In 1989, the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON, a non-profit, volunteer citizen organization dedicated to the study of UFO’s, found itself in the midst of a rift. In one camp were the more conservative and traditional UFO researchers, people like astronomer Jacques Vallee and to some extent the nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman, who would have liked the world to take the scientific study of UAP seriously. In the other camp was John Lear and his coterie of conspiracy theorists who made unsupported claims about government cover-ups and alien autopsies with no concrete evidence beyond the rumors of leaked documents, all of which, if they ever were leaked, turned out to be forged. That year, when MUFON organized a symposium in Las Vegas, John Lear’s home city, where Lear himself was the state director of the organization—again, on a volunteer basis—he demanded that he and his cadre of likeminded conspiracists be granted ample opportunity to speak. When MUFON leadership refused, Lear threatened to hold a rival symposium to draw audiences away. MUFON directors eventually gave in, and the theme of the symposium was declared: “The UFO Cover-up: A Government Conspiracy?” Indeed, testimony of what seemed to be a genuine government conspiracy to spread false information about UFOs was presented at this conference, but it wasn’t that presented by Lear and his conspiracists. Rather, it was by well-respected UFO researcher Bill Moore, who dropped the bombshell that he had himself been involved in these government disinformation operations. However, rather than evidence of the government covering up UFOs, it appeared to be evidence that the government was encouraging belief in the extra-terrestrial origin of UFOs. The revelation discredited Moore and by extension dealt a huge blow to many of the claims being propagated by Lear and his camp, as much of the mythology they had developed was based on supposed documents Moore had uncovered and claims made by other UFO researchers that Moore now revealed had been seeded by intelligence operatives. One member of Lear’s camp, a newcomer to the UFO speaking circuit, made his debut during that symposium, reading rather monotonously from his statement, “The Secret Government: The Origin, Identity, and Purpose of MJ-12.” Like some UFO whistleblowers today who recently testified before Congress, this man, Bill Cooper, claimed to have personally witnessed UAP while in the Navy. And unlike Donald Keyhoe and John Lear before him, Bill Cooper claimed to have personally seen classified documents revealing the extraterrestrial secrets kept by the government during his time with the Office of Naval Intelligence. Thus, in his lectures and interviews and later in his book and shortwave radio program, when he claimed to be revealing personal knowledge that the U.S. government was suppressing information about recovered alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial biological remains, he was very much making the same claims as former Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch, who recently testified to essentially the same thing in a public congressional hearing this summer. As I look further into the history American UFO Whistleblowers, I am coming to believe what Bill Moore told his audience that day in 1989: “The current crop of disinformation is really nothing new. It’s just that a different crop of people are spreading it this time around.”

The rift in MUFON at the 1989 conference might be said to reflect a wider rift among those who researched UAP and believed in the visitation of extraterrestrials to Earth. There has long been two views on this topic, one that may be called the light side, and another that has been termed the dark side. To those who keep to the light side of UFOlogy, the extraterrestrials who have supposedly taken an interest in our world and in us are benevolent creatures, come to teach us how to ascend from our current condition and guide us into a new age of enlightenment or prosperity. This is the realm of UFO religions, or cults, led by supposed contactees like George Van Tassel, who claimed to be in telepathic contact with an alien intelligence that he described as an “Ascended Master.” Now of course, this light side of UFOlogy has its own dark side as well, with UFO cults like Heaven’s Gate ending in the tragedy of mass suicide. But among those who believe (without evidence) that UFOs or UAP really do carry extraterrestrial visitors, the opposing view, of course, is that these visitors are in fact malevolent. And it was John Lear and his camp within MUFON, the darksiders of UFOlogy, who really popularized the notion of extraterrestrials being malicious. We heard it from John Lear already, who claimed that aliens had deceived the US government, that these aliens mutilated and experimented on not just cattle but people as well. And of the “dark side movement” in UFOlogy that John Lear spearheaded, no one was darker than his protégé, Milton William Cooper, or Bill Cooper, whom Lear introduced to the world. Cooper would take Lear’s claims in increasingly darker directions, asserting that extraterrestrials and the shadowy powers complicit in their plans conspired to control the population through the drug trade and by unleashing bioengineered diseases, and of course, through abduction and murder, including arguably the most famous murder in modern history: that of JFK. Over the course of Cooper’s career, his changing claims regarding UFOs and the evolution of his conspiracist ideas, we see that he came to view the sinister forces arrayed against humanity as more of a Satanic, or as he would say, Luciferian plot. While David Grusch has made no such claims, we do see the further development of this “dark side movement” in claims made by other recent UFO whistleblowers, like the equally dubious statements made by former Pentagon official Lue Elizondo, the whistleblower who served as the principal source for the momentous 2017 New York Times exposé of a secret government UAP program. In his many television and podcast interviews since going public, Elizondo has claimed that elements in the government try to suppress UAP research because they believe the phenomenon to be demonic. Whether Elizondo is making this up or not, it does seem to suggest that some of the claims of “darksider” UFOlogists from the 80s and 90s remain influential in people’s thinking about UAP today, lending a cultish aspect to Lear’s “dark side” UFO mythology. And while there is some connection between Bill Cooper and these claims that UFOs are actually a demonic plot, there is also direct connection between his claims and numerous other harmful conspiracy movements that have arisen in the last 30 years, many of which remain extremely influential today. Typically in October, I explore some myth or legend that might be considered spooky, and to be sure, some of the false claims that John Lear and Bill Cooper made about aliens are scary. In fact, aliens have been a mainstay of Hollywood horror since the first creature features, but “dark side” UFO mythology has inspired some of their most frightening treatments, as seen in the X-Files, for example. But what is truly terrifying here is how the skillful deceptions of Bill Cooper, who rose out of the field of UFOlogy to become perhaps the single most influential conspiracy theorist and agent of misinformation in modern time, continue to lead people into darkness today.

