Michael A. Aquino, 1946 to 2019: joined Anton LaVey's Church of Satan in 1969, rose to its hierarchy, then split in 1975 to found the Temple of Set after a claimed revelation he titled the Book of Coming Forth by Night, Set, not Satan, as the true isolate intelligence. The military file is equally documented: decorated Vietnam-era psychological operations officer, co-author with Paul Vallely of the 1980 paper From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory, retired a lieutenant colonel with the Meritorious Service Medal in 1994. In 1987, at the height of the Satanic Panic, a Presidio daycare child identified him as an abuser; investigators established the Aquinos were living in Washington during the claimed window, no charges were ever filed, and he later settled defamation actions against two books.
The MindWar paper argues victory is achieved by dominating the population's belief structure, friendly populations first, which Setians and critics alike read as the Temple's cosmology wearing a uniform: the mind as the only real battlespace, ritual and propaganda as the same art under different flags. Aquino never hid the overlap. He argued both files openly, the officer improving psyop doctrine and the priest arguing that isolated selfhood, Xeper, was the only real objective. His enemies wrote the fusion for him; he had already written it himself.
The claim: Aquino is the control case for this archive's whole psyop wing, the proof that occult practice and psychological operations are not two communities with occasional contact but one skill set with two dress codes, and that the Presidio accusation failed precisely because the one thing the Army kept better than secrets was his calendar. Verdict: the documented record supports the skill-set overlap, not the darker extrapolations. The archive's note: when the conspiracy literature cites Aquino as evidence the temples run the programs, the actual evidence says something more interesting, the programs and the temples were invented by the same people, on paper, in the open, and the papers are still on file.
If the Army's leading occultist was also its psyop theorist, which job was the day job?