The Historical Jesus and the Myths of Christ Mythicism (Another Historically Blind Xmas)

A couple of times this year, one name has been popping up in my research. The first time was in my episode on the Ark of the Covenant. John M Allegro, I told you then, was an eccentric archaeologist who worked with the team in Jerusalem that brought the Dead Sea Scrolls to the world’s attention, and it was Allegro who translated the Copper Scroll and believed that the treasures it recorded were real and could be found. He was himself a kind of proto-Indiana Jones in that he led expeditions to track down this long lost treasure, which he never managed to discover. Something I didn’t mention at the time, but which serves as noteworthy context for what came next in his career is the fact that he jeopardized his academic standing by making unusual claims about the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, asserting that certain fragmentary mentions of a “Teacher of Righteousness” who seemed to be a precursor messiah analogous to Jesus Christ, actually proved that the story of Jesus was just a recycling of this older story, and thus Jesus Christ himself was a myth. Allegro appeared again, briefly, in my recent episode on the Entheogen Theory of Religion, as his notion of Jesus Christ being a myth that represents someone or something else had developed in a remarkable direction by 1970, after he encountered the work of R. Gordon Wasson, the world’s first ethnomycologist and inventor of a grand unifying psychedelic theory of religion and world history. Besides a sect that reworked older traditions about a Teacher of Righteousness, Allegro had come to view early Christians as a fertility cult, devoted to the imagery of penises and sperm, and also to ritual drug use, specifically the eating of the Amanita muscaria mushroom as a sacrament. As a mystery cult, they did not speak openly of their rite or their true beliefs, he claimed in his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and instead spoke only in a sort of code, and early Church fathers unwittingly canonized their drug allegory as dogma. Just such a coded meaning surrounded the figure of Jesus Christ, for just as their sacred mushroom was known to spring from the earth without a seed, so too Jesus was said to have been conceived without seed. While Wasson took his mushroom theory of religion much too far, Allegro took it further still, claiming that through his maverick etymology, tracing words back to Sumerian, he could show the Bible was constantly making mushroom references. And as further evidence, he pointed to a 13th-century fresco in a French Church that depicts the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in a way that looks a lot like a cluster of mushrooms. But of course, as I pointed out before, a 13th-century French work of art could not possibly shed light on early Christian thought or the rites of a Middle Eastern mystery cult in antiquity. None of his academic colleagues found his Sumerian etymology convincing, and his scholarly career fell to shambles. Even R. Gordon Wasson, who we might imagine would latch onto Allegro as an ally, could not credit his outlandish claims, stating that Allegro “has stuck to a naive misinterpretation…only because he thinks this would serve his thesis.” While the claims of John Allegro that Jesus Christ was a myth, not a real person, have never been taken seriously by scholars and are widely viewed as unconvincing, he is not alone in theorizing that Jesus Christ was not a real, historical person. This holiday, I’ve still got more to say about the man who many see as the reason for the season. So gather round the fire as I tell a different kind of nativity story, about the birth of a modern myth, but maybe not the one you suspect I’m going to tell.

In my last holiday special, you could say that I put the Christ back in Christmas, even though I began with a lengthy discussion of the false notion that the abbreviation “Xmas” was a nefarious secular attempt to remove Christ’s name from the holiday. In that episode, I discussed the image of Christ, and how the images we revere today may have differed from the man Jesus. The underlying assumption in that holiday special was that Jesus Christ existed, historically, as a human being, though we may more accurately call this a given than an assumption. The fact is that the consensus among scholars of the New Testament and first century Palestine is that Jesus Christ was a real person. In fact, for most of the Common Era, there simply never was a reason to doubt that Jesus was real; the entire notion of Christ Mythicism is relatively recent. Now, don’t get me wrong. Even during Christ’s time and ever since there have been skeptical views about him. In his own time, he was largely viewed by everyone but his followers as a heretic or a revolutionary rabble rouser. And long have there been alternative views regarding who and what his followers proclaimed him to be, one of the first being that he certainly had not been born of a virgin. One alternative view of Christology, or “Christology,” was that Joseph was his biological father, and that Jesus only became the “Son of God” when the Holy Spirit descended on him at his baptism. Thus God was his adoptive father rather than the inseminator of Mary. Along with these “adoptionist” creeds was a “psilanthropist” view, holding that Jesus was merely a man—a man chosen to bear the revelations of God, perhaps, but a man nonetheless. Another claim, popular among critics of early Christians, was that, while Joseph wasn’t Jesus’s father, he did indeed have a biological father, a Roman soldier named Panthera who illegitimately fathered Christ. One doctrine, Docetism, even argued that Christ was divine but had no physical form and rather walked around as a kind of ghost or projected illusion. What we can see here is that, all of these Christologies uniformly took a view that there really was a figure named Jesus Christ on Earth during the first 30 years or so of the Common Era. Even the doctrine that he wasn’t corporeal still did not attempt to say that he was not actually there, doing and saying things and known to his followers and his persecutors alike. The notion that he wasn’t real would not appear until the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment.

