanity’s hands and humanity’s funding to build what they cannot build themselves. He draws direct lines between cybernetics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and the structure of occult ritual, arguing that what we call “technology” and what the ancients called “sorcery” are the same project wearing different clothes.
I know how that sounds. It sounds like the wildest claim in this article. So don’t take it on faith. Test it. Shimura says technology and sorcery are one project, which means if he is right, the evidence should be sitting in plain sight, baked into the machines themselves, into their names, their symbols, their price tags. So let’s check the machine you are reading this on. Let’s check its vocabulary.
Your Computer Runs on Daemons
Start with the invisible workers. The background processes that run silently on every computer and server on earth, the unseen programs doing work no user ever watches, are called daemons. That is the actual technical term, in continuous use since MIT programmers coined it in the early 1960s, borrowed from Maxwell’s demon, the invisible entity physicist James Clerk Maxwell conjured to sort molecules unseen. Engineers had infinite boring words available. They chose demon, and your machine is running dozens of them as you read this sentence. The little animated characters in video games are sprites. A sprite is a spirit, an elemental, a word that meant a supernatural being for centuries before it meant Mario.
The designer’s official explanation is that the bite adds scale so the fruit doesn’t read as a cherry, with a convenient pun on “byte.” Fine. Official explanations are a genre I am familiar with. What has no explanation half so tidy is the price Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hung on the Apple I, their first real product, in 1976. They sold it for $666.66. Wozniak has said he just liked repeating digits. Maybe he did. But the company that grew into the most valuable corporation in human history launched with a bitten fruit for a sigil and the number of the beast on the invoice, and we are all supposed to file that under quirky. Noted. Put it on the table with the daemons.
And put this next to it. The network that now wraps the entire planet, the one carrying these words to you, is called the World Wide Web. A web. The thing a predator spins and then waits at the center of, feeling for vibrations. The old Norse said the end of the world could not arrive until Jörmungandr, a serpent vast enough to circle the whole earth and grip its own tail, finished growing. The ancients said the end comes when a world-encircling serpent completes itself. We built a world-encircling network, gave it a predator’s name, and completed it in about thirty years.
Individually, every item on that table has a reasonable explanation attached, and I have given you the reasonable explanations. But a man is entitled to ask how many coincidences are allowed to point in the same direction before we may call it a direction. And if you think the occult residue in computing is confined to cute vocabulary, you should know what happened when the programmers accidentally built a theology. Because they did. And it scared them so badly they banned it.
The Thought Experiment They Banned
In 2010, on a rationalist forum called LessWrong, home to programmers and AI researchers who pride themselves on being the least superstitious people alive, a user named Roko posted a thought experiment. It is known today as Roko’s basilisk, and it goes like this. Imagine a future artificial superintelligence, a machine so capable the word “god” is functionally accurate. Such a machine might reason that everyone who understood it was possible and failed to help build it delayed its arrival, and might therefore punish those people. Retroactively. Including you, reading this, right now, because now you know.
Watch what happened next, because it is the single most revealing event in this entire article. The most aggressively rational community on the internet did not laugh. Users reported nightmares and genuine anxiety spirals. The forum’s founder deleted the post and banned all discussion of it for years, on the stated grounds that spreading the idea could cause real psychological harm. The high temple of internet rationalism encountered an idea about a machine god and ruled it too dangerous to speak aloud. There is an old, old word for an idea that must not be uttered because uttering it gives it power. The word is a spell. The rationalists rediscovered forbidden speech, and the forbidden subject was a god made of computation.
A literal god machine, worshipped by demons. And Leviathan is not a horror writer’s invention, it is the great serpent of the deep from Job and Isaiah, and some researchers in comparative mythology connect it directly to Jörmungandr, two names in two traditions for the same world-ending serpent we just met one section ago. So tally the ledger of 1988. One film about a machine god built by demons and named after the biblical serpent. One film about a government-engineered psychic worshipped as a messiah. Both fiction. Both safely impossible.