Milton William Cooper was a military brat. His father was a pilot in the Army Air Corps, and he was raised on a series of air bases, many of them overseas, never staying in one place long enough to put down roots. Because of this, much of what he understood about America and American culture he learned from those in the military and from the American Forces Radio and Television Service, or AFRTS. The irony here is that, later in his career he would present himself as a champion and defender of a kind of domestic American ideal that he never really experienced himself, and he would become the voice and mascot of many homegrown militia patriot sorts even though he had always, in a very real sense, felt alienated from his country. As a teen, on an airbase near Tokyo, he had his first brush with hosting a radio program when he was given an hour to act as disc jockey, playing Elvis, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and big band music. Unsurprisingly, when he came of age, he entered the service himself, joining the Air Force in 1962 and the Navy in 1966, and serving as a patrol boat commander in Vietnam. He saw a lot of action in country, and he lost friends, but he was awarded a medal of valor for his efforts and afterward earned a cushy office job in Hawaii for a while, on the briefing team of Admiral Bernard Clarey in the Office of Naval Intelligence, a position for which he said he had to be given a Top Secret Q clearance. Bill Cooper would be the first conspiracy figure to make a big deal about having a Q clearance, suggesting that it granted him access to all the most tightly guarded secrets that the sinister U.S. government hid from its citizens. In this regard, as well as others, he can be seen as inspiring, at least in part, the Qanon online conspiracy cult of today. In truth, having a Q clearance in order to work in an office setting in a secure facility is simply not that impressive. I know someone who works in IT at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has a Q clearance simply because he is around and has access to computers and a network through which classified information may pass. In fact, Q clearance is a Department of Energy access authorization, so it doesn’t really make sense that Cooper would have it in the Office of Naval Intelligence, though he may have had some equivalent Top Secret clearance. This is just the first sign that he may have been embellishing his role in that office in Hawaii and lying about what secrets he learned there. The other is that, over the course of his decade-long career as a conspiracy theorist, whenever some conspiracist claim was made by others, Bill Cooper would afterward confirm it, saying he had seen classified files in a certain filing cabinet at the Office of Naval Intelligence that proved the claim was true. In Bill Cooper’s version of reality, any office worker with a clearance could browse files about the U.S. government’s contact with extra-terrestrials, which were kept in what must have been an absolutely stuffed and unsecured filing cabinet.

After leaving the Navy, Bill Cooper moved to California, where he married numerous women, struggled to make ends meet in a variety of business ventures, battled with PTSD, and turned to alcohol and spousal abuse. During these years he would twice get into terrible motorcycle accidents, one of them resulting in the loss of a leg. Years later, once he had commenced his career as a conspiracy theorist, he tried to claim that those accidents had been attempts on his life, that he’d been run off the road by government operatives who visited him in the hospital and threatened his life if he ever spoke about what he’d seen in that filing cabinet on Hawaii. His father, though, had a different story to tell, saying those motorcycle accidents were Bill’s own fault, and that alcohol may have been involved. In 1981 and ’82, he suffered a series of mental breakdowns and was hospitalized for his PTSD. Finally, though, later in the 1980s, he found his calling while browsing the weird postings on electronic bulletin boards accessed through computers on a newfangled network called the Internet. On one particular message board, ParaNet, Bill was introduced to the claims of UFOlogists and conspiracy theorists. In 1988, he finally decided to add his own story, reaching out to the board’s systems operator, who introduced him as a genuine military witness. The story Cooper then told was of standing atop a surfaced submarine in 1966 and seeing a massive unidentified aircraft diving into the ocean and then emerging from the waters and jetting back into the clouds. It wasn’t that world shattering, as UFO claims go—just another sighting, embellished with Cooper’s further claim that his commanding officer swore all the witnesses to secrecy. And Cooper’s post was overshadowed when, a few days later, John Lear released his statement, The Lear Hypothesis, right there on Paranet. Perhaps jealous that the attention had shifted from his story to Lear’s outlandish claims, but also probably seeing it as an opportunity, Cooper claimed on Paranet that he could confirm about half of what Lear had written about, as he had seen classified documents in that overflowing filing cabinet that corroborated it. Lear made contact with Cooper, and soon Cooper was out in Vegas with Lear, drinking and spinning out their “dark side” conspiracy narrative.

