Tony Rodrigues

Tony Rodrigues is an American secret space program (SSP) experiencer, author, and remote-viewing practitioner who claims to have spent approximately 13 years as a slave laborer and eventually cargo engineer aboard Dark Fleet merchant vessels allegedly based at Ceres, the asteroid-belt dwarf planet, following what he describes as an earlier period of trafficking through a sequence of terrestrial settings. He has documented his alleged experiences in three books: Ceres Colony Cavalier (2021), Project Star Maker (2023), and Beyond Sight. He went public with his testimony in 2016, and since then has worked with thousands of people who believe they had similar experiences, charging for consultations to manage the volume of contact. Because the account rests almost entirely on Rodrigues's own testimony — most of it absent from his conscious recall until 2015, then reconstructed as fragmentary memories coalesced after he encountered other twenty-and-back accounts — and because he says the service left no record in his organic timeline, the case is difficult to check against anything outside his telling: supporters read it as suppressed trauma-conditioned memory restored to a genuine SSP survivor, while critics read it as confabulation assembled from a shared milieu of identical stories.

Background

Rodrigues was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and grew up in the state. He deliberately avoids watching other SSP witnesses' interviews to prevent contamination of his own account: "I've got to keep my information as organic as possible without blending it with other people that have stepped forward." He is a father of three daughters and believes his middle daughter experienced an abduction event around age twelve similar to his own alleged experience at age ten.

Claimed secret space program service

The service described below is documented almost wholly through Rodrigues's own recovered testimony, with the events said to have occurred in a cloned or transferred body that left his organic timeline unmarked; supporters read the absence of an external paper trail as the expected residue of a clandestine twenty-and-back program operating off the books, while critics read the same absence, combined with memories that surfaced only after Rodrigues encountered other contactees' accounts, as a sign that the narrative was constructed rather than recalled. The individual claims are best weighed against that shared backdrop. Between 1982 and the early 2000s, Rodrigues reportedly served an approximately 30-year twenty-and-back tour — nested with an intercalated ten-year extragalactic assignment — encompassing a classified remote viewing research program at Inyokern, operational remote-viewing work in Peru, approximately 13 years of labor at Ceres under the Dark Fleet and Ceres Colony Corporation, and a ten-year star-building assignment in the vicinity of the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy. Rodrigues allegedly experienced the entire sequence in a cloned body while his organic body remained on Earth, returning to ordinary life with memories intact after a Dark Fleet captain deleted his personnel file, thereby frustrating the standard memory-erasure procedure. He went public with the account in 2016 and documented the service across three books: Ceres Colony Cavalier (2021), Project Star Maker (2023), and Beyond Sight.

1982 abduction and initial conditioning (Michigan)

Rodrigues reports being taken on Thursday, April 15, 1982, at age ten, and returned to his bedroom by Friday morning, April 16 — though he subjectively experienced the intervening period as approximately twelve years, with no recall of the events between those two dates. He identifies the abduction date by corroborating documentary evidence: school records placing him at a science fair that same week, weather reports matching his memories of the cold and snow, and a photograph his father took of him playing in mud puddles the following weekend that appears at the end of Ceres Colony Cavalier. Rodrigues himself dates the recovery of the abduction narrative to 2015, more than three decades later: he says he had retained only fragmentary, dream-like impressions he repeatedly dismissed as an "elaborate dream," and that they cohered into a continuous account only after he obtained an MRI scan and watched Randy Cramer's twenty-and-back interviews, at which point the fragments "came together and began to coalesce." Supporters read the dated records as objective anchors fixing a real event in time and read the late recovery as the lifting of a deliberate memory block; critics, resting on the same admission, read it as the hallmark of confabulation — the verifiable details (a science fair, cold weather, a childhood photograph) being mundane and independently available, the twelve-year ordeal between them surfacing only after Rodrigues had absorbed a ready-made interpretive template from another witness's account.

