Nick Cook Speaks at The Ramtha School

By Tim Ventura, June 2004

It's a sweltering hot Sunday afternoon, and I'm driving down WA-512 towards
Yelm, WA. In the passenger seat is Colby Harper, a longtime friend and former
IT-industry colleague. Colby's been a mentor for years, ever since I worked for
him at Inteliant/AT&T in 2000. Once again I'm relying on his guidance, but this
time the job is finding a street address. "Wait a sec, Tim -- I think that we just
passed it." Colby's right -- I'd driven past the black wrought-iron gate that I was
looking for along a long, moss-covered wall that signified we'd reached our
destination.

As you might have guessed, there's a back story here -- and in this case its
definitely one of the strangest that I've seen to date. I guess you could say that
we're traveling to church on Sunday, but this isn't a social occasion -- nor is it
really a church. In fact, the building that we're pulling up at is unlike any other
.... its the "Ramtha School of Enlightenment" -- a Mecca for spirituality and
psychic powers that the editor of one of the world's most prestigious magazines
is about to give a speech at.

Through the Black Gate

The Ramtha school was a bit different that what I'd expected -- I must admit that
I didn't have much foreknowledge of what the place was like, but I was somewhat
familiar with their leadership. At 12 years old I'd seen JZ Knight engage in what
she's claimed was the channeling of a 40,000 year old deity named "Ramtha" on
Channel 4's "Town Meeting". It was a daytime show that I'd seen as a result of
being home from school sick. The vague recollection that I had from the show
was Ken Schram hosting it, and the audience laughing and booing JZ nearly off
the stage while she performed her channeling demonstration. My memory
revolves not even around JZ or Ramtha, but around the audience -- if you can
visualize in your mind the kind of response that the guests often get on Jerry
Springer, then you're probably thinking about the same thing that I saw on TV
that day.

Looking back on things, I can only assume that having an audience reaction like
that must really hurt a person to have happen -- I'd always assumed that JZ had
faded into obscurity after being treated so poorly by that audience, but I'd
apparently assumed wrong -- she was alive and well, living in Yelm, WA...and she
wasn't alone -- in the 16 years since I'd seen her on TV, she'd developed a
following and turned it her home in Yelm into a one-stop shopping center for
spirituality and psychic phenomenon.

My understanding of the Ramtha School was that it was a cult -- and after the
disasters first the Branch Davidian compound in 1993 and later with Heaven's
Gate in San Diego I was very resistant to even learning more about this

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organization. However, I'd been obligated to drive down and learn more about
this organization after friend and antigravity-journalist Bruce Smith told me
about an event at which Nick Cook would be speaking. Cook, after all, is the
aviation editor for Jane’s Defense Review, and at the very least I owed him
attendance after having my Lifter research featured in the July 2002 edition of
Jane’s Weekly.

Cultlike Objects
How do you define a cult? Colby and I had talked about this during our one-and-
a-half hour drive down from Seattle, and we'd had difficulty really pinning down
the definition to determine one way or the other what the Ramtha School of
Enlightenment really was. The problem is that while cults are easy for most
people to define, that's because most people are analyzing them from the
perspective of an established belief system. When I was 12, the minister at the
Baptist Church my mother was attending had a good definition of exactly what a
cult was, and at the time it seemed quite logical....the problem arises from the fact
that in hindsight the Baptist Church is a bit cultlike itself.

I guess that there are different types of cults, and if the Ramtha School qualifies it
would probably fit into what is generally known as a "personality cult". It's a scary
word, but realistically this type of organization is all around us. Cult, after all,
comes from the word "micro culture", which is literally a small culture formed by
a group of people with a common bond that sets them apart from the rest of the
world. Personality cults are a bit tough to pin down -- does musician Leif
Garrett's following of teenage girls in the 1970's qualify? What about the Grateful
Dead followers? Or more importantly, what Jesus and the 12-disciples,
which effectively defines Christianity as being the same thing that it accused
other followings of being. Even UFOlogy has cult-followings, and these micro
cultures all share many of the same characteristics that the Ramtha School does.