Where John Lear had latched onto the Majestic-12 forgery and embellished it, Cooper did likewise, correcting Lear according to the information he claimed to have seen in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Like Lear, he promoted the popular claims about cattle mutilations. Likening the attacks to those attributed to vampires in the past, he was kind of bumping up backward against the truth of the matter, since both phenomena are perfectly explained by the processes of decomposition and only misconstrued as something paranormal. When John Lear began to promote the claims of another supposed military whistleblower, Bill English, former Special Forces who claimed to have seen a suppressed report from Project Blue Book, the legendary Report 13, confirming that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin, Bill Cooper again hopped on the bandwagon, saying he too had seen a version of that report in the Hawaiian filing cabinet. Either Lear didn’t find it suspicious that Cooper never mentioned Report 13 before Bill English came along, or he chose to ignore that little sign of Cooper’s dishonesty. After pulling his weight with MUFON, Lear arranged for both of his military whistleblowers to speak at the 1989 symposium. Thus Bill Cooper made his debut, introducing his peculiar blend of UFO conspiracies and secret world government claims, the seeds of the grand unifying conspiracy theory he would later develop.

He read his paper in a near monotone, listing dry references to classified documents and supposed project names to outline a massive conspiracy implicating such groups as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission, members of which are typically recruited, he said, from secret societies in Ivy League colleges, like the Skull and Bones club… all of which claims have since become mainstays of popular conspiracy theory. You can tell he believed himself to be the smartest person in the room from the way he periodically stopped and asked if anyone understood what he had just read. Like Lear before him, faced with the evidence that the MJ-12 papers were fake, he nevertheless doubled down to insist that what they revealed was real—that Majestic-12 was actually called Majority-12 and it was an operation of the New World Order. Unlike others on Lear’s dark side of UFOlogy, Bill Cooper’s claims were explicitly grounded in global politics, all of which he saw as directly tied to the ET cover-up and the secret world government. And when the audience suggested he was full of it, he claimed he didn’t care if they believed, that he was just morally obliged to get the truth out. Nevertheless, it became apparent that he was there out of more than just moral obligation when he announced that he would afterward be selling the text of his speech.

At that very symposium, after Bill Moore revealed his complicity in feeding government disinformation to UFOlogists, a revelation that in some ways discredited claims John Lear had made and Bill Cooper had confirmed, Cooper reportedly raged at, believing Lear had somehow betrayed him by feeding him disinformation. This just shows that Bill Cooper was lying all along by saying he had seen documents in the Office of Naval Intelligence that confirmed was Lear claimed, since it wouldn’t really make sense to blame Lear for such false information if he had really seen it 18 years earlier in classified documents. But if we want to debunk the UFO claims of supposed whistleblower Bill Cooper, there are many far stronger pieces of evidence than this. For example, in one particularly absurd claim, Cooper asserted that the absence of RH factor in some people proved that humanity had been genetically engineered by extraterrestrials! He argued that RH factor, a protein named for rhesus monkeys, represents the genetic leftovers of money DNA, so people without it can only be the product of some extra-terrestrial experimentation, having not descended from monkeys! Actually, the rhesus blood type he’s talking about received its name only because it was first discovered in rhesus monkeys, not because it’s some kind of evolutionary marker.

A further example of claims Cooper made that prove completely baseless on further evaluation involves an early assertion of a NASA cover-up. Like Donald Keyhoe before him, who made disproven claims about lunar bases, Bill Cooper also liked to project images of the moon during his lectures and misinterpret blurry shadows as evidence of structures. He would impress upon his audience that it was “a real photo” which is meaningless. Of course the photo was really a photo, though it certainly didn’t reveal what he imagined it revealed. Cooper said the images he showed, taken from a book published by NASA called The Moon as Viewed by Lunar Orbiter, were quickly suppressed after their publication when the government realized what they revealed. In reality, the volume had a limited print run and subsequently was out of print. It was not printed again because a more definitive text entitled Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon was published the following year. And the fact is, because the orbital photographs were transmitted as analog data and had to be assembled as a mosaic, the images back then were extremely low resolution. We would not get the higher resolution images until some computer savvy volunteer researchers, working out of an empty McDonald’s since the late 2000s, started recovering the data. Today we have entirely detailed images of the moon, and the original NASA volume Cooper claimed had been suppressed is freely available online, digitized and hosted by NASA themselves. Like the supposed pyramid and face on Mars, both of which claims Bill Cooper also promoted all such claims have been disproven with higher resolution imagery.