The alleged abductors were a Gray and a short reptilian, who reportedly transported him to a medical facility where Grays performed tests and took genetic samples. The Grays allegedly communicated telepathically, confirmed he had the required genetics, and asked if he would participate; Rodrigues states he gave his consent after being told he would be back the next day and would not miss any time.

Rodrigues's description of the mechanism for the 20-and-back program centers on cloning: operators allegedly extracted his consciousness through a needle inserted in the tear duct of his dominant eye — a procedure that felt "like being punched in the eye" — and transferred it into a clone body that had no prior memories (a blank slate), leaving his organic body in Michigan while the clone body was sent to work programs. When the program concluded, the clone reportedly died and his consciousness returned to his organic body, which had continued aging normally in the meantime.

He describes the twelve-year signature as a recurring forensic marker he uses in consultations: he identifies cases by asking when a person's life changed dramatically for the worse, then adding twelve years to check whether the person reports an equally sudden, unexplained improvement around that later date. He states this pattern has held in thousands of individual consultations. Supporters take the consistency of the marker across thousands of cases as independent statistical corroboration that a real program leaves a detectable signature; critics, working from the same description, note that the test is administered by Rodrigues to people who have already sought him out believing themselves abducted, and that a span as broad as a downturn followed by an upturn twelve years on can be found in most lives — so that the "thousands" of confirmations function less as outside verification than as a population of fellow experiencers cued by the same template that shaped Rodrigues's own recovered account. He attributes to the program the capacity to erase abductees' memories of what occurred, but not the first ten to twelve minutes of the initial contact, which most people retain as a fragmentary abduction memory.

Rodrigues states that the program targets children with high IQ and specific genetics — what he calls "talented and gifted" children — and that the genetic threshold is heritable, causing the program to run generationally through families once a subject has been enrolled. He connects this identification pathway to his own enrollment in a Talented and Gifted school program as a child, where he encountered a classmate who arrived by limousine daily and whose father — who later judged Rodrigues's science fair project — pointed him out; Rodrigues states his first abduction occurred that same night. He believes his own middle daughter experienced a similar abduction event around age twelve.

Remote-viewing research program (Inyokern, 1982)

Rodrigues states that his SSP involvement began through a classified remote-viewing research program at Inyokern, California, adjacent to China Lake, in April 1982, into which he was abducted as a child. The program reportedly sat between Project Grill Flame and the subsequent Project Center Lane (which began January 1, 1983) and remained classified at a higher level than the official Grill Flame effort. The program allegedly used near-death experiences induced by oxygen deprivation — lowering oxygen in a sealed room until the subject lost consciousness, then reviving them — as a method to enhance psychic output. Rodrigues recalls progressively deeper NDE states across repeated sessions before ultimately manifesting a psychokinetic effect (lights flickering when he spoke) that terminated the NDE phase of the program.

After the NDE phase ended, subjects were reportedly drugged — administered an anesthetic to induce unconsciousness — and would wake hours later with no memory of the session. Rodrigues covers this period in his book Project Star Maker.

His Inyokern training was corroborated, in his account, when he visited the site in person and physically identified the buildings he remembered without having previously located them on Google Earth or satellite maps. Supporters present the recognition as a successful blind test — a man identifying structures he could only have seen during a secret childhood program; critics observe that the corroboration is established entirely by Rodrigues's own report of his own recognition, that Inyokern's airfield buildings are publicly visible to any visitor, and that a memory which itself coalesced only after exposure to other accounts cannot serve as the independent check its match to the site would require. The visit also prompted him to uncover approximately 30–40 declassified CIA documents relating to Project Grill Flame, including research into remote-viewing countermeasures and the use of extremely low-frequency (5–8 Hz) signals as potential blocking mechanisms.

Operational deployment (Peru)

Following his Inyokern training, Rodrigues was reportedly reassigned to Peru, where he was used as an operational remote viewer for tracking cocaine shipments in South America. He states that the drug ketamine was used to induce the remote-viewing states during this phase, a method he connects to contemporaneous Army research into ketamine's prophetic side-effects during field surgeries in Vietnam. Rodrigues has also stated that during the Peru phase the same drug-induced altered states were the context for near-death experiences that left him, in a persistent state, able to perceive information he would not normally access — a dynamic his editor and co-author Jackie Kenner, a psychic medium, later recognized when he described the Peru flights to her.