The Festival of Reason, a celebration of rationality held by the atheistic Cult of Reason in the wake of the French Revolution.

Specifically the Christ myth theory appeared among French thinkers during the French Revolution, a time when religious dogma was being actively stamped out in favor of what was viewed then as Reason—remember that Christian churches were converted to state-run atheist Temples of Reason. During this turmoil, one Constantin Volney was the first to hazard this claim in 1791, suggesting that Christ was a kind of mythological sun god whose name was derived from the Hindu god Krishna. By 1795, the claim was taken up by Charles-François Dupuis, who, as many have done since, suggested that Christ was just another mystery cult solar deity, like Mithra. By the late 18th century, early 19th century, the idea had spread to America, where political theorist and founding father Thomas Paine, in his least popular volume of The Age of Reason, asserted “that so far from his being the Son of God, he did not exist even as a man—that he is merely an imaginary or allegorical character, as Apollo, Hercules, Jupiter, and all the deities of antiquity were. There is no history written at the time Jesus Christ is said to have lived that speaks of the existence of such a person, even as a man.” As we will see, Paine’s objection about records would resonate with later Mythicists. Later in the 19th century, the German Bruno Bauer, claimed Jesus was invented by the writers of the gospels, which as we will see would also become a mainstay argument of Mythicists. At the end of the 19th century, white supremacist William Benjamin Smith also cast doubt on all contemporaneous sources about Christ and further hypothesized that a cult worshipping some Jesus figure had existed prior to Christ’s lifetime. At the dawn of the 20th century, Scotsman John Robertson took up this theory and brought it back to its roots by again arguing Christ was a solar deity worshipped by a Jewish mystery cult, specifically identifying the sacrificed messianic figure worshipped by a certain cult of Joshua as the deity that would become Jesus Christ. In 1909, German philosopher and historian Arthur Drews synthesized these arguments in a successful and controversial book called The Christ Myth. While Drews’s work was embraced by Vladimir Lenin and Christ Mythicism became a foundational tenet of Russian atheism, the theory was almost universally rejected by historians and scholars, for reasons I will discuss throughout the episode. Thus the Christ myth theory disappeared from academic and popular discourse, until 1975 when English scholar George Albert Wells took up the cause throughout the 1980s. By the 1990s, there had arisen a coterie of Christ Mythicists publishing more and more sophisticated arguments. The consensus view of historians and scholars remains that there was indeed a historical Jesus, but if one were to read mythicist works alone, without also reading the works of trained historians and scholars that explain how we know Jesus did exist historically—like the ponderous multi-volume work A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus by John P. Meier or the more accessible work of Bart D. Ehrman, like my principal source for this episode, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth—one might think that mythicists have made an ironclad argument against Christ’s existence. In fact, while their books may be more successful with the reading public, the scholarly community rejects their methods as flawed, their arguments as unsound, and their conclusions as false.  

