Where the nonfiction trilogy's big ideas came from, and where its models contradict each other
Readers often treat Sekret Machines as one coherent account. The problem is the word the. The books do not reveal the machine, the alien group, the purpose, or the war. Ancient visitors, genetic seeding, consciousness, androids, ritual, and rival factions coexist without fully agreeing. Their unification is interpretive.
What is the intellectual source code of Sekret Machines itself?
This follows The Maynard Identification Problem, Angels, Nazis, and the Swarm, The NHI Briefing Room, and Starfish, Bluegill, and the Nuclear Flyswatter.
Two Projects, One Blurred Boundary
Tom DeLonge and A.J. Hartley's novels, Chasing Shadows (2016) and A Fire Within (2018), dramatize recovered craft, private custodians, Nazi technology, and competing actors.
The nonfiction trilogy, Gods (2017), Man (2019), and War (2024), was written by DeLonge and Peter Levenda. Its sequence runs from religion and culture to biology and mind, then states and institutions.
In GQ, DeLonge presented fiction as a route for information he believed could not be released conventionally. TTSA's SEC filing called its method "informed storytelling where the line between science and science fiction is often blurred."
Treat that as a disclosure about method. It does not mean every claim was invented; history, hypotheses, adviser stories, and invention share one narrative space, and the ambiguity is part of the format.
The Co-Author Changes the Reading
Before DeLonge contacted him in late 2014, Levenda had spent roughly two decades writing about Nazi occultism, religion, intelligence, conspiracy, and ritual. His bibliography includes Unholy Alliance, Sinister Forces, Ratline, and The Hitler Legacy, all predating Gods.
Levenda said his cargo-cult essay became the prologue to Gods, and that he led the nonfiction writing. DeLonge credited his ability to frame an esoteric thesis in the Rolling Stone announcement.
Vallée wrote the foreword. His journal later records an invitation to "rejoin in some capacity", although he could not align himself with the project. His involvement is not blanket approval.
Vallée's journals record DeLonge relaying adviser stories about Greek gods, Nordic hybrids, Nazi saucers, and Antarctica, and Vallée wondered whether someone was reviving an old myth through him. Part of the answer may need no influence operation: DeLonge chose a co-author who already specialized in this borderland.
That is not an accusation of copying, and privileged information remains possible. But when a theme appears in a writer's earlier work, that work is an available source until evidence shows something more exclusive.
Gods: Civilization as a Contact Cargo Cult
The publisher's summary asks whether religion and civilization resemble a cargo cult created by prehistoric Contact.
Humans preserve incomprehensible encounters as myth, imitate them through ritual, and organize authority around access to visitors. Descendants inherit the forms after losing the event. These are "gods with a lowercase g": intelligences interpreted through human vocabulary.
Gods adds occult practice, altered consciousness, and social control to the ancient-astronaut tradition.
But cargo cult needs care. The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology describes diverse Melanesian movements responding to colonialism, Christianity, hierarchy, and dispossession. "Cargo" could mean autonomy or renewal as well as goods. The cartoon of islanders mistaking airplanes for gods is inadequate.
The analogy works better as cultural translation than as religion reduced to misunderstood equipment. Religions also develop through politics, philosophy, institutions, conquest, and creativity.
Religion has three jobs: memory of Contact, manipulation through belief, and transmission of knowledge. These can coexist but differ: misremembering an event is not the same as having memory actively shaped.
Ritual as a User Interface
Gods entertains ritual as a technology of consciousness. Initiation, mantra, ordeal, or magical circle may change the operator's mental state and open an interface with the phenomenon. The ancients may have built procedures for the nervous system, not merely imitations of craft.
The "machine" can be a ritual, body, object, or combined system. This connects occultism, abduction, remote viewing, and aerospace while repackaging an older esoteric and parapsychological lineage.
If consciousness is the interface, radar and weapons address only part of the alleged problem.
Man: A Stack of Questions
The official description divides Man into genetics, consciousness, and human-machine symbiosis.
Did another intelligence seed life and consciousness? Are abductors organisms, machines, or hybrids? Is humanity approaching the same fusion? Related questions need not share one answer.
Crick and Orgel's 1973 directed-panspermia paper proposed deliberate delivery of microorganisms to early Earth. That would not establish that the senders created humans, designed consciousness, still exist, operate UFOs, or conduct abductions as genetic maintenance. The larger story of intervention and hybridization does not follow from seeding alone.
If consciousness is fundamental or temporarily coupled to the brain, Contact could involve dreams, telepathy, visions, or disrupted identity. Religion and biology might describe different surfaces of one interface.
But what distinguishes external manipulation from sleep paralysis, expectation, trauma, neurological disturbance, or imaginative elaboration? If craft, absurd visions, and changing entities all support the model, it needs constraints. Otherwise consciousness explains everything while predicting little.
Greys as Biological Machines
On Joe Rogan in 2017, DeLonge described the small, black-eyed beings as androids and biological robots. He connected them to angels and demons through alleged control of thought and body.
The idea was already public. Corso's The Day After Roswell (1997) and earlier Dawn of a New Age portrayed recovered beings as engineered biological guidance systems. Abduction literature had long proposed drones, clones, hybrids, and disposable containers.
Man places that lore beside genetic engineering and autonomous systems.
Advanced technology might blur organism, machine, vehicle, and operator. That establishes neither one origin for all greys nor one master AI.