During his time in Peru, Rodrigues says he was known in the town as a kind of warlock figure — the children kept away from him and the townspeople regarded him with a mix of fear and fascination. He describes missing that community for the rest of his twenty years in the program and continuing to miss it after his return.

C-46 Commando corroboration

In the course of researching his testimony, Rodrigues established contact with Peruvian Air Force veterans through a Spanish-language UFO podcast. One of those veterans, Julio, a former Air Force pilot who took part in the 1990 War on Drugs raids in the Madre de Dios region, recalled that C-46 Commando aircraft were confiscated in Puerto Maldonado during those raids. Rodrigues had previously placed himself in a C-46 Commando during his Peru years — specifically naming that aircraft make on record in interviews as early as 2017–2018 — and, during a Zoom call, used Google Earth to locate what appeared to be those confiscated planes at Puerto Maldonado airport. A contact then traveled to the site and visually confirmed the aircraft. Rodrigues presents this as corroborating evidence that he was in fact in that region during that period, since he has no record of ever traveling to Peru in his organic timeline. Supporters treat this as the account's nearest approach to a checkable "paper trail" — Rodrigues naming an unusual aircraft type years before a Peruvian veteran independently confirmed that such planes were seized at that location and date. Critics, weighing the same sequence, note that the C-46 was a widely used cargo aircraft across Cold War-era South America, that the confirmation was sought and assembled by Rodrigues and his own contacts rather than by a disinterested party, and that an aircraft model recalled in advance and later matched to publicly photographable wrecks is also exactly what a researched or retrofitted detail would produce; on the harsher reading the episode is a staged corroboration rather than a hoax in the ordinary sense, since Rodrigues advances it sincerely as part of memory he believes genuine.

Transfer to Ceres and Dark Fleet service

Main articles:

Dark Fleet operations on Ceres

,

Ceres Colony Corporation

, and

Dark Fleet

Rodrigues alleges that, after his Peru phase, he was transported to the back side of the Moon before being assigned to the Dark Fleet colony at Ceres; he describes waking "on a flight to the back of the moon." He reportedly served aboard a Dark Fleet merchant vessel at Ceres as a cargo engineer — his highest rank — for approximately 13 years. The "breakaway German" operators allegedly traced their cultural lineage to the Thirty Years' War and took orders from a Draco base near Jupiter and an Antarctic "High Command." The total slave population at Ceres was approximately 225,000, according to Rodrigues. Two other non-human species were reportedly present alongside the Germans, including a tall species he calls the "Altrundle."

Rodrigues described personally witnessing the Occator Crater salt geyser — erupting every six to nine years to approximately 11–12 km altitude — in a 2016 disclosure, before NASA's Dawn probe confirmed in 2020 that the bright spots are brine-salt deposits from a subsurface ocean, corroborating his description. Supporters regard this as a dated prediction borne out by later spacecraft data — knowledge of Ceres's salt chemistry that Rodrigues could only have gained by being there. Critics counter that Ceres's bright spots had been imaged and widely reported as candidate salt or ice deposits from a subsurface brine since Dawn's 2015 arrival, a year before the disclosure, so that the broad-strokes match describes information already in public circulation rather than a detail unavailable to anyone following the mission's news coverage.

Extragalactic assignment (Project Star Maker)

Main article:

Project Star Maker

Beyond his primary 20-and-back account, Rodrigues describes an additional ten years during which his consciousness was allegedly extracted from his clone body at Ceres and placed in a non-human body in another galaxy, for a total of approximately thirty years of subjective experience outside his organic timeline. He describes the experience as nested — like Russian dolls, with one 20-and-back concealing another ten-year program inside it.