One of the central arguments of those who assert that Jesus Christ never existed as an actual person is that the principal sources for his existence, the gospels, cannot be trusted. They point out that that the original manuscripts of the gospels no longer exist, and that they were not written by the individuals they are named after, who might have had some first- or even second-hand knowledge of the man Jesus, but rather by men writing in a distant land some fifty years after the events narrated, give or take a decade. Since the gospels are full of contradictions and clearly legendary material, and since by their view, the gospel writers themselves were the ones inventing a mythical Christ, or at least were among the earliest promoters of the myth, they cannot be viewed as historical evidence whatsoever, and they look instead for non-Christian sources that mention Jesus within the first century of his lifetime. Such sources are few and far between, which they argue itself is proof Christ didn’t exist, though the fact is, such record keeping was not extensive or detailed in 1st century Palestine, and nevertheless there actually are some contemporaneous mentions of Jesus Christ outside of New Testament works. The most prominent of these are from Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish military commander during the First Roman-Jewish War who defected to Rome and lived the rest of his days writing histories, such as The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. In the latter work, there is a passage called Testimonium Flavianum, in which Josephus seemingly tells about Jesus, a “teacher of people,” who “was the Messiah.” In the passage, he describes Pilate’s condemnation of him, his crucifixion, and his subsequent resurrection. The problem with this passage, however, is that it doesn’t make sense for Josephus, who was not a Christian, to have stated some of these things. Since it is known that Josephus’s works survive today because they were copied and transmitted through the Middle Ages by Christians, there is scholarly consensus then, that this passage is an interpolation, something added by a Christian scribe at some later date. So, Jesus mythicists will say, you can’t trust the Bible, and the only mention of him outside the Bible is also untrustworthy. However, from a more scholarly perspective, this is an overstatement.

A romanticized woodcut engraving of Flavius Josephus

While it is true that the Testimonium Flavianum is mostly viewed as some kind of scribal interpolation, it is untrue to suggest that scholars believe the entirety of the passage was inserted by later Christians. The fact is that most scholars who are experts on the works of Josephus believe that only certain elements were added to a passage that Josephus did write himself, specifically wording that identified Jesus as divine and mentioned his resurrection. Without those interpolations, the Testimonium only describes a teacher who was put to death and who continued to inspire a tribe of followers who call themselves Christians—a historical account much more in keeping with something Josephus would have written. More than this, there is actually a second mention of Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews, a blurb in which Josephus mentions James, whom he identifies as “brother of Jesus, who is called the messiah.” The Messiah, for those who don’t know, was a Jewish eschatological concept, a redeemer or savior figure who would appear at the end of days. The word would later be translated into Greek as Christ. So here we have Josephus specifically referring to Jesus Christ, who in gospel traditions is also said to have a brother named James. Mythicists dismiss this as another scribal interpolation, but scholars disagree, as there is no reason to suspect that Josephus would not have written this. But this is a common tactic of mythicists, as Bart Ehrman consistently points out. When some source is raised as support for the historicity of Christ, they simply dismiss it as probably fake with no evidence that it is. For example, there are no less than three other potential non-Christian sources for the historical existence of Christ that appeared within a century of the years in which it is believed he lived. In 112 CE, Pliny the Younger wrote about a sect who call themselves Christians and “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.” In 115 CE, Suetonius wrote that during the reign of Roman Emperor Claudius, he deported the Jews from Rome due to riots “at the instigation of Chrestus,” which scholars believe was a misspelling of the Latin “Christus,” or Christ. And that same year, Tacitus wrote in his Annals of Imperial Rome about Nero’s persecution of a group “called Christians. The author of this name, Christ,” he explains, “was put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, while Tiberius was emperor; but the dangerous superstition, though suppressed for the moment, broke out again not only in Judea, the origin of this evil, but even in the city.” When mythicists address these other sources, they often say that these too must have been scribal interpolations, even though they add no Christian message to the text, get the name wrong, and even call Christianity evil. So here we see mythicists moving the goalposts, saying they would need some non-Christian source but then refusing to accept such sources when they are given.

