Fordham University’s connection to the Collins Elite, UFOs, and the Knights of Malta
Another free one, folks. Thanks for reading and any and all tips at my Buy Me a Coffee! link, as a former bartender every dollar is appreciated.
Things on all fronts are speeding up, and we’re all aware of the escalation of awareness of the UAP topic the last two weeks after the statement former President Barack Obama on the Brian Tyler Cohen podcast two weeks ago that was then followed up by current President Trump a little over a week ago.
We’re all living in the same intense reality with the battle of the Epstein Files playing out and the daily back-and-forth over that as well as our now war with Iran in proxy with Israel. Things are coming at us fast, needless to say.
So before it gets lost in the shuffle, I thought I would hop in here to cover something very new to me thanks to my buddy Pavel via his Psicoactivo Podcast.
Anyone following this topic closely the past few years, especially following Lue Elizondo who first broke open the story of the black-budget UFO crash-retrieval reverse-engineering story in December 2017, is familiar with his claims about the Collins Elite suppressing the story of UFOs in general.
You can watch Pavel’s episode from a couple of days ago covering this:
One big thing going around right is a claim by British filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee that Trump has a speech already written regarding Disclosure, which has been going around a lot the past couple of weeks as well.
The story now is that the Pentagon is actively blocking Disclosure because NHI and UAPs are part of a ‘demonic’ presence.
That claim made explicitly by Lue Elizondo and others regarding the view of the Collins Elite has been around the last few years now, and the International Business Times is the outlet reporting on this new stopgap of information important for Disclosure:
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-ufo-disclosure-pentagon-resistance-1781453
Trump Faces Pentagon Revolt As ‘Demon’ Fears Stall UFO Declassification Bombshell
Insiders claim religious anxieties and ‘interdimensional’ theories are slowing the release of long-awaited UFO files
By Crisnel Longino
Published 25 February 2026
President Donald Trump’s pledge to pull back the curtain on America’s deepest UFO secrets has reportedly hit unexpected turbulence, not from political rivals, but from within his own defence establishment. Officials are weighing how much the public should be told, with concerns ranging from national security to cultural and religious sensitivities.
What began as a bold promise of transparency has now become a contested process. The outcome could determine whether July’s planned disclosure is remembered as a turning point or a cautious half-step.
Trump Orders Release But Pentagon Urges Caution
According to multiple insider claims, parts of the Pentagon are pushing back against full declassification amid fears that the phenomenon may have ‘demonic’ or even ‘interdimensional’ implications. The result is a tense stand off that could shape how much the public is actually told.
Trump recently directed officials to identify and prepare UFO and extraterrestrial related files for potential release. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed that the Pentagon is ‘working’ on the directive and promised ‘full compliance’ with the President’s instructions. However, he also cautioned that the process would take time and should not be oversold.
Behind the scenes, sources claim there is serious internal hesitation. Some officials reportedly fear that revealing certain findings could trigger public panic or religious upheaval. Others argue that the phenomenon is too poorly understood to be responsibly disclosed in full.
While the administration maintains that declassification is under review, insiders suggest the scope of what will ultimately be released remains very much in flux.
Claims Of Demonic And Interdimentional Links
The controversy intensified after filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee, known for exploring UFO themes in his film God Versus Aliens, claimed that a Washington source had warned of ‘massive pushback’ within parts of the administration.
According to these claims, some Pentagon figures believe the UFO phenomenon may be linked not to extraterrestrials but to ‘interdimensional’ entities. For certain religious officials, that interpretation carries darker connotations, with fears that the phenomenon could be viewed as demonic.
Such concerns are said to be particularly sensitive among Evangelical communities, where concepts such as the rapture and end times prophecy remain influential. The idea that official confirmation of non-human intelligence might intersect with biblical interpretation has reportedly made some officials wary.