The Ceres Colony Corporation, whose mission was technology acquisition, allegedly made contact with a species from the far side of the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy — an extragalactic species from a galaxy characterized by irregular star formation, a ball-shaped rather than spiral structure, with resources spread unevenly across it. This galaxy's inhabitants were reportedly attempting to build a star in a nebula to compensate for their galaxy's low natural star-formation rate, and their project had fallen significantly behind schedule. They acquired additional labor by trading technological knowledge to the Ceres Colony Corporation in exchange for slave labor — primarily consciousness-in-clone-body workers — at an incremental rate, with the Corporation receiving a "volume of books" of technical data month by month as it delivered workers.

In the non-human body, Rodrigues reportedly worked as a pilot of small anti-gravity craft, scanning incoming asteroids for chemical composition and pushing selected ones into a gravity well in precise chemical sequences, layering the chemistry of a star so that it would ignite directly into a stable state rather than spend its first million years expanding and contracting.

The bodies they allegedly occupied were non-human, non-sexual, and maintained at an adolescent developmental level — roughly equivalent to a thirteen-year-old mentally, with three or four fingers, dark charcoal coloration — which Rodrigues theorizes reduced the strain on the consciousness driving them and allowed the twenty-year health cap to be circumvented. The workers were reportedly kept separated from the general population, housed in small studio-like rooms within a large asteroid, and managed by an AI that rewarded compliance with access to an entertainment menu (including networked video games) and punished non-compliance with an irritating ultraviolet light.

Rodrigues draws parallels between this experience and accounts of Igigi Anunnaki workers described in Sumerian texts and Dolores Cannon's writings, as well as to Norman Bergrum's Ringmakers of Saturn in terms of creating large ring habitats around small stars.

The Corporation reportedly terminated the deal partway through, after receiving enough technical data to achieve the two or three items it most wanted from the exchange. The star-building project allegedly succeeded in igniting the star but did not go as planned, with what Rodrigues calls a "reveal" at the end that he reserves for the book. On his return to Ceres — disorientated, nauseous, barely able to speak — he says he was given a brief medical checkup and sent back to his ordinary duties the next day.

After returning from the ten-year extragalactic program, Rodrigues allegedly began having recurring dreams on Ceres in which a being made contact with him during the moment of dreaming — flying out into space from his sleeping quarters, as was his standard Ceres dream, and then encountering something friendly. He believes these visitations from whatever he had encountered at the end of the extragalactic program are part of the "reveal" at the end of Project Star Maker.

Final year at Ceres and the captain's memory-retention maneuver

In his final year at Ceres, Rodrigues reportedly befriended a group of enslaved women from Earth, forming a relationship with one (called Mary in Ceres Colony Cavalier). A hybrid psychic reader — resembling a Grey-human girl of ten to twelve, administered via IV sedation — allegedly told him: "You're the one that remembers. You're going to remember all of it when you go back." This prophecy reportedly informed his resistance to the memory-erasure procedures during his return.

The captain of Rodrigues's merchant vessel reportedly disclosed to him a creator-god religion restricted to officers of command rank, access to which required demonstrated moral character over multiple lifetimes. The captain allegedly deleted Rodrigues's personnel file using the cover of a high-security mission — the absence of a record meant the lobotomy administrator at the Moon facility during the return process had nothing to act on, enabling Rodrigues to leave with his memories intact. This maneuver is, for supporters, the very thing that explains why no documentary trace of his service can be produced: the file that would corroborate him was deliberately destroyed to spare him, so its absence is consistent with — even predicted by — the account. Critics observe that the same device is internally convenient in a different way, supplying a built-in reason that the one record capable of testing the story will never be found, so that an account already beyond external verification becomes, by its own terms, unfalsifiable; on this reading a deleted file proves nothing that an absent file would not.