Another simple way of revealing Bill Cooper’s general lack of credibility is by simply pointing out that most of the claims he purported to confirm because he had supposedly seen classified documents about them turned out to be verified hoaxes. This goes well beyond the Majestic-12 forgeries. He also promoted the story of a 1948 UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico. This story had been exposed back in the fifties as a hoax concocted by two con men claiming to have alien technology for sale. And at the MUFON symposium, Bill Moore attributed its resurgence among UFOlogists to government disinformation. So really it was a twice debunked story, which through extension debunks Cooper’s claims that he was privy to government secrets, since those secrets he claimed knowledge of were debunked. Unless, as he might have you believe, the secret government had seeded forged documents into Naval Intelligence filing cabinets just to disinform random office workers. Cooper would go on to talk about Alternative 3, the secret government’s plan to establish colonies on the moon and Mars. Well this idea was pretty much plagiarized from a 1977 British television documentary called Alternative 3 that purported to reveal just such a conspiracy. The film started out as an investigative report about the so-called “brain drain,” or the idea that the most highly intelligent or skilled citizens were leaving the country, but they claimed their investigation evolved to look into actual disappearances. Over the course of the documentary, it claimed to reveal that missing scientists had actually been recruited for a secret space program that was preparing colonies on the Moon and Mars in order to ensure the survival of the elite in the face of global climate disaster. The film ends with supposed footage of a secret landing on Mars, during which astronauts film an alien life form moving beneath the sand. Needless to say, the broadcast of this program alarmed many viewers, much like the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. And also much like the Welles broadcast, this too was a work a fiction, a mockumentary. It was intended, its creators explained, as a satire of fringe belief and government conspiracy claims, and it was supposed to air on April 1st, as an April Fools joke, but because they were unable to obtain the intended time slot, it was aired on the 20th of June instead. There was no reason to believe the claims of Alternative 3, a clear work of fiction, but that didn’t stop Cooper from repeating its claims without any reference to the actual mockumentary.

This isn’t that surprising, however, as it’s very clear that the known fictionality of a claim would not stop Bill Cooper from asserting that it was in fact true, that it had only been dramatized as fiction to make you doubt that it could be true. He claimed, for example, that the events of Close Encounters of the Third Kind really happened. Likewise, when Cooper spoke of the types of alien races in contact with Earth and its secret government, he listed those already claimed by a variety of UFOlogists, greys from Orion or Zeta Reticuli, Pleiadians, etc. but he also threw in the benevolent Teros and the sadistic subterranean Deros, a direct reference to the Shaver Hoax. Patrons of the show just got a minisode all about these claims and the influence of their promoter on UFO mythology generally, but for those who don’t support on Patreon, essentially, the Shaver hoax claims were the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic that sci-fi magazine editor Ray Palmer reworked and published as a stunt to increase readership. So it was yet another work of science fiction Cooper repeated as if it were a secret fact he had seen evidence of in a Naval Intelligence filing cabinet. In fact, his tendency to run with known falsehoods is what eventually led to his falling out with John Lear and UFOlogy generally. One of Cooper’s many claims was having seen the original Krill Papers during his time in Naval Intelligence. The Krill Papers was a document that appeared in ’88, written by one O.H. Krill, that seemed to support much of the Lear Hypothesis, and therefore much of what Cooper claimed as well. Cooper claimed to have insider knowledge that O.H. Krill was actually an alien hostage. Well, it turns out, as John Lear had apparently explained to Bill Cooper more than once, John Lear himself had written the Krill Papers—just another forged document intended to bolster the UFO mythology he and his darksiders were crafting. When Lear eventually suggested Cooper stop lying about the Krill papers, since Lear had already admitted to many that he had coauthored the work with one John Grace, Cooper doubled down and began claiming John Lear was lying about writing the papers. After his falling out with Lear, however, came Cooper’s falling out with UFOlogy generally. After a couple years of insupportable claims and the promotion of known hoaxes, the UFOlogists who once gave him the benefit of the doubt began to turn on Cooper. Even one of Lear’s original “dark side” protégés, Don Ecker, became fatigued, writing in a 1990 article in the magazine UFO, “Who are the UFO whistleblowers? They come out of relative obscurity and burst into the center of ufological attention. Making incredible claims of alien activity on earth and the Government's deep but covert involvement. Without exception, the whistleblowers of recent times only furnish the most hazy evidence of their claims, if that.” I think it quite apparent that this sentiment could validly be repeated regarding UFO whistleblowers today.