A personality cult is generally defined around a single person -- usually a

charismatic and well-spoken leader that preaches a gospel and leads followers to
abandon their old lives in search of new meaning in the organization.

I read a book on cult organizations a while back that described a number of well-
known cults. One of the obvious problems is that with organizations like this,
they suck people in and drain their finances dry. Does the Ramtha School do
this? Offhand, I don't know if they tithe (a common practice with most major
religions), but they do have a bookstore, which sells a collection of volumes either
written by JZ Knight or transcribed from lectures that she's given at the school.
In terms of sucking people dry, though, I doubt that the bookstore would qualify -
- I spend more money on physics journals than it would cost to buy her entire
library of materials.

Some of the well-known cult practices that are generally considered to be

'dangerous' seem to be absent from the Ramtha School. Most cults try to isolate

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new members from their friends and families, and try to get people to leave their
old lives behind to start fresh in a new cult society....add in lots of brainwashing,
and you can take a normal person and gradually remove their identity. The idea is
that the members of this organization would be obviously brainwashed to spout
off catch-phrases from the leader, but I didn't see this happening. In fact, from
the two books that Bruce Smith had sent me beforehand, one of the central ideas
of RSE is to set aside preconceived notions from all sources (including Ramtha),
and to find the truth for oneself. This puts the Ramtha School into more of a
Buddhist setting than that of a Christian cult, which would tend to dominate its
followers and condition them with a dogmatic approach to beliefs.

Trying to figure out the RSE is an interesting mental challenge, but probably one
that isn't very fruitful -- after all, I'm not part of the organization, merely
intellectually interested in the way that they've structured their own approach to
spirituality. Cult or not, Colby and I had come to see Nick Cook deliver a lecture
on Antigravity. We'd been invited very graciously as guests to an otherwise
private event, and I was happy for the opportunity to visit and hear him speak.

Social Introductions
Mike Wright is a tall man, and was dressed in a loose-fitting but stylish white
shirt befitting the awful heat that we were enduring -- despite his rather abrupt
phone manner, he's quite friendly and congenial in person, and met Colby and
myself in the gravel parking lot at RSE to shepherd us into his office to meet with
Nick before the presentation. If I wasn't feeling schizophrenic enough
beforehand, being escorted into the converted Ranch-house that now served as
an office-complex was definitely increasing that crazy feeling in the back of my
head. The problem is that because I had cults on the brain, everything that I saw
seemed to make me wonder about what was a 'normal behavior' and what might
be a 'cultlike control technique'.

Colby and I followed Mike about a hundred feet down the narrow hall, in an
uneasy silence occasionally punctuated by small talk. The problem wasn't that
Mike was being rude -- in fact, he was quite pleasant, but incredibly busy. This
particular Sunday was a very busy occasion for RSE, as they were in the middle of
a 10-day retreat that involved pilgrims from all over the world traveling to Yelm
to listen to JZ speak and learn a bit more about the school.

Mike was especially busy because his specialty is science & technology. To give
the guy credit, he has an incredible grasp on science and technology -- especially
with regard to Quantum Information Systems, which is probably the last thing
you'd expect to find at RSE. However, the reality is that as Quantum Mechanics
progresses, it moves from being a hard-science into the realm of metaphor -- one
of the things that Mike later mentioned was his interest in Quantum Computers
and how they add support to the "Many-Worlds" interpretation of Quantum
Mechanics.

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After our walk down the hall, Mike stopped at a small office door and ushered us
in. I'm not sure what I expected to see, but in terms of organizational layout for
the school it was a pretty mundane office -- shelves overflowing with papers, two
PC's running Microsoft Outlook, and a few papers stacked on the desk directly in
front of me. The paper on top was a description of a recent successful experiment
to teleport an atom across a lab -- I quickly lost interest because I'd read the same
article earlier in the week online.

