Wilcock had long experienced mental health issues dating back to his adolescence, writing about them in his 2016 autobiography
The Ascension Mysteries, where he self-disclosed a series of mental illnesses, including depression and hallucinations, confessed to years of drug abuse, and wrote about his delusional belief that science fiction television shows communicated secret messages to him and that space aliens damaged the plumbing in his house in order to threaten him into silence. He believed his TV and his VCR spoke to him through high-pitched squeals. Wilcock also claimed that he had suffered repeated abuse and trauma, beginning in childhood. Wilcock provided a full list of his self-disclosed conditions, ranging from compulsive eating to chronic thumb-sucking, in
The Ascension Mysteries.
Born in Rotterdam, New York, in 1973, Wilcock grew up in nearby Scotia, a child of unhappy parents whose contentious and stormy marriage traumatized Wilcock, according to his own account. His mother believed in New Age spirituality and a wide range of conspiracy theories, including anti-vaccine conspiracies and her belief that her neighbors, who were Freemasons, were performing Satanic rites and ritual orgies next door—beliefs which she passed on to her son. He claimed his pot-smoking mother was emotionally abusive and exercised extreme control over his early life.
Wilcock described his high school and college years as an unending series of traumas and ostracism against a young man unable to fit in with his peers. He claimed his college roommates turned him into a submissive cleaning slave. It was in these years that he discovered alternative history literature and UFO books in his college's library. As a result, he came to believe that his dreams were visions of alternate dimensions and that his writings were prophecies. He claimed to have predicted the September 11 attacks a decade before they happened when he wrote song lyrics about "metal to metal, soul to soul, meshing to fusion."
