There are secrets governments keep locked away, and then there are secrets they seek out in the darkness. At the terrifying apex of the Cold War, when the American intelligence community was desperate for any advantage, be it a new satellite or a psychic weapon—they stumbled across a door to the unknown. This was not a search for breakthrough hardware; it was a desperate, high-stakes project to crack the universe’s most guarded mystery: reincarnation.
In 1967, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initiated one of the most unorthodox and bizarre missions in its history. The objective was chillingly simple: to achieve eternal life for the elite by understanding, and ultimately weaponizing, the mechanism of the human soul. This mission hinged entirely on one man, a reluctant guide into the deepest metaphysical realm: Evans Charlington.
Charlington, a medium whose unique abilities were unlocked after surviving a clinical death, became the centerpiece of a classified dialogue with an entity that existed outside our familiar laws of space and time. Dubbed “The Voice” or “Eil,” this source provided not vague spiritual platitudes, but a chillingly organized cosmology that reframes human existence as merely an an energy-gathering operation in an infinite, orchestrated cycle. The documents from this project, conducted at CIA headquarters until 1969, pull the reader onto the razor’s edge between myth and official history, forcing a confrontation with forbidden knowledge.
Project Shadow: The Pragmatic Pursuit of the Soul
The Agency’s interest in the esoteric was ruthlessly pragmatic, stripping mysticism down to its base function. Forget spiritual enlightenment; the CIA’s core query was a profound and disturbing existential gambit: If the universal principles of metaphysical rebirth could be reverse-engineered, could a select group—the military, the government, or a global elite—master the transfer of consciousness (the soul’s energy) from an aging body into a younger host, thereby achieving literal, physical immortality?
This goal was the true driver of the project, a dark echo of an ancient desire to cheat death itself. The sessions were meticulously documented, the questions posed by intelligence officers were clinical, and the atmosphere in the closed room was heavy with geopolitical ambition. The Voice, however, was immediately dismissive of the Agency’s profane ambition.
The answer Eil delivered was a categorical and immediate rejection of the entire premise: Manipulation of subtle laws by material beings is destructive and catastrophic to the harmonious structure of the cosmos. The message was clear: the secrets of reincarnation could not be weaponized. The universe, Eil implied, has fail-safes against crude, material interference. A material being, bound by the limitations of physics, cannot wield the forces that operate beyond physics without inviting universal imbalance. The pursuit of immortality through manipulation was a path only to destruction, not mastery.
Despite the denial of their primary objective, the revelations that flowed from The Voice during the two-year period (1967–1969) provided an unparalleled, though unsettling, picture of the cosmic mechanics of rebirth.
The Great Cycle: Dissecting the Mechanics of Rebirth
The intelligence officers, now deprived of their key to eternal youth, turned their focus to cataloging the revelations. What emerged was a systematic breakdown of the soul’s journey, one that radically challenged every tenet of traditional religious and philosophical thought.
The Voice redefined human identity: A human being is fundamentally an “energy organism”—a lower-stage energy entity housed in a temporary physical vessel. Our true purpose is not devotion or conquest, but simply to “explore the world and accumulate knowledge.” The physical world is merely an exploration platform, a sensory tool for generating and storing raw energetic data. Every interaction, every lesson, every experience—good, bad, painful, or joyous—is merely data collected by this energy organism. This accumulation process defines the current lifetime’s success, not the fulfillment of any moral code we conceive.
Upon the irreversible death of the biological body, the process is handled not by chance, but by higher entities referred to as “curators.” These curators are responsible for preparing an “energy ball”—the repository of the lifetime’s accumulated knowledge. This energy is then “formatted,” purified of unnecessary complexity, and prepared for its next assignment. The human energy entity does not ascend to a heavenly reward or descend into fire; it is efficiently recycled. The selection criteria for the next incarnation are entirely inaccessible to human reasoning. Eil stressed that human concepts like “good and bad deeds,” “faith,” or “love” are deemed products of the material world and hold no equivalent meaning for the curators. The process is not moral; it is mathematical. The choice of the next life—its location, body, and challenges—is completely outside of human petition or control, driven by the needs of the larger cosmic calculus.
The ultimate purpose of this seemingly endless chain of rebirths is for the energy entity to “rise in class” and transition into a subtle material world. This higher state of existence is so radically different that The Voice stated, “you won’t know. There is a completely different existence there.” It is a dimension beyond the grasp of a mind constrained by the biological concepts of space and time. The path to this ultimate transcendence is not gradual evolution but “complete disintegration.” Eil described it chillingly: “Turning into infinitely small to become infinitely large.” It suggests that the ego, the individual identity we cherish, must be shattered and dissolved for the energetic essence to achieve its full, boundless potential.
The cosmic model presented by The Voice established the absolute sovereignty of the rebirth cycle over all matter. The cycle is not limited to humans and animals. Eil asserted that everything that exists—including seemingly inanimate objects—has an energy body. In the event of an “unsuccessful” incarnation, the energy entity can possess not only an animal but also objects we deem lifeless: a drop of water, a grain of sand, or a stone. This vision portrays the universe as a single, living, circulating energy field where human life is merely one of countless forms the underlying essence can inhabit. The Voice offered a stark metaphysical definition of existence:
“Life is a concept of the biological body… energy is infinite.” When the biological body dies, the energy persists—everything lives an unlimited number of times. But this is not “life” as we feel it; it is simply “existence in the understanding of the energetic essence.”
The Sealing of the Secret
Over the course of two years, Charlington participated in more than 30 séances, meticulously transcribing the revelations. Yet, the classified experiment ultimately failed in its mercenary goal. The sought-after blueprint for manipulating reincarnation—the key to immortality for the military-industrial complex—was never delivered.
In 1969, with the project deemed unpromising due to its lack of actionable technological insight, the CIA quietly closed the file. The highly unusual record of dialogue with an “ephemeral source” was effectively sealed away from public scrutiny.
The medium’s own subsequent fate adds a final, tragic layer to the conspiracy. Charlington dedicated the few years he had left to compiling the vast, esoteric knowledge into a definitive book, desperate to bring the secrets to light. However, he died suddenly in 1973 before the manuscript could be published. The revelations he fought to release—of higher cosmic entities and a terrifying, impersonal cycle of existence—were thus silenced.
The story of Evans Charlington and the CIA’s most bizarre project remains a chilling document on the periphery of accepted history. Was the man a genuine guide whose insights fundamentally challenge our perception of death and consciousness? Or was he simply a catalyst for an intelligence agency lost in the labyrinth of its own desperate ambition? His legacy compels us to confront a terrifying and fascinating cosmology where our rational worldview is shattered, and the human role is revealed as a temporary, energy-gathering vessel in an infinite, cold, and meticulously orchestrated universal cycle.
