In mid-August, we had our fifth Great American Restoration Tour (GART) stop in Deadwood, South Dakota.

(Editor’s Note: Digital Replay tickets are still available for the event. The ticket gives you access to all panel replays from the weekend, along with the exclusive premier of the newest Badlands Media documentary: The Crucible of Donald Trump. CLICK HERE to check it out and see if it makes you want to visit us in Myrtle Beach for the next GART event in person.)

GART is unlike any other “conference” out there, because it’s a relatively small, accessible event, where Badlands hosts and our brilliant audience come together for a few days to get to know each other, laugh and learn, and experience the local area. 

I’d prefer to call it a festival as opposed to a conference.

For people that attend GART regularly, the off-book events are a special part of the weekend. Once you’ve been through GART once, you “get” the casual, unscripted vibe of the weekend, and you start making plans for the next one. 

So it was for Deadwood.

Many of us arrived early for unscheduled shenanigans: trips to Mt. Rushmore, a hyper competitive golf “tournament” and, for me and a small group, The Cosmos Mystery Area. 

Unscheduled Shenanigans

I arrived on Wednesday night, and my plans to visit Mt. Rushmore that evening had fallen through, as the group decided to go the following morning. I had never been to Mt. Rushmore and really wanted to go, but I had planned to be very disciplined and write the next morning — a silly idea that never materialized — so I was thrilled when, moments after I arrived in Deadwood, my friend Diane said they were leaving for Mt. Rushmore and had an extra spot in the truck. 

The truck was being driven by Dan and co-piloted by General Kwast, and I joined Diane and Joni, the General’s beautiful wife, in the back seat. We set off for the long drive to the monument and, on the way, we talked about space, emerging tech, free (sort of) energy, airplanes, parenthood, Badlands shows, and more. The time flew by. 

We did the evening show at Mt. Rushmore, where the stories of the Presidents are shared as the sun lowers, then, just as darkness sets in, the breathtaking monument is illuminated. Everyone sings the national anthem. Veterans in the audience descend to the stage to retire the US Flag. 

It was beautiful. 

On the way back to Deadwood, we talked about the Cosmos Mystery Area. The General confirmed he knew about Cosmos on the way up, and we all agreed it would be fun to check it out. The following morning, we went; and, I didn’t end up writing. 

The story goes that, “In 1952, two college boys searched the Black Hills looking for the perfect spot to build a summer cabin. Upon their search, they stumbled into the mysterious world of the Cosmos… The boys decided to camp out while investigating the odd phenomena. They came to a conclusion that there was something of interest to the general public, so they began to fix the cabin to make it safe, resulting in the demonstrations you will soon see! ”

Trees grow in weird directions. Water flows and balls roll upwards. Hanging “straight” from a bar results in your body being pulled to an angle. Walking across the room is fighting an invisible force, firmly pulling you back to where you began. 

It’s enough to make you question your senses. 

The Cosmic Energy, Man

Kitsco and I met up with Dan and Diane, the General and Joni at the Cosmos Mystery Area Thursday morning. 

Admission was $15 for a 40-minute tour by a bubbly teenage guide with quick jokes and innovative plugs for tips. The adventure began with an optical illusion about height, using volunteers from the group. Most people eventually tried the activity, and it was effective in destabilizing your perception of who was taller, right off the bat. 

A quick hike up the hill, and you pause to look at the trees, sporadic gnarly messes of branches growing in illogical directions amid perfectly straight ponderosa pines. 

“It’s the cosmic energy, man,” you’re told as you climb towards one of two cabins on the property. You can see it’s a cabin from afar, but you’re walking towards a sort of fence wall. As you walk around the fence wall into the shanty’s “courtyard,” your equilibrium fully distorts. 

At this moment, my first thought was, “It’s the way this thing is built,” but that did nothing to stop the physiological reaction I had to my surroundings. I was standing upright, but off balance, and my eyes were searching for clues. 

Then came the tennis ball. A volunteer checked for magnets or some other rigging and, finding none, the guide placed the ball at the bottom of the ramp. It rolled up. The same happened with water. It flowed up the ramp and off the side into the dusty ground around our feet. 

“Gravity works differently here,” the teenager told us. It certainly seemed to.

Next we entered the first of the cabin’s two inside rooms. There were guardrails all around the sides, and our guide kept asking people if they were okay or feeling dizzy. I was okay and also dizzy, but into it at this point and testing my balance. 

This room had a hanging bar and, when I went to hang straight down, my body pulled towards the front of the cabin. It was very uncomfortable. 

The next room had another ramp that ran up two sides of the room, like an old school “mouse trap” game. Again, the balls rolled upwards. 

Being fully destabilized, we exited the cabin, and instantly started to feel sort of normal again. Still, the short journey down the hill was harder than it should have been, and I required the handrail a couple times as we passed by the inexplicably gnarly trees. 