It took a while for Nick to enter the room -- as it turns out, while my paranoia ran
towards my vain attempt to categorize the Ramtha School into a "cult / no-cult"
strategy, Nick's paranoia seems to have been towards finalizing his speaking
notes to make sure that he didn't get lost on stage. I immediately understood
from his expression that he was feeling uneasy -- Bruce had told me earlier in the
week that this event would have nearly 2,000 attendees, and I knew that Nick's
experience with publicity had mainly involved small groups at media-venues,
such as filming for television, etc.

Seeing Nick was a bit of a relief, though -- and seeing that he was focused on
something other than our rather strange location was even more relieving. For
me, this is what really began to help me to relax -- after all, this is the first time
that I'd met him in person, despite a few hours of phone conversations that we'd
had over the last two years.

The Grand Tour

With only a few minutes left before he was scheduled to begin his presentation on
Antigravity to the audience, Nick could only spare a few minutes to discuss his
latest research with us while he waited for someone to arrive with his slideshow
presentation. We talked briefly about Ning Li -- Nick favorably echoed my
sentiment that the thing that made Li's work so interesting was that it involved
very conventional physics from a very conservative part of the scientific
establishment. Nick and I had a very similar understanding of the situation
regarding Ning Li's early work, and her subsequent disappearance from public
view to pursue a secret project for the Department of Defense. I did envy his
description of attending the High-Frequency Gravity Wave Conference that he'd
met her at in 2003 ... as it turns out, there are a number of people working on the
same concepts that she is, and this conference was the best location to make
contacts in this community.

While Nick finished preparing his slides, Mike gave Colby and myself a quick tour
of the Ramtha School. I'd like to say that I'm one of the few insiders to see the
inside of the school, but realistically that would blow the entire thing out of
perspective. The Ramtha School was apparently converted from an old horse-
ranch, most likely to find inexpensive buildings with the kind of space required
for school activities. From what I'd seen it was operated a bit like a fairground --
during the 10-day retreat people had parked their RV's in a parking lot off to the
back of the school, but ordinarily the school only had a minimal number of

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people visiting during the day. It wasn't packed, but obviously more active than
normal.

I actually felt quite at home touring around the Ramtha School -- most likely
because it's reminiscent of a college campus. My wife attended Evergreen in
Olympia, and prior to that both of us had gone to Western Washington University
in Bellingham, and the cultural "feel" of the Ramtha school really just paralleled
the dress and social patterns that you'd see at most major Universities. Simple
clothing and natural fibers prevailed, and because of the heat most of the people
milling around behind the main conference building were wearing either tank-
tops or sleeveless shirts. Parasols were set up at regular intervals to provide some
isolation from the heat, and I noticed that most of the students were carrying
daypacks to contain whatever essentials they didn't want to leave in the main
conference building. Compared to The Evergreen State College, the Ramtha
School is seems quite mundane...

Mike walked us through the auditorium that Nick would be speaking at -- it's an
enormous building, easily as large as my high-school gymnasium. The entire
building was constructed from wood, and poorly lit due to a lack of lighting on
the ceiling. It had been converted from what looked like an old barn, although it
had a more modern era room that was supported by very durable-looking moon-
shaped beams providing support for the roof. The floor of the building was the
most interesting area, because instead of folding chairs it appeared that the
attendees had all brought individual seating -- usually pads or pillows. That was
actually the only real 'cultlike' element that I saw in the entire place -- imagine
some uncountable number of pillows and pads, of all shapes and sizes, arranged
on the floor in a rough approximation of audience seating at a gymnasium-
presentation.

The walls were adorned in moderation -- near the ceiling on the west wall were a
gigantic red pentagram and what appeared to be a paper-cutout of Michelangelo’s
"David touching God's Finger" mural from the Sistine Chapel. On the wall was an
equally large Star of David, made from an overlay of a red-triangle onto a blue
one.