The term ‘interdimensional’ has also surfaced in discussions about unidentified aerial phenomena. Some sources allege that evidence suggests certain craft do not fit a simple extraterrestrial model. Trump himself has described the issue as ‘complex’, a remark now being re-examined in light of these reports.
What Will Actually Be Released
Despite the drama, insiders caution that any upcoming disclosure may be more limited than some enthusiasts expect.
A planned speech on 8 July 2026, marking the 79th anniversary of Roswell, is reportedly still on the calendar. However, sources suggest the focus will likely remain on more conventional sightings and previously acknowledged cases, such as military encounters with unusual craft.
More controversial aspects, including alleged interdimentional theories or programs exploring consciousness and psionics, may remain classified for now. Online commentators are already predicting that the public will see little beyond material similar to previously released Navy footage.
There is also debate about whether withholding information on religious grounds could raise constitutional concerns. Some critics argue that if officials are suppressing data because it intersects with beliefs about angels or demons, that could blur the line between state secrecy and religious influence.
A Press Conference And Growing Pressure
Fuel has been added to the fire by claims that a new insider is preparing to speak at a press conference in Washington on 1 May 2026. If that appearance goes ahead, it could increase pressure on the administration to clarify its position.
For now, the Pentagon insists it is reviewing material in line with presidential orders. Yet the reported internal resistance suggests that disclosure is not simply a matter of paperwork. It is a cultural and ideological battle as much as a bureaucratic one.
Fun fact — I’ve talked with Mark Christopher Lee, as he’s claimed that he has a source who will be accessing the Vatican’s secret library to investigate the 1933 Magenta, Italy files that my research partners and I have been locked onto for well almost three years now all around.
Carl Crusher of the Skinwalker Ranch crew has been posting some great videos about Disclosure the past few days, and really the past few months.
I’ve talked to Carl after he posted publicly that his grandfather in WWII was sent to check out the Baltic Sea Anomaly, which has been covered by Dennis Asberg and Beatriz Villarroel, and that his grandfather was then sent to check out the Magenta craft story in Italy in WWII.
Crusher was included in this conversation months ago with other Psionics months ago on the Good Trouble Show with Matt Ford Podcast:
Here’s Matt Ford interviewing Dennis Asberg and Beatriz Villarroel about the Baltic Sea Anomaly:
As Pavel reiterated from Jason Samosa’s excellent recent coverage, Fordham University seems to be part of the epicenter of the Collins Elite.
Samosa has been doing great work for a while, and recently he published a trilogy on the modern Disclosure movement starting with Obama after his re-election in 2013, starting here:
In Pavel’s coverage of the work of Samosa regarding the Collins Elite, Samosa brings up Fordham College, who are connected to the Knights of Malta and have posted plenty regarding that:
Texts from the Military Orders
The three principal military orders in the Holy Land included the Hospitallers, the Templars, and the Tuetonic Knights. Each order had its own history, structure and administrative system. Although many of the documents that remain from these powerful international organizations were written in Latin, many texts were also composed in French.
The Hospitallers, also known as the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, produced and maintained many texts in Old French, which were in turn housed in the various locations in the Latin East where the Order found its headquarters over the course of its long and troubled history. French played such an important role in Hospitaller culture that historian Anthony Luttrell characterized French as “the official language of the Hospital.” These texts, of multiple genres, included legislative documents produced for efficient functioning of the order (The Hospitaller Rule and subsequent changes to the Rule, esgarts, and usances), collections of diplomatic texts that establish rights and privileges accorded to the Order, and a body of texts translated into Old French from various languages for the use of members of the order. A few manuscripts also contain a compilation of many different kind of Hospitaller texts, all written in French, which attest to the breadth of functions that the French language served within the Hospitaller organization.