It is true, though, that these non-Christian sources cannot alone prove the historical Christ’s existence, as they only go to prove the existence of Christians, or at most that the story of Christ, the gospel traditions, were spreading during the first hundred years after his lifetime. For stronger evidence, we must look earlier, which means examining the books of the New Testament historically. I do not mean taking their accounts as works of history, as their contents cannot be viewed as inerrant fact. But to contend that, just because they have a bias or contain some clearly mythological or legendary elements means that they are of no use to historians is absurd. If we were to throw out all such literature, then that would mean historians would also have to reject many other ancient works of history, such as Herodotus, who commonly blended fact with fantasy and rumor. Instead we must look critically at the texts to discern what they can show us. Mythicists, as with other skeptics, including myself, will first point out the authorship of these works. It was long believed that Matthew and John were written by actual disciples of Christ—Matthew supposedly being a converted tax collector mentioned in the gospel that bears this name, and John long believed to have been the unnamed Beloved Disciple. See my episode on the Authorship of John for more on that. Meanwhile, the other two canonical gospels, Mark and Luke, were believed to have been written by followers of Christ’s followers, Mark supposedly being a companion of the disciple Peter and Luke a follower of the apostle Paul. However, as mythicists will point out, none of this appears to be true, as all evidence points to these works having been written anonymously decades later by educated individuals fluent in Greek, rather than in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and his followers. And more than this, mythicists further deconstruct the gospel traditions by pointing out that almost nothing in John agrees with or repeats anything in the other three so-called Synoptic gospels, so it should be rejected as a work of fiction. And more than this, they point to evidence that both Matthew and Luke appear to use the exact wording of passages in Mark, suggesting that their authors used Mark as a source. According to mythicists, then, this means that there is really only a single source, Mark, which they view as a work of fiction that invented the man Jesus. However, as with other mythicist arguments, they have latched onto one aspect of modern scholarship to make an argument that no New Testament scholars agree with.

Codex Vaticanus, a 4th century Greek Bible which contains one of the earliest extant complete manuscripts of The Gospel According to Mark, itself the earliest of the surviving gospels.

The fact is that mythicists are absolutely right when they point out that we don’t have original documents of the gospels, and that they contain a multitude of discrepancies, and that John presents an almost entirely different story from the Synoptic gospels, and that Matthew and Luke do appear to repeat elements of Mark. But a further fact is that Matthew and Luke also each contain unique and independent elements not copied from Mark, like the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew also contains the story of the Magi, which no other gospel contains, and Luke contains the parables of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, which are unique to that gospel. Does this mean that these are all invented whole cloth? Experts on this topic don’t believe that. The academic consensus is that the writers of the canonical gospels were working from numerous sources. Luke even references these older accounts in chapter 1, stating, “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account.” New Testament scholars designate these pre-existing sources using letters. The source of episodes that appear only in Matthew being called M, and those that appear only in Luke being called L, and the source of traditions that appear in both Matthew and Luke but not Mark being designated Q, for quelle, the German word for “source.” Rather than viewing John as a complete aberration that doesn’t match source material at all, The Gospel According to John is also believed by experts to be based on pre-existing sources that simply have not survived. These are called the Signs Source, believed to be the source from which John took accounts of Christ’s miracles, and more than one Discourse Source, from which he took the speeches that he attributes to Jesus. Some scholars even suggest that his account of the passion is derived from some other currently lost work. Beyond these, there are other surviving gospels that simply aren’t canonized, like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas. And beyond even the written sources there is scholarly analysis of the gospels that suggests they all derive ultimately from oral traditions, which would make a lot of sense considering that it’s believed literacy was uncommon in 1st century Palestine. Moreover, the fact that occasional words in the gospels are given in Aramaic and then explicitly translated into Greek supports the notion that written Gospel sources were recording Aramaic oral traditions. So altogether, this provides a picture of the evolution of gospel traditions, coming out of Palestine during the time of Christ in the form of oral tradition, being written out afterward in sources now lost to us, and then preserved in the surviving gospels. Thus, while mythicists try to reduce these sources to a single work, all evidence suggests there were numerous contemporaneous accounts of the living man named Jesus who was called by his followers the Christ.