Colby picked up on the more interesting piece -- little collages lining the walls at
eye-level, composed of photographs with hand-drawn pictures plastered around
them. The scale of the presentation building was large enough, and the room
itself was visually crowded enough from pillows and pads that it would be easy to
miss these murals -- but it was a good thing that Colby hadn't.

"What do these represent?" Colby asked, pointing vaguely to one of the hand-
drawn pictures. Mike replied, "Those are orbs". As I was a bit behind both Mike
and Colby, I missed part of the exchange due to tripping over someone's seating
pillow, but I listened intently as Mike described what the murals represented.
"People meditate to visualize the orbs, which are nonworld-entities -- they're
intelligence, but they have no bodies. The human eye can't see them, but with

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meditation people can draw an accurate representation of what our camera filter
later photographs. Essentially they appear on film as a plasma, although we've
had to modify the shutter and exposure to capture them because they're in a
slightly different spectrum than the eye can see."

From Mike's description, this appeared to be a very prolific endeavor -- people

would meditate for minutes or hours to 'communicate' with the orbs, and then
draw a representation of their mental image of the orbs construction. The
patterns on paper were quite unique, and interestingly enough the photos seemed
to show many of the same unique variations in color an intensity that the
drawings had captured. My question to Mike was whether or not the school was
collecting metrics on these experiences -- after all, its a unique enough experience
for one person to go through, and after looking around the room at eye level I
realized that there were literally hundreds of orb-pictures and photographs
posted all around.

After finishing up his description of the orbs, we followed Mike outside and he
showed us a field surrounded by horse fencing, and explained that students used
it to practice a variety of meditation techniques. He described one activity in
which students write symbols on cards, and then place them in the field. This is
done as a group activity, which means that at any one time a collection of cards
are placed at miscellaneous locations in the field, which itself is several hundreds
yards both in length and breadth. By concentrating on sending a mental image of
the card to their peers, the claim is that students are able to assist other students
with locating specific cards in the field by thought alone. Imagine trying to find
an upside down postcard in an area the size of a football-field, while not
accidentally grabbing someone else's card, and you begin to get the idea.

We began to witness another activity in the field while standing in front of it -- a

middle aged woman walked through the fence-gate into the field, and began a
breathing technique that sounded like a loud, repeated "swooshing" noise. Mike
indicated that this allowed her to effectively meditate while she walked through
the field, and told us that this could sometimes create 'teleportation' or
'bilocation' effects. His claim was that students sometimes literally vanish into
thin air, and other students occasionally 're-appear' out of thin air in the field
(sometimes carrying suitcases).

Walking back to the prep-room where Nick was putting the finishing touches on
his slide show, we were able to see vendors with temporary food-stands selling a
variety of consumables, and Mike showed us a very college-looking bookstore
literally packed with people trying to buy copies of Ramtha literature. A micro
culture at work....

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The Presentation
I've heard Nick Cook speak on several occasions, and despite the nervous tension
that he displayed during preparation, none of us were prepared for the response
that he got at this one. I've seen Nick in two television specials, and heard him
on-air with Art Bell at least 3 or 4 times over the last two years. Those are both
very controlled media formats, though -- not open to public response except via
on-air Q&A during his Art Bell appearances.

The auditorium was nearly full when Colby and I arrived -- Mike had disappeared
with Nick, but pointed Colby and I to the guest seating in the back of the
auditorium. Fortunately for us, the guest seating was in folding chairs -- because
other than that we hadn't brought pillows or pads to sit on. Imagine an
auditorium full of people dressed very casually, dressed in neo-hippie outfits and
loose fitting clothes, either sitting on their pads & pillows or milling about getting
ready to be seated. Now picture two very out of place people in back -- two men
dressed in slacks and button-up shirts, sitting on folding chairs -- that's Colby
and myself. Needless to say, a rather uncomfortable position to be in.

In a fortunate turn of events, only seconds before Nick was to begin speaking, I
heard a familiar voice and looked up to see Bruce Smith squeezing past people to
sit down in the empty chair on my right. I hadn't seen Bruce since we arrived, but
I quickly introduced him to Colby before the event began. Having Bruce sitting
next to me helped eliminate some of the nervousness -- after all, I've known
Bruce for over a year and had him over to the house twice for Lifter
demonstrations.