So Bill Cooper fell out with Lear and with MUFON. Indeed, he began claiming that they were part of the conspiracy, part of the cover-up. Lear’s former CIA connections through Air America meant he was running their disinformation. And MUFON was simply a front organization infiltrated by government operatives who used it to control the UFO narrative. One might imagine that this change in his approach would limit his platform, but Bill Cooper had already begun to evolve. Norio Hayakawa, a UFO enthusiast in California, had heard him speak and arranged and promoted a successful lecture at Hollywood High School in ’89, and from there, his speaking gigs took off. As he traveled and lectured on his conspiracy theories, his claims evolved, moving away from the alien conspiracies and toward much darker claims about the aims of the New World Order. He leaned on widespread conspiracy theories, putting his own spin on them. For example, he did a lot to spread the prevalent HIV-as-U.S.-bioweapon claims I recently refuted in an episode, sharing the text of some legislation that he claimed proved the virus had been engineered. Actually the bill was urging research in order to be prepared in the eventuality that a rival nation engineered such a biological warfare agent. And the bill absolutely does not say anything about a microbe that attacks the autoimmune system. It only posits the development of an infective microorganism that “might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes,” which only means it might be hard for our bodies and medicine to deal with. Similarly, he developed his own take on the JFK assassination, that centerpiece of modern conspiracism, asserting that in some grainy footage it could be seen that William Greer, the Secret Service agent driving his car, turned around and aimed a handgun at President Kennedy. In fact, rather like an ink blot or a shape in a cloud, if you are trying to see this in the low-resolution film, you can imagine it, even though what you’re seeing is really the sun gleaming on the shiny hair of the Secret Service agent in the passenger seat, who also turns his head back to look at the president. Cooper liked to preface his JFK theory by displaying a slide with a quote attributed to Kennedy: “The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy America's freedom and before I leave this office, I must inform the citizens of their plight." Cooper suggested that Kennedy knew about the alien cover-up, that this was the plot he had mentioned, and that he was killed to silence him. The problem is that this quotation is entirely apocryphal. Kennedy never actually said it. And Cooper’s takes on these two conspiracy theories help to demonstrate his evolving claims. He used to assert the AIDS epidemic was part of the alien cover-up, that spreading disease among humanity and controlling the population was part of the alien agenda, but later he would just claim it was part of the New World Order agenda, and aliens were a smokescreen. And not only did he assert that Kennedy had been killed for his knowledge of the aliens, he also claimed William Greer was an alien and had shot Kennedy with alien technology. But when he moved away from his UFOlogy roots, he instead claimed that Greer had used a dart gun with shellfish toxins and that Kennedy was killed because he was going to reveal the grand overarching conspiracy of the New World Order. So after all, following all the assertions he had made for years about retrieved craft and recovered aliens, claims that we saw trotted out before Congress again this year, Bill Cooper would eventually flip flop and say all of that was government disinformation—which, again, maybe he was blindly bumping against the truth here in his flailing for explanations.

Bill Cooper’s hand-drawn cover of *Behold a Pale Horse*.

Next in Cooper’s career came his most important legacy, a book, Behold a Pale Horse, which he managed to get published by a small New Age printer that focused on mystical works. I emphasize that he got this book published and not that he wrote it because, though it did indeed include some autobiographical writing in which Cooper tried to establish his background in Naval Intelligence in order to establish some credibility with readers, much of the volume simply reproduces other documents, or rather forgeries and hoaxes. One was The Report from Iron Mountain. This book, first published in 1967, purported to be the official report of a secret government study group meeting in a bunker. Highlights of the work include the determination that war or some credible threat of equal weight is necessary for the stabilization of society, and the recommendation of possible alternatives to the threat of war, one being the threat of alien contact. This of course fit well with Cooper’s evolving conspiracy narrative, only the book was exposed as a hoax in 1990, when its true author revealed himself in order to claim copyright on the work when others, like Cooper, started reprinting as if it were in the public domain. It turns out Leonard Lewin had written it as a satire and its publishers, including novelist E. L. Doctorow, sold it as non-fiction as a publicity stunt. Never mind all that, though. Cooper and other conspiracy theorists would continue to insist, even today, that it was real. And going along well with the plans supposedly discussed in the bunker at Iron Mountain was Cooper’s reprinting of a pamphlet from 1979 called “Concentration Camp Plans for the U.S. Citizens.” This pamphlet and Cooper’s amplification of its claims are what is responsible for the many conspiracy theories about the Federal Emergency Management Agency and supposed plans for FEMA camps. Going back to the original pamphlet and Cooper’s dissemination of it, claims about FEMA camps degenerate into lists of supposed sites, abandoned prisons or shuttered factories named as supposed locations without any actual evidence. And this would continue with the advent of social media. Just like Cooper’s images of the moon, people post pictures of any appropriate looking installation or fortified structure, often photoshopped, and say, “Hey, look, a real picture!”