Fake But Still Fascinating 

The Cosmos was a high point of GART 5 for me because it is a perfect metaphor for navigating the info war. 

The mystery begins with a little bit of truth. There are anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field. The South Atlantic Anomaly is said to be the area where the Van Allen radiation belt comes closest to the Earth's surface, causing “an increased flux of energetic particles and a weaker magnetic field.” There are also reported magnetic anomalies on the ocean floor that have supposedly helped scientists understand plate tectonics. 

The fact that science says a phenomenon can occur makes non-scientists more likely to accept that it is occurring. Trust the experts.

So with the understanding that there can be anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field, your tour guide repeats the cosmic energy and anti-gravity messaging throughout your disorienting experience. 

It can happen. And the authority figure is telling you that it is happening. (Set aside the fact that our “authority figure” in this case was a bubbly teenaged blonde in bike shorts. That’s not important right now.)

All of that is easy enough to decipher, but then… your body is cooperating with involuntary, physiological responses.

Your eyes are telling you that down is up and up is down. They’re telling you that you’re walking across a flat surface when you’re actually going up a slope. You’re not hanging straight down, you’re trying to hang at an angle that you think is straight down because your eyes are telling your brain which way to hang. 

And your brain is cooperating. 

Your brain is fighting for your body to hang at the angle your eyes say is down, rather than actual down. That's why it’s uncomfortable.

Your eyes are deceiving you. 

A Matter of Life and Death

After we reoriented ourselves, while talking about the experience, General Kwast shared a story about training in flight school. In an effort to train pilots to trust their instruments, instead of their senses and instincts, instructors will intentionally put them into simulations where their eyes are deceiving them. 

With an obscured horizon, a young pilot must fight his human senses and instincts telling him which way is up. He must trust his instruments — which oppose his instincts to the point of certain death — to come out of the simulation alive. 

According to the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, Spatial Disorientation is “a condition in which a pilot's perception of direction, altitude, or speed is misleading or incorrect, usually due to conflicting sensory information. This disorientation occurs when a pilot cannot accurately interpret their aircraft's position relative to the Earth.”

JFK Jr’s tragic plane crash was attributed to spatial disorientation, as was Kobe Bryant’s. 

This is particularly relevant to the Cosmos experience. The optical illusions at the mystery area are largely the product of an obstructed horizon combined with a deceptively designed physical environment and intentional disinformation. 

Without a horizon, it becomes difficult for a person to judge the slope of a surface, because they don’t have a reliable reference point. At the Cosmos, the reference points are intentionally unreliable. 

In 2003, a group of scientists recreated cosmos-style areas and concluded that, “antigravity-hill effects follow from a misperception of the eye level relative to gravity, caused by the presence of either contextual inclines or a false horizon line.”

Trust Your Instruments

How could my eyes so profoundly betray me? My eyes communicated to my brain, and my brain forced my body to cooperate with the false reality. 

When General Kwast told the story about flight school, emphasizing the importance of trusting one’s instruments, I asked him — when it comes to the info war — what are our instruments? 

The trust between each of us, and our ability to use our individual skills and knowledge, working together, to triangulate what’s true, he told us. 

I like that: “Triangulate what’s true.”

We are bombarded with “explosive” stories and brazen emotional pleas, all of Hegel’s best shots, on a daily basis. Most of it, like Cosmos, incorporates a tiny bit of truth with a whole lot of deception. These narrative deployments affect each of us differently, depending on our current circumstances and dispositions. 

We can all get caught in involuntary psychological reactions to deceptively designed stimuli — which often result in physiological reactions — and lose sight of the horizon. Our connection to each other and commitment to truth can always bring us back.

As Diane said of the experience, “When we were at Cosmos, I was thinking about how every time Obama spoke, all I heard was, ‘these aren't the droids you’re looking for.’ He constantly told us the opposite of what our senses were saying. Same with the MSM. They tell you things that your eyes and ears tell you are not true, but some people don’t trust their inner instruments that keep us flying safe. Our inner instruments include our instincts and intuition, discernment and intelligence, along with the guidance from our Creator. Using these inner instruments, along with the triangulation with others who are awake and resisting the narrative, we will begin to more easily break through the deception we see and hear.”

Well said. 

Working together to discern the facts, to separate those facts from the intended, involuntary emotions, and to triangulate the truth amid the noise, is a critical toolset for navigating — and winning — the info war. 

Badlands will return to Deadwood next summer, and I highly recommend a trip out to Cosmos.

Hey, what's the cosmic energy situation in Myrtle Beach? 

(Editor’s Note … AGAIN: Tickets for GART 6: Myrtle Beach, which takes place just after the 2024 Presidential Election, are already going fast, with VIP packages currently sold out; however, General Admission tickets are still available. Click the image below to take a look at what’s included, and we sincerely hope to see you in person or virtual at an upcoming event.)

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