Despite the rather earthy-feel of the Ramtha School's auditorium, it contains a

very sophisticated sound and light-system, hung from the crescent-moon shaped
supports by heavy-duty steel chains. Mike stepped onto the podium and began a
brief introduction of Nick, and I must admit that it was an impressive stage to be
standing on -- even though it was nearly at ground level, gigantic 50 foot speaker-
racks were hanging on all 3 sides of the speaker, providing a definite center of
attention on the stage.

The part that stunned me was when Mike finished his introduction and finally
Nick stepped onto the stage -- before he could even begin to speak he was met
with an immediate applause that turned rapidly into a standing ovation at least a
full minute in length. The applause had begun to subside after the first 30-
seconds, but when Nick raised his hands to motion the audience to quiet down it
had the opposite effect, make the applause that much louder.

I guess that it makes sense, when you think about it. Something about Nick
Cook's writing resonates in a very unique way with the public. I think that its
because he's not only writing about technology, but also about a personal
transformation of mind that happens along with his journalistic research. It's the

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same journey that anyone interested in alternative-science undertakes at some
point or other -- the realization that the textbook version of reality doesn't
explain everything. I think is also the reason that Cook's book, "The Hunt for
Zero Point", has done so well.... in short, its a book that anybody who's ever
wondered about the limits of science can identify with.

Science & Metaphor

Shortly before the presentation, Mike and Nick were discussing the best term for
this type of science. The term that Mike preferred was "Frontier Science", because
there's a connotation this new knowledge will eventually become part of our
'known body of knowledge about the universe'. I like the term also, but I am
sticking with 'alternative-science' because I feel like a major component of
Antigravity and Free-Energy Technology research comes from an intersection of
cultural beliefs & modern mythology with science. It's not a pure art -- something
that can be reduced down to equations and separated from the people that
created it, and because of that I don't think that it will ever really fit into the same
mold that traditional scientific discovery does.

Seeing Nick on stage presenting to the audience was a stark-reminder of some of

the realities of alternative science. The problem was not that he didn't fit in, but
instead quite the opposite -- he fit in very well, with an educated group of people
who not only had read the book but understood the concepts that he was
discussing in it. It's easy to write people off as quacks, cult-members, or whatever
you want to call them, and much more difficult to realize that these are actually
thinking, feeling human beings with well-informed opinions on this subject
material.

The larger problem is a fundamental crisis in all of the sciences that we've been
dodging for years - the intersection of science and metaphor. Richard Hoagland
actually described the Ramtha teachings to me as "a descent into metaphor", but
what he didn't tell me was that it wasn't a very deep descent -- even in
conventional science new experiments like the teleportation of atoms or
Quantum Computing open the door to mysticism and belief.

Mike's comments about Quantum Computing weren't simply an area of personal

interest to him -- ideas like signal non-locality allowing clairvoyance and
Quantum Computing proving the 'Many Worlds' theory dovetail nicely into new-
age philosophy. In fact, in comparison to cutting edge QM or String Theory work,
Antigravity is a downright bad fit with new age mysticism.

According to Nick, this was his first "real public speaking experience", which led
me to guess that he'd probably stick pretty close to his speaking notes, and this
was in fact what happened. I guess that in terms of practice experience, you
couldn't get a much better venue -- a cohesive group of intent listeners who by
virtue of their affiliations have open minds. The fact that Nick reported on
military research was a concern of mine, but nobody seemed to attribute any

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blame to him for any wrongdoings that the technologies he reports on have been
used for.

