Review

Sekret Machines: Gods

June 25, 2023

Sekret Machines: Gods (SMG) is volume one of a trilogy, Sekret Machines: Gods, Man, and War. The authors are Tom Delonge (the guy from Blink 182) and Peter Levenda, whose author biography includes "[being] held at gunpoint in Latin America" and "a member of the same front organization ... that provided cover for ... suspected co-conspirators in the JFK assassination."

Why should you care what the singer from Blink 182 and a guy who was distantly involved with the JFK assassination think about UFOs? A chain of events that led to a whisteblower testifying to the United States Congress about recovered vehicles from non-human intelligence all began with something Tom wrote in these books that stirred up some interest at high levels in the military and intelligence communities. [1] One might wonder what he wrote that was so interesting.

SMG can be broadly categorized as an Ancient Alien theory. Tom and Peter believe that most of the gods described in ancient religious texts were actually extraterrestrial beings and that these often enigmatic and perplexing mythical stories are actually literal.

SMG raises an interesting point about religion: why are there so many similarities between religions, and why do they almost universally sound insane? The idea that we were created by powerful beings and have immortal souls that go somewhere else after we die is an oddly specific description that most religions share.

It is important to understand that the concept of a divine creation of humans is an almost universal idea. This is not something that we should expect as a normal human understanding of the world or of their origins; it is not something that is self-evident, not even in a purely religious or spiritual context. Why do humans conceive of their own creation as happening because of a god or gods—essentially, as the Gnostics understood it, alien beings—deciding to extend themselves this way?

Sekret Machines: Gods

On the second point, why do ancient texts sound so bizarre?

When the heavens above did not exist,
And earth beneath had not come into being —
There was Apsû, the first in order, their begetter,
And demiurge Tia-mat, who gave birth to them all;
They had mingled their waters together

Enūma Eliš

There was neither non-existence nor existence then;
Neither the realm of space, nor the sky which is beyond;
What stirred? Where? In whose protection? There was neither death nor immortality then;
No distinguishing sign of night nor of day;
That One breathed, windless, by its own impulse;
Other than that there was nothing beyond. Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
the void was covered; That One by force of heat came into being;

Rig Veda - Nasadiya_Sukta

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,
and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.
God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”
And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.
And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.”

The Bible - Genesis 1

This is not how normal people write, if you read this without context you would rightfully assume the writer was insane. Did all of humanity go through a period of collective insanity, at roughly the same time, all around the globe?

SMG's answer is that it's not a coincidence these texts are similar and sound insane: they're not meant to be creative poetry, they're literal descriptions of fantastical events that have gone through thousands of years of interpretation.

What else do our most ancient myths tell us? Many of them describe the gods as not particularly caring of their human creations. The gods in Sumerian, Greek, Hindu, and Aztec mythologies are all often petty, fickle, and destructive.

This kind of tenuous relationship between the gods and humans come to a point with the Sumerian myth of Babylon and biblical myth of The Tower of Babel. SMG draws the conclusion that the gods spited mankind for rivaling their own power, and triggered some kind of cataclysm that divided us across the world. The last chapter of SMG, called "Planet Earth: The Hot LZ", alludes to something Tom once said in an interview with Joe Rogan: that there are factions of non-human beings and the Earth is like the Middle East in some intergalactic proxy war. [2]

The problem with alien theories is they can be a deus ex machina for any story. Sufficiently powerful aliens could explain anything. SMG draws some pretty tenuous connections sometimes, I opted to skip covering some ideas like how the pyramids are a cargo cult of alien hibernation chambers because it felt like a little too much and didn't seem important to their main thesis.

With that being said, SMG brings up some genuine mysteries about the origins of our myths and high ranking members of our military seem to agree. If you accept for a moment that alien beings have been to Earth at some point in our history, it doesn't seem like a stretch that they would intervene in our affairs, that any ancient records of them would sound surreal and fantastical, that there would be multiple factions, and that those factions would compete in indirect ways because direct conflict would destroy the object of their interest. As above, so below, after all.

What evolutionary purpose is served by this nagging sense—revealed in countless spiritual, religious and historical accounts over the millennia and from all over the world, not to mention in the world's literature, music, and art—that we don't really belong here, that something is wrong with us, that death is an absurdity, and that our home is in the stars?

Sekret Machines: Gods