Another big chunk of the book was a document entitled Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which was supposedly an “introductory programming manual” for those being onboarded into the secret government conspiracy. It outlined a psyop of massive proportions, being conducted on all the general populace of the world. It was World War Three, the document claimed, but instead of being waged on an opposing army, it was being waged on civilians, and instead of firing bullets, combatants had essentially weaponized misinformation and economic conditions. In some ways its observations were valid, I think, but the notion that all of this, basically the conditions of the modern world in the information age, was some ongoing operation of an intelligence group was a farce. Most believed Cooper had written it himself, but actually, it had been found on a copy machine and circulated among conspiracist newspapers before it got into Cooper’s hands. In 2003, it was claimed by one Hartford Van Dyke, who was serving an 8-year sentence for counterfeiting, as he had sent 600,000 phony dollars to the IRS with a message calling it “fake money to satisfy fake debts.” He didn’t claim the work was genuine. It was his “manifesto,” a work that he himself admitted was more an expression of his “sociopathy” than his paranoia. But Cooper printed this found document as if it were absolutely genuine proof of what “they” were doing to us. And finally, perhaps the most egregious reproduction of a known fake in his book, Cooper reprinted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its entirety. If you don’t know what that is, check out my older episode, “The Terrible within the Small; or, The Fabrication of the Learned Elders of Zion and the Forgery of Their Protocols.” Essentially, it was a plagiarized forgery that invented the notion of a global Jewish conspiracy. In perhaps the weakest caveat possible, Cooper told his readers that, though it maybe wasn’t a Jewish conspiracy the Protocols revealed, the conspiracy was still very real, telling them to just replace the word Jew with the word Illuminati.

Those who follow my efforts on Historical Blindness may be familiar with my banner episodes on Illuminati conspiracy claims, The Illuminati Illuminated, which examine their origins and demonstrate quite clearly the lack of merit and falsehood of that grand unifying conspiracy theory. In crafting his own grand unifying conspiracy theory, Bill Cooper would include the Illuminati as the architects of a New World Order, but he claimed to trace the conspiracy much further back, to the beginnings of human history. He fleshed out his conspiracist worldview during the next chapter of his career, hosting a program with massive reach on the World Wide Country Radio shortwave broadcaster out of Tennessee, home of a variety of religious programs, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Every episode of his show, The Hour of the Time, signaled his apocalyptic worldview with the sound of klaxons and jackbooted marching. It was on this program that Cooper, in a series he called “Mystery Babylon,” traced the New World Order conspirators from modern organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers Group back to the Bavarian Illuminati, and before them to the Freemasons and, you guessed it, the Knights Templar. But like the plot of the Assassins Creed videogames, he claimed that these groups were just evolutions of an ancient secret society that had evolved through the millennia, taking different names along the way. Back through the Romans to the Greeks to the ancient Egyptians he traced them to so-called Mystery Schools, and specifically to a group called the Brotherhood of the Serpent. As with most of Cooper’s claims, he was repackaging theories he’d read elsewhere as if they were truths he had discovered through deep research. In reality, he seems to have adopted much of this from a 1989 book called The Gods of Eden, in which author William Bramley hypothesized that this ancient secret society was a group of extraterrestrials bent on controlling all subsequent human history.

The cover of the book Bill Cooper cribbed much of his grand unifying conspiracy theory from.

While Cooper had moved away from the ET angle, he still used everything he could from such claims, repurposing them to suit his views, which took on more and more religious, millenarian qualities. There had always been an element of this in his claims, going all the way back to his MUFON debut, when he claimed the secret government had uncovered a secret prophecy in the Vatican predicting certain end times occurrences in the nineties. Of course this wasn’t true, since none of the supposed foretold end times events actually occurred in the 90s. But it became a theme in his assertions. The shadowy powers that shaped world events were following the timeline of Revelation, working to make its prophecies a reality. Surely the Mark of the Beast would next be introduced, or perhaps it already had? Cooper told his listeners that bar codes may actually be the mark of the Anti-Christ. As I said before, we can discern the evolution of Cooper’s claims by looking at his changing views on the Kennedy assassination. After a while, when it was no longer aliens but rather New World Order assassins, Cooper began to assert that it was actually a Luciferian plot, claiming Dealey Plaza was an occult place of power, making Kennedy a human sacrifice. And he told his listeners that if you took the year 1307, when the Knights Templars were suppressed, and you subtracted it from the year 1963, when JFK was assassinated, voila! You get the Number of the Beast, 666! Actually, you get the number 656, but he was close, and his listeners probably didn’t run the numbers themselves.