Rodrigues also describes a chronovisor-like time-viewing device at the Moon facility being used during the return process: "they had a device known as a Chronovisor. And what a Chronovisor did was look at probable futures," which he understood to be checking the timeline as he was returned toward 1982. By his account the device was connected to his mind to assess the probability of his remembering the tour after memory suppression — and thus whether operators would need to partially lobotomize him before returning him to his original timeline — with non-human beings near the examining platform telepathically taunting him that he would not remember, while the technician monitoring the connected screen told them to stop, apparently because the probability of his remembering was rising.[citation needed]

Return and post-service period

After his alleged twenty-and-back return, Rodrigues resumed his organic-body life. Following the Earth Alliance and GFW operations that reportedly cleared the Ceres colony, Rodrigues participated in an August 31, 2021 interview with Michael Salla and Elena Danaan discussing the Dark Fleet exodus. A liberated Cerean society "would still be kind of...a down the road version of what the Nazis began in the late thirties and forties," per Rodrigues.

In a 2020 episode of The Brohio Podcast, Rodrigues appeared alongside fellow 20-and-back participant Michael Gerloff to discuss the secret travel experiences of program participants.

At the 2023 Journey to Truth Conference, Rodrigues participated in a roundtable panel alongside SSP experiencers Abby Lynn and Barry Littleton and remote viewer Jessica Jones. He announced Project Star Maker as forthcoming at that time, describing it as covering the "loophole" portion of Ceres Colony Cavalier — the ten extra years mentioned at the end of that book as "another story." He also discussed the SSP's funding dynamics in terms of slave labor cost elimination, and noted that, in his view, a substantial fraction of people taken into programs with full memory retention are financially compensated and blackmailed into silence rather than having their memories erased.

In an August 2023 interview on Elena Danaan's YouTube channel, Rodrigues described Project Star Maker as a "companion" to Ceres Colony Cavalier — the star-building episodes occur within the timeline of the Ceres book, intercalated between events already described there. Danaan, who had read the book prior to the interview, confirmed that it contained a detailed mechanical description of stellar ignition sufficient for astrophysicists to analyze, and identified a profound "spiritual dimension" at the book's conclusion involving a journey of the spirit that she declined to spoil for viewers. Both agreed the books were moving toward a planned trilogy, with the third volume covering events of which audiences are, per Rodrigues, "unaware." Rodrigues credited his editor and collaborator Jackie Kenner — a psychic medium — with having recognized independently the nature of his Peru-era experiences: her mediumship confirmed for him the drug-induced intuitive-extraction procedure he had been subjected to as a child, which she had never been told about.

Post-return remote viewing work

After coming public in 2016, Rodrigues established a remote-viewing group called Tier Three, which meets weekly to conduct sessions on humanitarian targets — including attempts to dissipate hurricanes and healing sessions for group members and their relatives, which he describes as producing "tremendous success" when twelve to fifteen practitioners focus on a single target. He also operates a commercial remote-viewing service and three teaching groups at beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, delivered through Patreon on weekly Zoom calls, and has released a remote-viewing binaural product with a hypnotherapy track and subliminal affirmations.

Rodrigues has also conducted remote-viewing sessions specifically targeted at claims made by other SSP experiencers. In one session, his group targeted what Elena Danaan described as a Galactic Federation of Worlds starship in orbit, and the viewers reportedly produced drawings of two spheres — which Danaan confirmed matched the anti-remote-viewing shield of the ship rather than the ship itself.

In a 2025 episode with Michael Salla, Rodrigues described running a remote-viewing session targeting the SSP contactee JP, which produced data describing craft activity — including U.S. Navy and unidentified SSP craft — in the Indian Ocean, and which Rodrigues states was subsequently corroborated by JP's own account of being taken to view those craft two days after the session.

He also tasked two remote viewers — himself and a viewer named Veronica — with a blind target related to the experiences of SSP contactee Jean-Charles Moyen, which produced overlapping data describing an underground cave or high-tech underground structure, with a component Rodrigues describes as relating to Toronto.

Rodrigues also described an impromptu remote-viewing experience at the Cahokia Monks Mound during the Journey to Truth conference: while sitting on the mound plateau in meditation — using the form of meditation he was taught at Inyokern, which involves blanking the mind rather than focusing on a goal — he felt a distinct energetic presence approximately fifty to sixty feet below him, and perceived it as "still on."

