No transcript, memo, or press account of a 1972 CIA séance with Sybil Leek and an entity called “Caxuulikom” exists anywhere. Every version of the story traces back to recent fringe blogs and forum posts.
What actually happened is stranger for being true: a CIA drug-testing program that explored whether occult belief could be weaponized, run by the same official who oversaw MKULTRA.
The Séance Has No Documented Source
Sybil Leek herself needs no invented backstory. Born in Staffordshire in 1917, she was dubbed “Britain’s most famous witch” by the BBC, founded the Witchcraft Research Association in 1964, and emigrated to the United States after facing persecution at home. Her 1968 memoir Diary of a Witch sold widely. That’s checkable biography, on the record from multiple period sources. What isn’t on the record: the claim that CIA and military intelligence officers convened a September 1972 séance with her, where an entity calling itself Caxuulikom declared “the Earth is a farm.” No transcript, official memo, or period press coverage of any such event has surfaced. Even writers sympathetic to the story admit as much: the link between actual CIA activity and the Leek séance is unproven, and the tale seems to circulate only through recent blogs, forums, and video posts, each citing the last, none pointing back to an original source.
What MKOFTEN Actually Was
Here the facts outpace the fiction. Project MKOFTEN, also called Operation Often, ran from roughly 1966 to 1973 under the Department of Defense and CIA, overseen by Sidney Gottlieb, the man who also directed MKULTRA. A 1977 Pentagon review released under FOIA, alongside material the 1975 Church Committee examined, lays out a drug-testing operation: behavioral and toxicological effects on animals, on prisoners at Holmesburg State Prison in Philadelphia, and on volunteers at Edgewood Arsenal. The claim that MKOFTEN also consulted astrologers, mediums, and practitioners of witchcraft to weaponize occult technique gets repeated constantly, but it doesn’t show up anywhere in the primary paper trail. Researchers who’ve gone through the released files trace the occult angle to secondary allegations and later media retellings, not to the government’s own paperwork. The drug-testing side of MKOFTEN stands on solid ground. The witchcraft-consultation layer built on top of it doesn’t.
Jack Parsons Needs No Embellishment
John Whiteside “Jack” Parsons requires no embellishment. A self-taught chemist and rocketry pioneer, he co-founded what became NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory while also serving as a devoted follower of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, leading the Agape Lodge in Pasadena, and in 1946 performed a ritual he called the Babalon Working, meant to invoke a Thelemic goddess figure into physical form. L. Ron Hubbard’s involvement with Parsons, including a yacht scheme that cost Parsons much of his savings, has been reported for decades. Parsons died in a 1952 laboratory explosion, officially ruled accidental. His life, moving fluidly between cutting-edge aerospace engineering and ceremonial magic, doesn’t need a fabricated CIA séance twenty years later to stay remarkable.
The Collins Elite Traces to a Specific Source
The “Collins Elite,” a supposed group of evangelical intelligence analysts who concluded UFO phenomena were demonic rather than extraterrestrial, traces to one specific source: journalist Nick Redfern’s reporting, laid out most fully in his book Final Events. That matters for how the claim should be weighed. It’s a single journalist’s account of what he was told by anonymous former officials, not a government program with its own paper trail the way MKOFTEN has. Redfern is a serious researcher with a solid track record, and the claim may well hold up. But it sits in a different evidentiary category than MKOFTEN’s FOIA releases: one credentialed reporter’s sourcing, not a released government file.
History Stranger Than the Invention
None of this needs an invented demon to stay worth reading. Sybil Leek, Jack Parsons, and MKOFTEN’s drug-testing program are all established pieces of twentieth-century history, stranger in their particulars than most fiction bothers to be. The Collins Elite is a sourced claim from a named journalist, worth taking seriously as reporting rather than settled fact. The Caxuulikom séance, by contrast, has nothing behind it at all, no transcript, no memo, no period coverage, only recent retellings citing each other in a loop. Telling those two apart is the more interesting story. It’s also the true one.