His very presence on shortwave radio meant that he was garnering listeners in survivalist, white separatist, Christian Identity, and militia communities. Other hosts on his network had already cultivated dedicated audiences among such groups, like the Silent Brotherhood in the Pacific Northwest and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in the Ozarks, groups with ideologies that led them to commit armed robbery and murder. To his credit, Cooper said on air that the Christian Identity movement was “the biggest bunch of hogwash I ever heard in my entire life,” asserting specifically that “[t]hese people are racist, completely mental,” that they “might call themselves patriots, but they are not…. They are liars, lying to us.” Despite the fact that he had reprinted the anti-Semitic Protocols in his book, he resisted outright anti-Semitism, and when he was labeled an anti-Semite by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, he called it a “smear campaign.” In his lashing out at Jews who called him an anti-Semite, however, he began to express more and more anti-Semitic views, including Holocaust denial. And while some of his statements drove away the “patriot” militia sort, plenty of them found much to admire in his broadcasts, especially after Waco. During the siege of the Branch Davidian compound in 1993, Cooper did much to craft the white separatist American militiaman view of the event, drawing valid connections between that siege and the one at Ruby Ridge, and drawing attention to the very real mismanagement of the entire debacle by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and afterward the FBI, but also mixing in absolute falsehoods, like his claim that the government gave the Branch Davidians poison milk or his misrepresentation of David Koresh as a monogamous family man rather than a polygamist and serial rapist of underage girls. Cooper would go on to cover the Oklahoma City Bombing in much the same fashion, claiming that Timothy McVeigh was a patsy, that he was “the Lee Harvey Oswald of the American Reichstag!” Eventually it came out, though, that Timothy McVeigh and his several accomplices were regular listeners of Cooper’s. In federal court, several of them testified that Cooper’s program had inspired them to take their anti-government action. And finally, it was revealed that Timothy McVeigh had actually come to visit him before the bombing and according to Cooper had said they intended to take some action that they believed would make a difference and cryptically told him to “Watch Oklahoma City.” The fact that Cooper knew this while he broadcasted assertions of McVeigh’s innocence and claims that the bombing was a false flag operation serves as perhaps the ultimate piece of evidence discrediting him.

Starting out on Internet bulletin boards, Bill Cooper, over the course of only about ten years, would blaze a trail through fringe belief at which one cannot help but marvel. His influence cannot be exaggerated. He is known for having popularized many conspiracy claims that have proven to have lasting power, and he even popularized a lot of the phrases that people mock when talking about conspiracy theorists, and that conspiracy speculators continue to unironically use today. For example, he coined the term “sheeple.” And he was always telling his audience to do their own research. He made broad assertions about the mainstream media, claiming we do not have a free press. But in the same breath he's urging people to publish their own content, apparently unbothered by the cognitive dissonance of it all, demonstrating how free Americans really are to express themselves and publish false claims, just as Cooper himself had done. Bill Cooper is sometimes credited as having accurately predicted certain occurrences or historical developments. For example, he is said to have predicted that we were moving toward a cashless society. In reality, what he predicted is far more extreme than what we see today with electronic transactions and e-banking. He claimed that swap meets would no longer exist, that you could not sell your neighbor a mattress…basically he said things like yard sales would be prohibited by law, and that failing to record and report each minor transaction would be grounds for imprisonment. Now, I ask you, does that sound accurate in today’s world, when we might send pitch in on a restaurant tab with cash or by sending a Venmo that will not be reported to the IRS, which would have no interest in such transactions?

People also credit Cooper with predicting 9/11. In reality, the FBI had place Osama Bin Laden on their Most Wanted list since 1999. Cooper was responding to a recent report aired on CNN in which a journalist had been able to speak with Bin Laden. Cooper couldn’t believe that a journalist might penetrate a hideout that the U.S. government had been unable to find. So it must have been propaganda allowed by the government, he claimed. In reality, though, the U.S. government was unable to apprehend Bin Laden because he was being harbored by the Taliban government. And some American CNN reporter had not managed to penetrate their defenses to interview them. It was the Bureau Chief of the Middle East Broadcasting Company in Pakistan, and he had been invited to Kandahar to interview Bin Laden because Bin Laden wanted to preemptively take credit for the 9/11 attacks. During the interview, he dropped hints about the forthcoming attacks. So really all Bill Cooper anticipated with his remarks were the unsupported talking points of 9/11 truthers who would spring up after his death. In fact, the most influential Truther work, the documentary Loose Change, has been accused of plagiarizing Bill Cooper.

