Michael Aquino

Michael A. Aquino (born October 16, 1946) is a United States Army Lieutenant Colonel, psychological operations specialist, and occultist who founded the Temple of Set in 1975 after leaving Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. A former Green Beret and Vietnam War veteran, Aquino spent his Army career in military intelligence and psychological warfare, co-authoring the 1980 paper "MindWar" with Colonel Paul Vallely. He was investigated but never charged in connection with the 1986–1988 Presidio Child Development Center abuse allegations, and is a recurring figure in research into the overlap between deep state intelligence operations, MK-ULTRA, and Satanic ritual abuse.

Military career

Aquino served as a psychological warfare specialist in Vietnam and continued as a reserve officer, rising to Lieutenant Colonel. As of the early 1980s, he held a commission as a Major in the U.S. Army Reserve with a military specialty in military intelligence, assigned to a PSYOP unit in the Los Angeles area.

A U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command memo dated July 3, 1981 (document CI29-70), issued after the San Francisco Police Department alerted military authorities during a child molestation complaint investigation, confirmed Aquino's rank and unit and noted that two of his Temple of Set lieutenants — Captain Willie Browning and Captain Dennis Mann — were also U.S. Army Reserve officers in Military Intelligence roles.

Despite the suitability concerns raised in the 1981 investigation, a follow-up Army memo from Headquarters, Presidio of San Francisco (December 9, 1981) stated that matters concerning Aquino had been "favorably adjudicated" and that his Secret clearance — granted June 9, 1981 — remained in force.

Aquino publicly claimed to his Temple of Set membership that he reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a claim military intelligence assessors described as "a gross exaggeration" while nonetheless confirming his active commission.

Temple of Set

In 1975, Aquino founded the Temple of Set following a schism within Anton LaVey's Church of Satan in San Francisco. Aquino claimed to have received a revelation from the Egyptian deity Set — formalized as "The Book of Coming Forth by Night" — which provided the theological basis for the new organization's doctrine of Setianism. Unlike LaVeyan Satanism, Setianism treats Set as a literal, self-created entity who bestowed isolate self-consciousness on humanity.

The Temple is governed through a Council of Nine, described in a 1981 military intelligence memo as "in fact his chief lieutenants," with Aquino as high priest and official head. By the early 1980s the organization had several hundred members operating nationally, with a smaller international presence in Western Europe and the Pacific.

The organization was advertised in the San Francisco Yellow Pages during the period Aquino was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco (1981–1986). The Army's public position, articulated by Army public affairs officer Lt. Col. Greg Rixon, was that the Constitution's freedom of religion protections shielded Aquino from any adverse action: "As long as an individual's religious practice remains within the limit of the law, there is no problem."

MindWar

In 1980, Aquino co-authored with Colonel Paul E. Vallely a military paper titled "From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory," circulated through Army War College and the PSYOP community. The document proposed replacing conventional psychological operations doctrine with a total-information-environment strategy called "MindWar," defined as "the deliberate, aggressive, convincing of all participants in a war that we will win that war."

The paper argued that PSYOP had failed in Vietnam not because its principles were unsound but because it operated only at the tactical level, and called for a national-level strategy using television, radio, and emerging satellite communications to reach and reshape the will of both enemy populations and the domestic U.S. population before combat was ever engaged.

Significantly, the MindWar paper explicitly contemplated the use of naturally occurring physical phenomena — atmospheric electromagnetic activity, ionization levels, and extremely low frequency (ELF) waves — to alter the receptivity of target audiences, noting that "MindWar should be timed accordingly" with external EM conditions. The paper also referenced "coercive measures" that "must not be detectable by ordinary means," and noted — without endorsing — the CIA's exploration of "mind-weakening drugs."

Presidio scandal

In 1986–1988, Aquino was investigated by the U.S. Army in connection with alleged child sexual abuse at the Presidio Child Development Center, a U.S. Army-run daycare facility at the Presidio of San Francisco. According to former FBI Special Agent in Charge Ted Gunderson, the investigation was triggered when a child pointed Aquino out on the street and told his mother, "That's the man that molested me at the preschool." The Army investigation ran for approximately 18 months and was closed without charges.

During this period Aquino was transferred from the Presidio to St. Louis, where he was placed in charge of personnel files for the U.S. Army Reserve. He subsequently returned to the Bay Area and continued Temple of Set activities. Gunderson also alleged that Aquino was later involved in a classified mind-control program at the University of Arizona.

Aquino appeared on Geraldo Rivera's 1988 television special on Satanism, which Gunderson described as the highest-rated TV documentary in the history of television at that time; Rivera faced significant backlash following the broadcast and did not air further programming on the topic.

A July 1, 1981 military intelligence memo (File #81-776), filed six years before the Presidio allegations arose, had already noted concerns about Aquino's personal conduct and sexual practices, and anticipated potential complications arising from his Army Reserve position.

In conspiracy research

Aquino is a central figure in multiple overlapping research threads connecting military intelligence, occultism, and alleged deep state operations. Ted Gunderson — a former FBI Special Agent in Charge — identified Aquino and Anton LaVey as "certain leaders in America who have been active for years" in organized Satanic ritual abuse networks, and named the Temple of Set as operationally significant to those networks.

Author and historian Peter Levenda, who had written about Aquino in Unholy Alliance for conducting a satanic ceremony at Wewelsburg Castle, described a personal meeting with Aquino at a Las Vegas convention of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Levenda reported that the assembled intelligence community members — from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DEA — treated Aquino warmly and wanted photographs with him: "They all want their picture taken with this guy... they saw him as one of theirs." John Alexander was also in attendance. Levenda characterized Aquino as "an intellectual guy, very intelligent... extremely cynical" who "didn't believe in paranormal anything" and "didn't believe in UFOs," instead viewing himself as a realist committed to the philosophies behind occult systems. Levenda connected Aquino's Phoenix Program background to broader psychological warfare operations, noting that Aquino's techniques — making ghosts appear, creating vampires to terrorize villagers — were designed to be scaled to a national level.

Researcher Joel Thomas noted that Aquino's departure from the Church of Satan in 1975 involved what Aquino described as a direct interaction with Set, during which the entity instructed him to write The Book of Coming Forth by Night through automatic writing — paralleling Aleister Crowley's reception of The Book of the Law from Aiwass. Thomas and co-host Isaac Weishaupt emphasized the pattern of high-level military intelligence officers simultaneously practicing occultism: "These guys are the guys running our country and running the world."

Former Church of Satan member Bill Schnoebelen described reading Aquino's works and joining the Temple of Set as part of his progression into deeper satanic practice, stating that Aquino's Temple represented "the real thing" beyond what Schnoebelen characterized as LaVey's "theatrics."

The MindWar paper, which was reproduced in full in William Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse (1991), is widely cited by conspiracy researchers as direct documentary evidence of a program to weaponize electronic media and electromagnetic frequencies against civilian populations — a thesis intersecting with MK-ULTRA successor research and with allegations surrounding the Franklin scandal.

Arkheim Ra, an alleged secret space program experiencer, claimed in a 2024 interview that within Project Ibis, Aquino functioned as or was associated with a shapeshifting entity: "There was this owl creature character there and it was just Michael Aquino and he can shapeshift."

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