On the very day the second HNA article was published , I found Werner Altnickel’s phone number online —he was the Greenpeace activist featured in the TV report. I spoke with him on the phone for two hours, and afterward I had even more questions than before. Werner didn’t just talk about chemtrails, but also about many other topics I’d never heard of or thought about before. After the call, I didn’t know how to make sense of what I’d just heard. Today I know that he was right about everything he told me back then.

Based on this experience, I can now relate fairly well to the average person who has spent their entire life consuming almost nothing but mainstream media propaganda. How could someone like that react to the things a supposed “conspiracy theorist” puts in front of them with anything other than rejection? They don’t know what you’re talking about because they’ve never heard of it before. They can’t assess whether the information presented to them is valid—and what’s more, it threatens their comfort zone. Most people are not receptive to new ideas anyway, especially not when those ideas could have negative consequences for their own worldview or way of life.

Through Hollywood and constant media coverage, the average person has learned that anyone who does not share the system’s opinion is either a madman or a Nazi—and you can’t argue with people like that anyway. This fact shows me just how perfectly this system is structured. It’s practically indestructible. It would only become vulnerable if the system were to lose control of the media—and that will never happen.

The CDs that Werner Altnickel promised to send me never arrived. And yet my path continued.

Through the HNA forum, I was suddenly contacted by someone I now consider my best friend: He was studying abroad at the time and had already had his “aha” moment a few years earlier. Since he regularly followed the discussions on the HNA forum, he came across my post and wrote to me: “I know someone who can explain everything to you.” I was given a phone number in Kassel. When I called it, a deep, husky voice answered—one that didn’t inspire much trust, but still stirred something inside me. The words were clear: “If you really want to know how the world works—and how we’re all being duped—then come see me. I can show you everything.”

I remember exactly how I gave my girlfriend at the time the address I was supposed to drive to. I told her: “If you don’t hear from me within the next five hours, call the police andgive them this address.” My gut instinct warned me, but my curiosity was stronger.

When the door opened, there stood a man about 1.70 m tall, in his mid-fifties, with gray hair and a beer belly—enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke that drifted straight toward me and into the stairwell. To my great relief, the man didn’t seem particularly threatening, so I went inside.

What followed would change my life. I spent six hours with Wolfgang in front of his computer while he showed me a flood of images: company logos with pyramids and the all-seeing eye, buildings with Masonic symbolism, explanations of the 33 degrees of Freemasonry, alternative theories about the 9/11 attacks, the idea that there’s a secret power behind the scenes controlling all world events, and much more. What did all this have to do with chemtrails? From my perspective at the time, not much. Twenty years later: a great deal.

As I walked home after that meeting, my head was spinning with all the information. I felt as if a dam had burst in my mind—and I asked myself, “What if this man is right about everything?”

If even a fraction of what he had just shown and told me were true, I would have to radically change my life. In the months that followed, I started reading books, began listening to Alexander Benesch’s “Infokrieg” radio show, regularly read Freeman’s ASR blog, and, of course, eventually—around 2010—ended up on Eichelburg’s hartgeld.com.This was at a time when the awareness movement, or alternative media, was just spilling over into Germany from the English-speaking world, which back then mainly consisted of Alex Jones and David Icke, and the first websites were emerging here that reported on topics far removed from the mainstream.