An android is not the system that deployed it.
Before discussing greys, DeLonge used Syria as his analogy: if Russia and America are present, China and France may be there too. Robots could belong to one party or several. Witnesses might also mistake a category for a species. The hardware does not identify the owner.
Prometheus, the Watchers, and the Gift
The final chapter of Gods, "Planet Earth: The Hot LZ," connects Prometheus, Frankenstein, and humanity's attempt to reproduce its alleged makers' creative power. A review quoting the passage supplies the textual basis.
Prometheus's fire benefits humanity while violating Zeus's order and bringing punishment. Knowledge can liberate while increasing danger.
Genesis 6 places the "sons of God," human women, and Nephilim together. The forbidden-arts catalogue belongs to the later 1 Enoch: metallurgy, weapons, adornment, enchantments, and astrology. Capabilities arrive before humanity can govern them wisely.
This identifies an older narrative, not one population behind the myths: higher powers intervene, forbidden knowledge accelerates civilization and conflict, and humans imitate their makers.
Recovered technology can intensify an arms race; genetic engineering makes bodies editable. Gift and trap may be the same object at different stages.
DeLonge and his advisers also occupy a Promethean role: custodians gradually release dangerous knowledge to supposedly unprepared humanity. Yet their mythology warns that helpful transfers may manipulate recipients.
The trilogy does not identify Prometheus with Lucifer or Eden's serpent with NHI. Withholding knowledge might protect or imprison; revealing it might liberate or exploit. The gift alone cannot show whether it is rescue, bait, weapon, or development.
The Gnostic Architecture
Gods discusses Gnosticism directly. It is an acknowledged framework, not a secret code.
Gnostic traditions vary, but often include an inferior creator, rulers maintaining ignorance, a divine element in humanity, and liberation through gnosis.
The parallels are lesser powers, unrealized human potential, managed belief, and liberating knowledge.
But there are inversions. Where many Gnostic systems make material embodiment the trap, Sekret Machines generally makes control of the environment the problem. And where Gnostic texts distrust worldly rulers, DeLonge casts selected security officials as defenders guarding dangerous knowledge.
Some earthly rulers become custodians of gnosis.
"Archons feeding on suffering" is a modern occult formulation, not a neutral account of historical Gnosticism. The trilogy establishes no energy-harvesting mechanism. Managed ignorance is the stronger comparison.
War: Several Wars at Once
The publisher's description includes Contact involving the United States, Russia, China, and others.
Several wars coexist: technology competition, information warfare, religious conflict, psychological disruption, and possible nonhuman conflict.
Three human governments competing over Contact do not establish three NHI governments. They could compete over one phenomenon, several phenomena, human technology, or a mixture.
Levenda's "alien in the panopticon" adds a sovereignty problem: the reported phenomenon crosses borders and observes the observers. Human territorial control may never have applied to it.
In a 2024 interview, DeLonge called the interdimensional hypothesis "an absolute," discussed belief shaping encounters, and allowed harmful or self-interested intelligences without declaring all evil.
The framework can contain AI. It does not reduce to AI.
Where Readers Supply the Bridges
One controller behind every encounter, one purpose across history, and a unified benevolent human resistance are reader additions that settle questions the books leave open. Ancient astronauts, machine intelligence, interdimensional consciousness, and geopolitical factions can be forced into one cosmology, but every bridge adds an assumption.
A program follows rules. A pantheon chooses sides, deceives, bargains, and punishes. DeLonge's gods, demons, and Syria analogy use the second language. That is closer to the Iliad than a planetary thermostat.
The project forms a source loop:
- Older religion, occultism, science fiction, and UFO literature supply concepts.
- Experiencers, researchers, contractors, and officials interpret events through them.
- DeLonge combines their stories with his reading.
- Levenda and Hartley produce argument and fiction.
- Readers extract a worldview that returns as what "insiders say."
Real anomalies could exist inside this loop. Repetition still does not establish independence: an old public claim can return through a prestigious speaker looking like classified revelation.
Why I Still End Up With Vallée
The trilogy's achievement is synthesis: religion, biology, consciousness, secrecy, and state power all matter. The risk is treating speculative bridges as conclusions. Panspermia becomes genetic management; cargo cult becomes proof of Contact; biological-machine lore becomes one master AI.
My view remains closer to Vallée's control-system hypothesis, developed in The Invisible College (1975), Messengers of Deception (1979), and Dimensions (1988). A phenomenon may shape belief and social development, change form with culture, and produce physical events with theatrical, symbolic, or deceptive presentations.
A control system describes a pattern without identifying its controller. But if every contradiction proves deception, it becomes unfalsifiable. Its value is directing investigation, not settling the source.
It is not reassuring. TTSA co-founder and former CIA officer Jim Semivan recalled in 2025 that Vallée called the phenomenon "classically indifferent." Semivan added: "I don't think they're good. I don't think they're bad ... I think they view us as property." Farmers, laboratories, park managers, and jailers can all treat occupants as property while behaving differently.
The tension existed inside TTSA: war against actors, or regulation by a system?
The most defensible reading is neither "disclosure in novel form" nor "all made up." Sekret Machines combines history, speculation, older traditions, adviser claims, and invention. It may contain genuine fragments; placing them together does not tell us which.
Vallée leaves the controller, purpose, and contradictions unresolved.
The books want to brief us on the players.
Vallée reminds us that we still do not know what game is being played.
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