The central archives for the Hospitallers, which contained many diplomatic texts for the order, were moved from their initial repository in Jerusalem to Tyre (in 1187), to Acre (in 1191) in then to Cyprus (1291), Rhodes (1310), and finally to Malta (1530), with a large collection of charters sent to southern France in the late thirteenth century. From those moved to France, a number of them were sent the central archive in Malta in the eighteenth century, but never arrived.The perpatetic nature of the archives, therefore, does lead to some difficulties in pinpointing the locale of production for many of these French texts. These texts are cross-referenced on the corresponding pages when the locale of production is known.
Templar documents, on the other hand, are much more rare than their Hospitaller counterparts, due to the unfortunate loss of the Templar archives some time after the destruction of Acre in 1291 (for a discussion of this loss, see especially R. Hiestan, Archivalische Zeitschrift Zum Problem des Templerzentralarchivs, Bohlau Verlag, 1980.) However, a copy of Rule of the Templars in Old French does still exist, as do some Templar diplomatic texts that were culled from Hospitllar collections and from the collections of western archives.
The Teutonic Knights, also called the Order of the Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem, was a smaller organization than the two mentioned above, but also used French in certain diplomatic documents that originated from their order.
The list of Old French documents included here is not yet comprehensive; texts will be added as work continues. Please note that diplomatic texts from the Hosptiallers and Templars are listed on separate pages.
Bibliography
Jochen Burgtorf. The Central Convent of Hospitallers and Templars. History, Organization and Personnel, 1099/1120–1310. Leiden: Brill, 2008.
Johnathan Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, 1050–1310. London: Macmillan, 1967.
Anthony Luttrell, “The Hospitallers’ Historical Activities: 1291–1400,” Annales de l”ordre Souverin Militaire de Malte, XXIV. Rome, 1966, 126–9.
Ibid. “Fourteenth-Century Hospitaller Lawyers,” Traditio 21 (1965), 449–465.
Ibid.”The Hospitallers’ Early Written Records,”in The Crusades and their Sources: Essays presented to Bernard Hamilton,ed. J. France and W.G. Zajac, Aldershot, 1998, 135–54.https://history.blog.fordham.edu/?p=2743
Is the World Still Living in the Shadow of the Crusades?
The official website for BBC History Magazine interviewed our colleague, Prof. Nicholas Paul. Read Prof. Paul’s comments below:
Confronted with the message, propagated by both the European and Anglophone extreme right and Islamic jihadist groups, that we live in an age of renewed conflict between Islam and the west, many people may understandably conclude that we have inherited an ancient legacy of holy war. We have — though not in the way that many imagine.
The legacy of the crusades today is not due to the continuity over time of any medieval crusading institution. After all, the crusade indulgence offered by the church — a central element of the architecture of these holy wars — had effectively disappeared by the 17th century. Surviving crusading orders, such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, are now devoted to charitable work. And no modern state, whether in Spain, the Baltic or the eastern Mediterranean, can trace its origins to the ‘crusader states’ established by medieval conquests. Too much historical water — reformation, revolution, global exchange, the rise and fall of empires, the shock of modernity — has passed under the bridge for any modern community to still bear marks of crusading violence.
The legacy of the crusades is, nonetheless, powerful, primarily because of the passions and predilections of 19th- and 20th-century Europeans. They found in the crusades a useful past through which they sought to understand their own world of overseas empires, warring nations and rapid social change. These modern observers constructed a storehouse of popular images and stories — such as the epic encounter of Richard I and Saladin during the Third Crusade — and used them to make claims about morality and collective identity.
Western Europeans took these images and attitudes abroad — for example, in 1898, when Kaiser Wilhelm II re-enacted the conquest of Jerusalem and rebuilt Saladin’s tomb at Damascus, laying a gilt bronze wreath (later taken by TE Lawrence and now displayed in London’s Imperial War Museum). It was in this modern context that a new historical memory of the crusades was constructed — one that stripped away fundamental elements of crusading history and is easily co-opted by those who would make a ‘clash of civilisations’ seem habitual and inevitable.
That full conversation can be found here:
Is the world still living in the shadow of the crusades?
