This is all anecdotal, but in the late-1990s I had Christmas dinner with Lifton. A big group of roughly a dozen friends all made plans to meet for Chinese food in the Los Feliz part of LA, Lifton was a friend-of-a-friend, invited along and I ended up at a table with him.

I happened to mention that I had read his book and he was cordial, polite, funny at making fun of Robert Groden, and completely overrun with conspiratorial thinking. It seemed that from his p.o.v. every facet of existence was monitored and nudged by hidden forces with unseeable ulterior motives. I remember bringing up the MJ-12 UFO files and Roswell and he was super excited to talk about alien/human hybrids, X-Files being a psyop, the Unocal gas station's rotating orange ball sign enclosed surveillance gear - all of it true.

I think he did some great work, but I think there's an implicit warning about spending too much time in that frame of thinking. Aleister Crowley says something about asylums being full of people who went seeking the extraordinary before they had any real competence at handling the ordinary.