The fact is, though, that there are numerous other early Christian sources beyond gospel accounts that attest to the existence of Jesus Christ. One source was Papias, an early second century church father who describes, in words that only survive in quotation by later writers, how he pieced together what he knew of Jesus by seeking out and questioning those who had known Christ’s disciples in life. His writing, a five-volume work reportedly called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, would amount to a primary source document if it had been transmitted by ancient scribes and survived for us to read today. We further have Ignatius of Antioch’s early second century letter to the Smyrnaeans, which repeats the major incidents of the gospels, and I Clement, a letter written by Roman Christians and addressed to the Christians in Corinth, which makes clear that there was early, widespread knowledge of Jesus’s life, teachings, and death. Throughout the New Testament, beyond the gospels, we see clear knowledge among early Christians of Jesus and his life that mythicists will tell you had just recently been invented. The information litters the Acts of the Apostles, numerous epistles such as I Timothy, the Letter to the Hebrews, and I and II Peter, and I John. Even the Book of Revelations contains passages that reflect clear knowledge of Christ and gospel traditions, all of which are dated to the 1st century. And the biggest stumbling blocks that mythicists must negotiate are the Pauline epistles, the numerous letters written by the Apostle Paul, which make up the majority of the New Testament and according to scholarly consensus actually were written years, even decades before the surviving, canonized gospels. You heard that right. The gospels record events said to have occurred during the life of Christ, but the letters of Paul, a one-time persecutor of Christians who was converted, are the earliest written sources that appear in the New Testament. To deal with this massive blind spot in their argument, they cast doubt on whether the epistles of Paul really show that he had any knowledge of Christ. They argue that, for someone who supposedly was so devoted to faith in Christ, he sure doesn’t talk much about Jesus and his life. The fact is that his letters were to other early Christians who were well aware of the life story of Christ, so there was no need for him to be preaching to the converted, as it were. Regardless, there are clear instances in which Paul references the life and death of Jesus—specifically about his birth, his being a Jew of the Davidic line, his brothers (specifically naming James), his teachings, his prediction of his own death, his crucifixion, and his burial. Some mythicists, as is typical of many of their arguments, attempt to address this fact, which seems devastating to their argument, by again weakly suggesting without a shred of evidence that later Christian scribes just inserted these references to Christ in Paul’s epistles.

A portrait of Paul the Apostle by Rembrandt

As Bart Ehrman explains, one major criterion for determining the historical authenticity of any report in ancient works, besides whether it is independently attested to in numerous sources—which is certainly the case with the historicity of Jesus Christ—is the so-called “criterion of dissimilarity.” Essentially, this has to do with whether the reported fact or incident serves some purpose or accords in some way with an article of faith that the transmitters of the document want to promote. To put it plainly, if some detail concerning Jesus’s life did not help later Christians, or even early Christians, to promulgate their doctrines, why would they make it up or insert it into works that did not include it. Mythicists too use this criterion to argue that each part of Christ’s story serves a purpose in spreading the Christ myth, but as Ehrman points out, this criterion is supposed to be used—can only be used, really—to prove something did happen, not to prove it did not happen. And there are several independently corroborated details of Christ’s life that meet this criterion. One is the existence of Jesus’s family, specifically his brothers. Not only does this information appear in a variety of our sources, it also seems to serve no clear Christian agenda. If it were made up, why? Another is Christ’s crucifixion, which was likewise corroborated in numerous sources, and was actually quite inconvenient for Christians. It must be remembered that Christians were trying to tie their Jesus to the foretold messiah of Jewish tradition, but it had never been part of prophecy that the Messiah would suffer and die so violently. It was said the Messiah would bring about the resurrection, but this wasn’t about the Messiah dying and rising again. Rather, it was about the resurrection of all the dead and the conquering of death altogether. Christians had to bend over backward, finding old bits of scripture that they suggested were actually prophecies about the Messiah being pierced and not having bones broken in order to bolster their case that their man Jesus was the Messiah. Why would they have made up the story of the passion if it made it harder to argue their doctrine? And lastly, the fact that Jesus came from a poor little backwater village in Galilee called Nazareth was also a real problem for early Christians, as it was said the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. To address this problem, they told a dubious story about his mother traveling to Bethlehem for a census that, according to historians, would not take place for another 6 years. The point is that, though it does indeed seem that this gospel tradition, like others, is not to be trusted, if early Christians were just inventing the story of Jesus Christ, if it were not based on a real, historical person’s life, why would they not just say that he was born in Bethlehem? Well, mythicists have an interesting response to this problem. They claim that no such place as Nazareth even existed, that Jesus being from Nazareth in the gospel traditions resulted from a mistranslation of a word for “branch,” referring to Jesus supposedly being a branch from the line of King David, or that he was a member of a sect called Nazirites, mistakenly called a Nazarene. We can safely dismiss this mythicist argument as well, though, since archaeologists have actually located the small Judean village of Nazareth. Mythicists have done mental gymnastics to refute this archaeological evidence, suggesting that, while it may have existed, it wasn’t inhabited during Jesus’s lifetime, a claim further refuted by archaeologists who have turned up a variety of evidence, from pottery to coins, that prove it was not only a real place, but also inhabited during the time in question.

