Episode Details

I don’t remember exactly when I was formally introduced to him. I had seen him and Al Bielek in the clubs all the way back in eighty-nine. In their polyester ensembles complete with plaid high waters to show off their buster brown shoes they had stood out like “undercover” cops amongst the bikers, mobsters and freshly minted Wall Street slicksters that made up the usual crowd. I was running security for a couple of strip clubs right across the street from Babylon Town Hall on Long Island. Preston Nichols was a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound gelatinous blob and Bielek looked like he was playing Stan Laurel in an old black and white movie.I was working the door that night and they both stopped right in front of me, something most people avoided when there wasn’t a cover charge. They were having an animated conversation about music speaking with exaggerated self-importance for what I took to be a couple of nerds on a whimsical midnight excursion to the wild side. For some reason it stuck in my mind. I remember Preston saying, “well I really like U2,” like some important decision had just been reached.In 1992 the very same strange man would come out with an even stranger book. The story woven by Preston Nichols “a former employee of Grumman” and resident of East Islip, along with his coauthor Peter Moon, would assume cult status three books later. They smoothly blend a powerful hallucinogenic out of the Brookhaven Lab, the aerospace industry, an old radar station at Montauk Point Long Island and the invention of the vacuum and transistor tubes. Central to the narrative is the massive bombardment with oscillated microwaves of selected human beings in a specially built chair. The Montauk Chair enabled them to channel alternate realities. This was all based on the mathematics of John von Neumann. There was Aleister Crowley, secret underground bases, Nazi occult science, Greys and time travel. Controlling this latter-day Illuminatus Trilogy is a “sinister” cabal that is able to operate in alternate realities to manipulate this one.

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According to Nichols there is an underground complex in Montauk that is headquarters for a secret army of mind-controlled super soldiers. Trained by Nazi’s they are able to travel through time and space acting as trans-dimensional assassins and altering history anyway the cabal pleases. Amongst Nichols circle of friends his story was taken so seriously that John Ford, the president of the Long Island U.F.O. Network, and three of his friends, were given lengthy prison sentences after being 'entrapped' in a 1996 plot to poison then Suffolk County Republican Chairman John Powell, Suffolk Legislator Fred Towle and Brookhaven Conservative Party chief Anthony Gazzola, by exposing them to radium. After Ford was arrested, I would spend a terse couple of days with him in Long Islands Riverhead Correctional Facility. I had known Preston Nichols for about four years by then.

Nichols and Moons narrative uses the Babylon working as the cabals raison d'être. Much of what goes on in Montauk revolves around achieving this magnum opus of all occult ceremonies. In their narrative the Babylon working is designed to bring about the incarnation of the Moon Goddess. It is the culmination of a mysterious and archaic rite that Aleister Crowley called the Amalantrah working. Crowley performed the Amalantrah working in the spring of 1918 on Esopus Island on the Hudson River in New York. He spent that summer on Long Islands Montauk Point.Crowley's sexual partner or conduit, the Scarlet Woman as Crowley called her, was a woman named Roddie Minor. Crowley dubbed her the camel after the Qabalistic meaning of the third Hebrew letter Gimel which is the path to the crown of God in the Sepher Yasirah. Long afterwards Crowley would make cryptic references to the cit