Economic rationale

Rodrigues argues that the secret space program is economically feasible specifically because of slave labor. Using an aircraft carrier as a comparison — its cost at roughly $180–200 billion — he calculates that substituting slave labor for paid workers eliminates over 60–70% of the total cost of a spacecraft, since labor constitutes the bulk of manufacturing expenses. The same logic applies to raw materials: if the people mining, transporting, and processing materials are also slave labor, costs fall further. On this basis he contends that building colonies throughout the Solar System is affordable rather than the trillion-dollar fantasy critics claim.

He also argues that the program's use of the U.S. prison population is technically legal under the Thirteenth Amendment, which explicitly permits involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime; once sentenced, a person can be placed in a 20-and-back program with their memories erased and returned, all within existing statutory frameworks.

Colony corporations

Main articles:

Interplanetary Corporate Conglomerate

and

Ceres Colony Corporation

Rodrigues describes all colonized bodies in the solar system — Earth included — as operating under individual colony corporations, with "over hundreds of them in our solar system." He also describes a "solar system internet" — an interplanetary communications network he expects will be the first infrastructure disclosed to the general public.

Books

Rodrigues has authored three books documenting his claimed experiences:

• Ceres Colony Cavalier (2021) — his first book, covering his 13 years in the Dark Fleet at Ceres; an Amazon bestseller.
• Project Star Maker (2023) — covers the additional ten years during which his consciousness was placed in a non-human body in another galaxy, co-authored with editor Jackie Kenner; described as a "spiritual overlay" to Ceres Colony Cavalier and noted for receiving reviews from readers who said they cried tears of joy.
• Beyond Sight — details his training in operational remote viewing and his subsequent remote-viewing sessions on secret space program topics.

Reception and authenticity

Because the events Rodrigues describes are said to have occurred in a cloned or transferred body, leaving his organic life on Earth seamless and unbroken, and because the personnel record that might confirm them was allegedly deleted, the account stands almost entirely on his own recovered testimony and cannot readily be checked against any external source. That structure makes the case difficult to falsify — a feature supporters attribute to the genuinely clandestine, memory-managed nature of a twenty-and-back program, and critics to a story positioned where evidence neither for nor against it can be brought to bear.

Supporters — including Michael Salla, who has hosted Rodrigues repeatedly, and a community of self-identified fellow experiencers — read the testimony as suppressed memory restored: the recovery of the narrative in 2015 reflects the lifting of trauma-based conditioning, the recurring twelve-year "signature" found in thousands of consultations reflects a real program's footprint, and the convergence of his account with those of other SSP witnesses reflects independent people recovering a shared truth. The corroborations he advances — the Inyokern buildings, the C-46 Commando, the Ceres salt geyser — are taken on this view as points where private memory met public fact and matched.

Critics read the same materials in reverse. They note that the account did not exist in continuous form until Rodrigues encountered Randy Cramer's twenty-and-back framing and obtained an MRI, and that memory reconstructed after exposure to a ready-made template is the textbook condition for confabulation; that each "corroboration" rests on information publicly available to a researcher (an unusual but real aircraft, an airfield's visible buildings, a NASA mission's widely reported findings); and that the cross-witness agreement which supporters cite as confirmation is equally explained by a tightly networked milieu in which the same stories circulate, with Rodrigues himself screening newcomers against his twelve-year marker. The credibility on this reading is circular: the witnesses who corroborate one another were drawn from, and shaped by, the same body of accounts.

Even within the contactee community that takes the broad phenomenon seriously, Rodrigues's standing is qualified rather than universal. He has acknowledged that his account "isn't palatable" and that he is "not the poster boy" for disclosure because the material is uniformly traumatic, and has expressed surprise that so few others have come forward with the detailed, evidence-bearing memory he claims for himself — an admission supporters read as candor about a hard testimony and critics read as a tacit concession that his is an outlier account resting on little others can reproduce.

See also

• List of people who have participated in secret space programs
• 20 and back program

References

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