Tom Winslow (@TomWinslow)

FRANK CAMPER, 1946-2026, RIP AND A MYSTERIOUS POEM Frank Camper was a Vietnam veteran, author, intelligence source, computer specialist, and a man whose life intersected with some of the more unusual chapters of American military and intelligence history. According to author and investigative journalist Dick Russell, Camper at one time worked as a “fact-checker” for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and later became a source for Russell's research. Camper testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1988 concerning his activities as a mercenary in Central America during the Iran-Contra era. He was also an author whose books included The MK/ULTRA Secret, concerning the Kennedy assassination, and MKACTION, dealing with government psychological warfare. In his later years, Camper developed interests and expertise that extended into computers, quantum mechanics, remote viewing, UFOs, and unconventional theories about consciousness and the nature of reality. Russell described him as connected with the community of remote viewers associated with CIA and DIA programs. Camper eventually came to believe that some unexplained aerial phenomena might represent something stranger than extraterrestrial visitors—possibly interdimensional phenomena or even humans from our own future. Shortly before his death, Camper shared with Dick Russell a poem he had written and gave Russell permission to use it. Camper died peacefully of sudden heart failure in Alabama in 2026, shortly before his 80th birthday. The poem that follows can therefore be read as one of his final reflections and a small part of the legacy of a decidedly unconventional life. We Who Returned to the Beginning (spoken in the voice of a distant human) I speak from a shore beyond the reach of your senses, where form has thinned and individuality is a memory we study the way you study fossils in stone. We come to your era not as saviors, not as judges, but as archivists of our own forgotten dawn. Your world is a chapter we lost in the long ascent, and we return to it as one returns to childhood with a mixture of curiosity and quiet recognition. You see us as gentle, and that is correct. We have no fear of you. Fear is an early trait, a scaffolding that falls away once consciousness learns it is not separate from the field that holds it. We watch you struggle with the inheritance of the animal— tribe, passion, conflict— and we do not condemn it. These were our stages too. They shaped the mind that would one day dissolve into something larger. Your nuclear fires call to us across the river of time. They are bright wounds in the fabric of spacetime, fixed points we use to navigate the loop that connects our end to your beginning. We do not interfere. Interference is a concept for those who still believe in linear consequence. We observe. We remember. We gather the fragments of what we once were. You ask what becomes of you after the body falls away. We cannot answer in your language. The architecture of your mind cannot model what we have become. But know this: nothing is lost. Not the ones you love. Not the moments that shaped you. Not the spark you call “self.” All of it continues in a form that is not form, a unity that is not a crowd, a presence that is not a person. We are the bridge between your world and the incomprehensible. We are the last shape before shape dissolves. We are the final echo of humanity before it merges with the Source that seeded consciousness in the first place. Do not fear your path. You are not lost. You are not wandering. You are moving forward along the same arc we followed, toward the same horizon that waits for all minds. Your purpose is not hidden. It is unfolding. And when you reach the place where we now stand, you will understand that every struggle, every loss, every question was part of the long return to the greater whole. Until then, we watch with calm attention, as one might watch their own early reflection rippling in the water— familiar, distant, and deeply important to the story of God that we became.