There is no surviving transcript, CIA memorandum, military report, or contemporary press account documenting a 1972 séance in which the witch Sybil Leek supposedly communicated with an entity called “Caxuulikom.” The story exists, but the record behind it does not: recent fringe articles, forums, videos, and retellings repeat substantially the same account while pointing backward to one another rather than to an original source. What actually can be documented is considerably stranger.
During roughly the same era, U.S. intelligence and military researchers really did conduct experiments involving psychoactive and incapacitating substances, including testing on prisoners and military personnel, under programs connected to the same intelligence establishment that had already run MKUltra and Project ARTICHOKE. The séance has no evidentiary foundation. The drug experiments do.
The Séance Has No Documentary Trail
Sybil Leek does not need a fabricated intelligence connection to make her life extraordinary. Born in Staffordshire in 1917, Leek became one of Britain’s best-known public figures associated with witchcraft and the occult, was described by the BBC as “Britain’s most famous witch,” founded the Witchcraft Research Association in 1964, and eventually moved to the United States. Her 1968 memoir, Diary of a Witch, became a widely read account of her life and beliefs. Those are historical claims with a paper trail. The problem begins when a very different story is attached to that biography: the claim that in September 1972, CIA and military intelligence personnel arranged a séance with Leek and that an entity calling itself Caxuulikom appeared and announced that “the Earth is a farm.”
No primary record of that encounter has surfaced. There is no authenticated transcript, no CIA or Defense Department memorandum describing the séance, no contemporary newspaper report, and no independently verifiable participant account that establishes the event occurred. The story’s modern circulation instead appears to depend on a chain of secondary retellings in which the existence of the séance is treated as established before anyone produces the document that supposedly established it in the first place. That distinction matters. An extraordinary story can be difficult to verify because records were classified, destroyed, or never created. But the absence of a surviving record is not itself evidence that the event happened, and repeated citation between later writers does not turn one unsupported claim into several independent sources.
What MKOFTEN Actually Was
The documented history is disturbing enough without adding a supernatural meeting to it. Project MKOFTEN, also known as Operation Often, operated from roughly 1966 to 1973 within the CIA and Department of Defense research environment and was overseen by Sidney Gottlieb, the intelligence official associated with both MKUltra and the earlier Project ARTICHOKE. A September 20, 1977 Department of Defense General Counsel memorandum, subsequently released through FOIA and considered alongside records examined by the Church Committee, describes behavioral and toxicological experimentation involving animals, prisoners at Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia, and volunteer military personnel at Edgewood Arsenal. Whatever remains unknown about the program, this portion of the story does not depend on rumor: there is a surviving government paper trail.
The Holmesburg experiments form part of an even longer and darker history. Dermatologist Albert Kligman, working under Army contracts at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted experiments on prisoners at Holmesburg for decades, from 1951 into the 1970s, exposing inmates to hundreds of substances in research that later became the subject of major ethical criticism. Journalist Allen Hornblum documented the program extensively in Acres of Skin, drawing on interviews with surviving participants as well as the available documentary record. At Edgewood Arsenal, meanwhile, military researchers tested incapacitating and psychoactive compounds on soldiers. One documented 1971 experiment involved two military volunteers receiving the substance designated EA-3167, with CIA funding routed through the Edgewood research structure. These are not stories that become more credible when embellished with occult language. They are already part of the historical record.
This is also where an important distinction gets lost in popular retellings. MKOFTEN is frequently described online as a program that recruited astrologers, mediums, witches, and occult practitioners in an attempt to weaponize supernatural techniques. That allegation is much harder to establish from the released primary record. The surviving record provides substantial evidence for chemical, behavioral, and toxicological research. It does not provide comparable support for the dramatic occult-consultation narrative that has grown around it. The temptation to combine the two is understandable. Intelligence history already contains enough genuinely bizarre material that the invented layer can slip in almost unnoticed.
Jack Parsons Was Already a Remarkable Historical Figure
The same corrective principle applies to Jack Parsons. John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons was simultaneously a pioneering figure in American rocketry and a committed practitioner of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, a combination so improbable that later storytellers have had little reason to improve upon it. Parsons helped establish the experimental rocket work that became associated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, led the Agape Lodge of Thelema in Pasadena, and in 1946 conducted the ritual he called the Babalon Working, an attempt to invoke the Thelemic figure Babalon. His association with L. Ron Hubbard during the episode surrounding Parsons’s boat and financial dealings became another part of the mythology surrounding his life. Parsons died in a laboratory explosion in 1952, officially ruled accidental. The documented man was already living at the intersection of advanced rocketry, military-industrial science, occult practice, and twentieth-century counterculture. He does not need to be inserted into an invented CIA séance to become extraordinary.
The Collins Elite Is a Different Kind of Claim
The story of the so-called Collins Elite belongs in yet another evidentiary category. The term refers to an alleged group of intelligence and military personnel who came to interpret UFO phenomena through a Christian theological framework, ultimately treating some alleged encounters as demonic rather than extraterrestrial. The account has been developed most prominently by journalist Nick Redfern, particularly in Final Events, where it rests on interviews and information attributed to former officials and other sources. That makes it neither automatically false nor equivalent to a declassified government program. It is reported history whose underlying sources cannot be independently evaluated in the same way as a released Defense Department memorandum.
That difference in evidence is precisely the distinction worth preserving. A named journalist can report what confidential sources told him. A government archive can preserve a document. A later writer can quote either one. None of those acts are interchangeable. The existence of a paper trail does not automatically prove every allegation surrounding the people or programs mentioned in it, just as the absence of a paper trail does not prove that every undocumented story is fabricated. What matters is whether the specific claim can be traced to evidence appropriate to the claim being made.
MKOFTEN’s Actual Records Outlast the Séance
That leaves us with a much more interesting landscape than the viral version provides. Sybil Leek was real. Jack Parsons was real. MKOFTEN was real. The CIA and military really did conduct deeply controversial experiments involving psychoactive and incapacitating substances, including research involving prisoners and soldiers. The Collins Elite story is a documented piece of modern investigative reporting whose underlying allegations remain in a different evidentiary category from declassified government programs. And the alleged Caxuulikom séance remains something else entirely: a dramatic story with no primary document that has surfaced to establish that it happened.
The lesson isn’t that intelligence agencies never investigated strange phenomena, or that every story about occultism and government is automatically fiction. The twentieth-century record is too complicated for either conclusion. The lesson is simpler and more useful: extraordinary history does not become stronger when unsupported details are added to it. In this case, the documented record already contains secret drug experiments, unethical human research, occult practitioners, intelligence programs, rocket pioneers, and decades of institutional secrecy. The fictional séance adds spectacle. The surviving documents add something better: a mystery that can actually be investigated.