For several centuries in the Middle Ages, Christians waged a ‘holy war’ aiming in part — ostensibly, at least — to liberate the Holy Land. Six experts discuss the question, and whether those events, recreated in books, films and firebrand speeches, continue to affect lives and politics in the region and around the globe today.
Suleiman A Mourad: “We invoke the crusades because we want to believe that the past determines the present”
Do we live in the shadow of the crusades? This question suggests a passive role on our part, as if what happened back then explains what happens now. But history is often shaped by what we choose to remember, why and how. History is about the way the present writes the past.
The history of the crusades is told invariably as a savage, religiously inspired clash of civilisations between medieval European Christians and oriental Muslims. We think that this explains (at least in part) modern violence and the political tension between the west and Muslim countries, linking it to what happened centuries ago between the crusaders and the Muslims.
Some do this by habit, others by connivance. Irrespective of motives, our tendency is to stereotype the present and the past, and to reject their complexity. Indeed, when British General Edmund Allenby entered Jerusalem in 1917, following the defeat of the Ottoman army in southern Palestine, the British media compared him to Richard the Lionheart. When French General Henri Gouraud captured Damascus in 1920, following the French army’s crushing defeat of Arab nationalists, he reputedly stood in front of Saladin’s grave and orated: “Awake, Saladin — we have returned!” Meanwhile, the US wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are often denounced by Muslim politicians as crusader invasions.
We invoke the crusades because we want to believe that the past determines the present — that these are but different chapters in the same ongoing conflict — and that many people are adamant that old scores must be settled.
What gets lost in this modern exploitation of crusader history is its complex reality. That period of the Middle Ages witnessed a lot of violence, but also countless cases of cooperation, political and military alliance, exchange of goods and science, and forms of religious tolerance between Muslims and crusaders. When the modern history of the crusades was written, starting in the 19th century, scholars were drawn to its violence. They ignored the other evidence because they found no use for it. When we do, though, the history of the crusades will be written differently.
More like this
Suleiman A Mourad is historian of Islam and professor of religion at Smith College, Massachusetts, and associate fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study, France
Helen Nicholson: “We still live with many of the developments encouraged by the crusades: state taxation, magnificent castles, charitable work”
We are still living with the constructed memory of the crusades, and with the mindset that prompted them. Populist religious and national leaders construct myths around the crusades to promote their religious or political agendas, urging their followers to avenge the crusades or to continue in the footsteps of the crusades.
In addition, the word ‘crusade’ has come to mean any struggle against moral wrong — so we have a crusade against drug abuse, or a crusade against poverty. The human urge to intervene on the side of moral good in order to destroy evil still prompts individuals to join great undertakings couched in moral terms, such as the thousands who travelled from Britain in the 1930s to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, or the young people who joined the so-called Islamic State in Syria.
But were the original crusades a moral battle against evil? Not really. The First Crusade began in 1095 with the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos’s plans to recover territory lost over the previous 20 years to the Seljuq Turks. It evolved into a Frankish-Norman expedition to capture Jerusalem, which had changed hands four times in the preceding three decades. So were the crusades really about controlling land?
By the late 14th century, crusades focused on halting the Ottoman advance into the Balkans — suggesting that the crusades were about defence against an apparently unstoppable enemy. We could compare the crusades to Nato, since crusades involved the co-operation of many nations in an operation of mutual benefit. We could also compare the crusades to the United Nations’ peacekeeping operations, because most Crusades were promoted by the Latin Church, a supra-national organisation. But these comparisons quickly break down under scrutiny.
It would be truer to say that we still live with many of the developments encouraged by the crusades: systems of state taxation, magnificent castles, and the kind of services performed by the likes of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, now the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, which undertakes charitable work around the world.