Nick received applause a few times during his lecture, but one instance that was
particularly meaningful to me was his statement about 'the journey being more
important than the destination'. That's perhaps the single largest connection
between not only physics, but also the black-world engineering investigation that
connects with students of religion & mysticism. That's also probably why his book
does so well in newsgroups that usually connect more with mystical quests --
because his work involves a mixture of objective and subjective information, but
unlike the hard sciences its usually difficult to separate the two. What is real, and
what is myth -- and more importantly, if nobody ever learns about it, was it real
in the first place? If the government builds a spy plane but nobody ever learns
about it, then exactly how real can that spy plane ever really be?

The Missing Ingredient

There was a seemingly suspicious absence from the auditorium, and that was JZ
Knight/Ramtha. Admittedly, it was dark and very crowded, but with photos of
her plastered on the entrance to the hallways and in the bookstore, I would have
hoped to recognize her if she'd been there. I was sitting in front of a raised
wooden seating box, and I will admit that if she came in late that could have been
one place that she'd sit where I wouldn't even have noticed her, but I'd think that
for having a speaker like Nick Cook come to visit she would come out to introduce
him or at least say a few words after his presentation.

Despite JZ's apparent absence, Nick's presentation came and went -- he wrapped
up first the overview of his research, and then the hour-long Q&A period that
followed. Most of the questions were the kind that you'd generally expect to hear
-- people interested in learning details about what he'd found about the Nazi Bell,
and a question about whether he'd been able to track down the fate of Hans
Kammler. Unfortunately, while he'd been able to learn more about these subjects,
it didn't appear that he'd reached final answers yet, and didn't have a ton to say
about them.

After a thunderous applause that lasted even longer than his entrance, he
finished things up and was hurried by Mike over to the hall on west wing of the
auditorium for about half an hour of book-signing and audience feedback. Colby
and I were left with Bruce Smith, who engaged us to spend some time eating
dinner from one of the foot-court stalls. I had salad and mesquite chicken -- if I'd
had more presence of mind, I would have asked for a recipe for the chicken
because it was some of the best that I've ever had.

I took up conversation with some of the people in the food court stalls -- while I
can't speak on many of the subjects that Nick had addressed, he had mentioned
me in his presentation, which obligated me to at least discuss to some degree my
research and the Lifter experiments. The individuals who'd asked didn't know

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this at the time -- in fact, the reason that they'd asked was simply because Colby
and I were the only two people wearing business-casual attire at the entire event.
Nonetheless, I spent some time talking instead of eating, which left me finishing
off the delicious chicken but dumping the salad into a nearby trash container
when it was time for us to head back to Mike's office.

We had about a half hour to speak with Nick before he had to leave for his flight
back to London -- which obviously isn't a lot of time when 4 people are talking
and asking questions at once. I'd left Nick with a bundle of CD-Rom's though --
containing hours of video footage and information on a variety of my research, as
well as providing duplicate copies to Mike Wright as a thank you for inviting me
to meet Nick and view the presentation.

Nick was eventually ushered away to his ride-share back to the airport -- on pain
of missing his flight -- and Colby, myself, Mike Wright and Bruce Smith were able
to talk for a few minutes about some of the day's events. I've already interviewed
Bruce, but I plan on interviewing Mike for the website, and found his comments
on Quantum Mechanics to be quite astute, as well as touching very effectively on
some of the more philosophical aspects of the science.

Conclusion
When Colby and I departed, it was after 8 o'clock, and the sun was setting as the
black gate closed behind us. The commute from Yelm to Seattle was again about
an hour and a half, which we spent mostly discussing the unusual events of the
day. I tend to believe that we both were surprised by the experience, and I came
away with a really good feeling both about the Ramtha School as well as how
smoothly the day's events transpired. In fact, I felt a bit sad that the event wasn't
open to the public, because I suspect that it would be an interesting learning
experience for anybody interested in attending.

I don't have any preconceived notions about whether JZ Knight really channels a
40,000 year old deity, nor can I make an educated guess. That's the only thing
that I really wondered about before I'd arrived, and turned out to be the least
important thing when I left. What's interesting is the value of the experience in its
own right, and the realization that all of us as people have very similar
connections, no matter what our personal approach to solving life's riddles may
be.

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