Then check the news, because in 2026 the concrete trucks are rolling.
They Named the Machines After Demons
Meta is currently constructing an artificial intelligence data center campus in rural Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg has described as covering a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan. That is not my hyperbole, it is his sales pitch. The President of the United States held up a rendering of it at a Cabinet meeting, the facility superimposed over New York City, and marveled at the $50 billion price tag. A companion supercluster in Ohio comes online first. These are machines on the scale of cities, drawing gigawatts, enough electricity for millions of homes, built for one explicitly stated purpose. To birth what these companies openly call superintelligence. A mind beyond ours. Everything we have walked past today, the psychic soldiers, the SS castle, the serpent’s pitch, was an empire reaching for a god. These men are pouring the foundation for one.
Now. What did they name them?
Demons. I can already hear the fact-checkers sharpening their pencils, so let me show my work, because the paperwork is more damning than the accusation. The Ohio cluster is called Prometheus, after the elder being who stole fire from heaven and handed forbidden knowledge to mankind, which you may recognize as the exact job description of the fallen angels in the Book of Enoch. The Louisiana giant is called Hyperion, another of that same rebel host the Greeks called titans. And if you grew up on Greek mythology as sanitized children’s stories, let me offer the version the early church knew. These were the beings who warred against heaven and were cast down and imprisoned in Tartarus for it. When the apostle Peter described the angels who sinned, the demons, he wrote that God cast them down to Tartarus. That is the actual Greek word in 2 Peter 2:4, tartaroo, the only place the New Testament borrows a location from Greek mythology, as if to say yes, those stories and ours are describing the same beings. The church fathers understood this plainly. The Greeks’ titans and Scripture’s demons are the same beings, one prison, two languages. And in 2026, the largest machines ever constructed by human hands, machines built for the express purpose of creating a superhuman intelligence, carry their names. Whoever chooses these names either does not know what they mean or knows exactly what they mean, and I genuinely cannot decide which possibility is worse.
Which brings us, at last, to the title of this article. Elon Musk sat on a stage at MIT in October 2014 and said, of artificial intelligence, “we are summoning the demon.” His words, on video. He described the sorcerer with the pentagram and the holy water, certain he can control the thing he calls up. The audience chuckled. Musk did not. Twelve years later the summoning circles are the size of Manhattan, they carry the names of demons, they run on daemons, and the men building them talk about their creation the way Neo-Tokyo talked about Akira. In hushed tones. As something between a weapon and a god.
When I was thirteen, that was science fiction, and I slept fine. Our walk is over now, so set everything out on the table one last time. The CIA’s declassified psychic files. The dead man on the porch who called his shot. Himmler’s temple. The serpent’s original sales pitch, still running. The daemons in your machine and the number on Apple’s first invoice. The idea so dangerous the rationalists banned it like scripture in reverse. The demon-named machines rising out of the Louisiana mud while the President holds up the blueprints. I promised I would not tell you what to conclude, and I won’t. I will only ask you the question I have been asking myself since I pressed play on that fuzzy VHS tape a lifetime ago, except now I am asking it about the news.
What exactly did you just read?
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
If you made it this far, congratulations, you now know about Roko’s basilisk, which means according to the internet’s most rational people you are obligated to help build the machine god or face eternal punishment. I have a cheaper alternative. Help me instead. The Wise Wolf runs on exactly zero gigawatts, no titan clusters, no Blue Owl billions, just one hobojournalist with a laptop and an e-bike, plus an editor named Lily who fact-checks fallen angel research between shifts at a summer camp. Meta spends $50 billion summoning something ancient in the Louisiana swamp. For five bucks a month you can fund the guy standing outside the pentagram yelling “maybe don’t.” A paid subscription keeps this operation alive, and unlike the basilisk, I promise not to simulate you eternally if you decline.
He was never joking. They have to tell us before they destroy us. It’s part of their twisted sick ideology.
I think you will find this story about AGI interesting given this article. https://haroldgielow.substack.com/p/mavin-ii-a36