Helen Nicholson is professor of medieval history at Cardiff University
German Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem, 1898. During this visit he re-enacted the conquest of the city — an example of western European powers co-opting images and stories to consolidate collective identities. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Rebecca Rist: “Many Muslims do not view the crusades, which they believe they won, as markedly special events”
In the modern era, western nations have often looked back with enthusiasm to the crusades, and crusading language has been used by many politicians and movements to justify their actions. In the 17th century, Louis Maimbourg’s History of the Crusades (1675) was used as propaganda for the persecution of Protestants in France during the reign of Louis XIV. In the 19th century, European powers used pseudo-crusading and para-crusading rhetoric to justify their imperial and colonial wars.
In the 20th century, crusades were depicted in political cartoons during the First World War. Crusade rhetoric was also a key feature of America’s Cold War discourse, as employed by presidents Harry S Truman and Dwight D Eisenhower when collaborating with Pius XII (1939–58) to denounce the evils of Stalin and Soviet rule.
More recently, certain American movements — for the abolition of slavery, the war against Mormon polygamy, the prohibition of alcohol, and the civil rights movement headed by Martin Luther King — have been cited as examples of modern crusades.
The word ‘crusade’, then, continues to be used to denote a cause which people believe in strongly such as for human rights or against illegal practices. Yet almost all medieval crusades (except the first) were ultimately failures, unsuccessful in retaking Jerusalem or maintaining the crusader states. In the 19th century, the west’s increasing hegemony — seen in the colonialism, imperialism and trade of that era — began to appear to the Islamic world as an attempt to more than compensate for the failures of medieval crusades. For that reason, and others, the crusades continue to affect how the east views the west today.
Yet many Muslims do not view the crusades, which they believe they won, as markedly special events, since Islam and Christianity have frequently been at odds since the seventh century — long before the First Crusade (1095–99). Hence the crusades are, rather, just one expression of a long-standing rivalry between east and west, Muslim and Christian. It is that legacy with which we are still living today.
Rebecca Rist is professor in medieval history at the University of Reading, and author of Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245 (Continuum, 2009)
Nicholas Paul: “The crusades’ legacy is powerful because of the predilections of 19th- and 20th-century Europeans”
Confronted with the message, propagated by both the European and Anglophone extreme right and Islamic jihadist groups, that we live in an age of renewed conflict between Islam and the west, many people may understandably conclude that we have inherited an ancient legacy of holy war. We have — though not in the way that many imagine.
The legacy of the crusades today is not due to the continuity over time of any medieval crusading institution. After all, the crusade indulgence offered by the church — a central element of the architecture of these holy wars — had effectively disappeared by the 17th century. Surviving crusading orders, such as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, are now devoted to charitable work. And no modern state, whether in Spain, the Baltic or the eastern Mediterranean, can trace its origins to the ‘crusader states’ established by medieval conquests. Too much historical water — reformation, revolution, global exchange, the rise and fall of empires, the shock of modernity — has passed under the bridge for any modern community to still bear marks of crusading violence.
The legacy of the crusades is, nonetheless, powerful, primarily because of the passions and predilections of 19th- and 20th-century Europeans. They found in the crusades a useful past through which they sought to understand their own world of overseas empires, warring nations and rapid social change. These modern observers constructed a storehouse of popular images and stories — such as the epic encounter of Richard I and Saladin during the Third Crusade — and used them to make claims about morality and collective identity.
Western Europeans took these images and attitudes abroad — for example, in 1898, when Kaiser Wilhelm II re-enacted the conquest of Jerusalem and rebuilt Saladin’s tomb at Damascus, laying a gilt bronze wreath (later taken by TE Lawrence and now displayed in London’s Imperial War Museum). It was in this modern context that a new historical memory of the crusades was constructed — one that stripped away fundamental elements of crusading history and is easily co-opted by those who would make a ‘clash of civilisations’ seem habitual and inevitable.