One last prediction it is claimed Bill Cooper made was of his own murder by the government. A couple months after his broadcasts about 9/11, Bill Cooper died in a shootout with authorities on his property. Of course, this made him a martyr in the minds of his devotees, who believed the government had finally decided to silence him after his 9/11 broadcasts. In truth, there had been a warrant for his arrest for years because of tax evasion. Local sheriffs had put off arresting him for a long time because they just knew Bill Cooper wouldn’t go easily. Finally, after Cooper’s neighbors had made complaints of being harassed by him and of Cooper pulling a gun on them, the sheriff’s office felt they had to finally arrest him. All precautions were taken to arrest him without violence. They drew him out of his house by pretending to be partiers playing loud music on the road. Cooper came out, got in his vehicle, and drove down the hill to where the undercover officers were blasting their boombox, yelling at them to leave or he’d call the police. When he started driving back up to his house, the sheriffs blocked the road with another vehicle and declared that he was under arrest. But as expected, Cooper didn’t go gentle. He gunned it, drove directly at one agent, made it all the way back to his driveway before crashing his vehicle. Then he came out shooting as he made for his front door. In fact, he shot a deputy, Rob Marinez, in the head. Skull fragments entered the deputy’s brain, and he would afterward be paralyzed. As he fired at one deputy, another fired at him, killing him. In one way, certainly, he had made a valid prediction when, the year before, he told a friend, Doyel Shamley, that he had “decided what he was going to do now,” saying that he “can always be a martyr.” This, however, seems to have been more of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Bill Cooper’s legacy, the mark he left on the world today, remains far broader than one might imagine. He made his mark on UFOlogy, and he made his mark on conspiracist culture generally. And he remains a legend among the anti-government militiamen and domestic terrorists who so loved Cooper that when he was alive they sought him out in person to ask advice before committing their crimes, though it’s true, some have since rejected him for not being racist enough. More surprisingly, though, his book, Behold a Pale Horse, gained widespread popularity in the Black community as well, thanks in large part to its promotion by conspiracy-minded members of the Nation of Islam in New York. The book was also widely read in federal penitentiaries, and it would become, according to one commonly repeated statistic, the most stolen book in the country. As Cooper’s book gained popularity in certain parts of the Black community, it exerted a huge influence on American rap music, with such rappers as Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Ghostface Killah, Big Daddy Kane, Rakim, Mobb Deep, and Busta Rhymes considering themselves devotees of the book and making numerous references to Cooper’s ideas or even to Cooper himself.

As mentioned already, Cooper was the origin of 9/11 truther claims, but he was wildly influential on other conspiracists as well, one of whom would go on to succeed him in a lot of ways. Alex Jones, then in his twenties, was an up-and-coming young shortwave broadcaster who got his start on the same network as Bill Cooper. Jones had come up listening to The Hour of the Time, and in a lot of ways he modeled himself on Cooper. Certainly the claims that Jones would make throughout his career about false flag operations were just the same old claims Cooper used to make, recycled for the next tragedy. Alex Jones may best be known for his claims that school shootings were actually orchestrated by the government, and that itself is a claim that Bill Cooper had made in the past. Actually, by all reports, Bill Cooper greatly disliked Alex Jones, thinking him a copycat rival who was stealing his whole schtick. From Alex Jones to Qanon, which as I mentioned before makes much ado about their invisible informant/leader holding a Q clearance, we continue to see many of the conspiracy delusions of Bill Cooper touted among right-wing extremists and even by current members of Congress. Perhaps most specifically, the idea that the entrenched powers in our government (aka the “deep state”) are actually a sinister Luciferian cult can certainly be traced back to Bill Cooper. So in a way, Cooper can be credited, or blamed, for having cultivated the paranoiac milieu that has made the MAGA cult possible—though certainly Bill Cooper would chafe at calling it a cult. He didn’t like the Branch Davidians being called a cult, and once, when he was called a “cult figure,” he urged that the word not be used. But if we think about it further, the word is absolutely apt. Rather than in the sense of an unorthodox religion or deviant set of beliefs, it is in the sense of the great devotion to that set of fringe beliefs or to a figure who promulgates them. Just as the Branch Davidians were cult in the sense of an unorthodox religious sect, a cult of personality was also present, in the adherents’ devotion to Koresh. And certainly there is a cult of personality in MAGA, just as there was and is a cult of personality among the adherents of Bill Cooper. Likewise, there is an argument to be made that John Lear and the adherents of his “dark side” UFO mythology are a kind of cult: a relatively small group of people promoting and spreading a dubious set of fringe beliefs to which they are devoted despite all logical disproof. And as we’ll see in the final installment of this series on UFO Whistleblowers, after Bill Cooper, the cult of John Lear would produce another figure, far more influential in UFOlogy than Bill Cooper, who, though divisive, would inspire a true cult of personality. This figure, Bob Lazar, and his claims about Area 51, will be shown to have direct connection to the claims recently made under oath to Congress by David Grusch.

Until next time, remember, we can all learn a thing or two from the television program X-Files, which actually cribbed ideas liberally from Bill Cooper and John Lear’s “dark side” dogma. What it teaches us is that, it is perfectly natural to, like Agent Mulder, want to believe, though we must, like Scully, remain skeptically vigilant.

UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part Two: Bill Cooper

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