Nicholas Paul is associate professor of history at Fordham University, New York, and co-editor of Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past? (Fordham University Press, 2019)
Christopher Tyerman: “The crusades were fought from religious conviction and material advantage relevant to their time and place, not ours”
The question assumes contemporary currency of ‘the crusades’, from its use in Islamist propaganda, to etiolated intellectual debate on a supposed clash of civilisations, to English soccer fans cheerfully dressing up as crusader warriors. Exactly who is ‘still living in the shadow of the crusades’? Distanced western academics? Self-imagined heirs of victims?
The historical crusades were not homogeneous. They affected many communities and regions very differently, from the foundation of Prussia, the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christian schism, attacks on European Jewry and the Spanish nationalist myth of the Reconquista, to the transient and peripheral occupation of parts of Syria and Palestine.
The crusades did not create western imperialism or the state of Israel. Wars fought by populist adherence to an ideological or religious ideology may excite modern recognition of a cause — God Wills It! — at once unprovable and unanswerable, but their legacies are imaginative and sentimental.
The 19th-century coincidence of romantic medievalism, Christian mission and the global spread of European empires revived and invented memories of crusading, providing spurious arguments for French and British involvement in north Africa and western Asia. Western proclamation of crusading precedents informed the counter-ideologies of indigenous regional resistance to foreign intervention. Citing historical precedent is often a sign of historical ignorance. Ironically, the bogus ‘West is Best’ neo-imperialist clash-of-civilisation construct encourages its corresponding jihadist twin.
The crusades were fought from religious conviction and material advantage relevant to their time and place, not ours, examples of political and cultural contact as much as of contest and conquest. Their continued legacy derives from pilfering a crude vision of the past to justify contemporary conflict or victimhood. The modern near east is not a product of medieval wars, yet the shadow of the crusades lies across the rhetoric of polemicists. In so far as this influences popular beliefs, the legacy is real; in so far as it claims to represent historical continuity, it is not.
Christopher Tyerman is professor of the history of the crusades at Hertford College, University of Oxford
Susanna A Throop: “The crusades popularised specific narratives and key ideas that remain present in western cultures”
There are many legacies of the crusades, and they are disputed. In 2019, actors worldwide are calling for violence framed as either an extension of or a defence against the crusades. These appeals — and the disputes surrounding them — are highly visible in our news cycles.
It is easy to dismiss such calls to violence as historical appropriation or myth-making. Certainly, historical accuracy is not the main priority of those referencing the crusades. But in using the crusades to claim political power, territory and a righteous obligation to be violent, modern actors are doing what many others, including various religious groups and modern nation-states, have done for centuries.
- Read more | How to lead like Saladin
At least two basic narrative structures of crusading remain in use. The first is the story of a divinely willed victory that results in both individual salvation and the profitable expansion of ‘Christendom’ such as we see in descriptions of the Latin Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099. The second is the story of a holy and heroic defeat, in which righteous warriors lose the battle but nonetheless win eternal salvation and earthly renown.
Underlying both these narrative structures are several key ideas: that violence on behalf of God is spiritually beneficial both for the individual and for the larger group of which they are a part; that divine will is manifest in the world, and thus crusading victory demonstrates righteousness while crusading defeat urges redoubled effort; and that there is a connection between holy violence and the assertion of group identity.
These narratives and ideas emphatically did not originate with the crusading movement; they can be identified much earlier in the history of Christianity. However, the many centuries of the crusading movement and historical work thereafter consolidated and reiterated them with vivid imagery, legends and traditions. As a result, the history of the crusades has become a ubiquitous part of the western cultural background, referenced in flags, art, family histories, athletics teams and even in the brands of companies and organisations that seem entirely unrelated. In political discourse, the history of the crusades has long been used to support or contest western nationalism and imperialism. The cultural legacy of the crusades is not only visible in the polemics of violent extremists; it surrounds us.
Susanna A Throop is associate professor of history at Ursinus College, Pennsylvania, and author of The Crusades: An Epitome (Kismet, 2018)
This article was first published in issue 16 of BBC World Histories magazine
Ending this here how. Thanks for reading.