The last mythicist argument to consider looks farther back, before the Common Era, to pagan traditions of antiquity. What most of the various mythicist arguments have in common is the claim that Jesus Christ was just one more version of a pagan myth or deity, that his myth was a reinvention or evolution of previous myths. I’ve brought up ideas like this before, and to be honest, they cannot be refuted entirely because there is clear reason to believe that elements of pagan belief were incorporated into Christian traditions. However, what mythicists do is take this entirely too far. For example, one strain of Christ Mythicism takes supposed similarities to Mithra and Mithraism and argues that Jesus did not exist any more than Mithra did, that Christianity was just a rebranding of Mithraism. I spoke about this in greater detail in my very first holiday special. Essentially, there is good reason to think that December 25th was chosen as the date for Christmas not because it was the literal date of Jesus’s birth, but because it coincided with the pagan holiday of the birth of the unconquered sun, Sol Invictus, which seems to have been a later development of the Mithraic mystery cult, but the numerous claims about every single element of Christianity being derived from Mithraism lack credibility. He was not born of a virgin; he was born of a rock. He did not have twelve disciples; rather, he was pictured in certain reliefs with figures representing the twelve signs of the zodiac. While it is true that certain early Christian apologists like Justin Martyr and Tertullian drew comparisons between the two religions, suggesting Christian baptism and the eucharistic ceremony were similar to Mithraic ritual meals and ablutions, these parallels are dubious. They were promoted by Christians hoping to convert pagans by suggesting their practices were not so dissimilar, and if there was any connection or crossover between the two, it may very well be that evolving Mithraic customs were actually beginning to incorporate nascent Christian practices. Any absolutist argument about Christianity being a whole-cloth adaptation of Mithraism just doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Relief depicting Mithra slaying a Bull (a tauroctony). The image was iconic in Mithraism and has no clear connection to Christianity.

Mythicists do not limit themselves to Mithraism, though. Many draw parallels to a wide variety of mythological deities, specifically what they call pagan dying-rising gods. They take this notion from the writings of comparative mythologist James Frazer, who raised the idea in his important late 19th-century work, The Golden Bough. According to Frazer, there is a motif among world religions and mythologies, a kind of archetype or category into which many deities fit, and it involved dying and rising again. For Frazer, this had to do with fertility cults and their preoccupation with the life cycles of vegetation. Just as ancient sun worship saw the setting and rising of the sun as a kind of death and resurrection, so too fertility cults saw the life cycles of plants that seem to die in the winter and revive in the spring as a cycle of rebirth. Frazer identifies deities like Osiris, Adonis, and Tammuz as just such dying and rising gods, and mythicists would throw Jesus Christ on the pile. In this, however, mythicists are working in an outmoded scholarly tradition. More recent scholarship views Frazer’s claims as flawed, suggesting that most of the deities he identified are more like disappearing gods or just dying gods. For example, Osiris does die, but he doesn’t come back to life, instead becoming the lord of the dead. Likewise, Adonis is simply forced to live some of his life in the realm of the living and some in the realm of the dead because Aphrodite and Persephone fight over him. And like Adonis, since these vegetative deities represent a cycle, there is often a perpetual death and rebirth, which is, of course, not the case for Jesus. As I have already mentioned, for early Christians, it is clear that Christ’s resurrection represented the beginning of the Messianic age, in which all the dead would be resurrected. He was viewed explicitly as a fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, not as some pagan fertility deity. And the simple fact is, though Christians throughout history have refused to acknowledge it, the earliest of Christians did not view Jesus as a god, or The God, at all. He was just the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed king, the son of God in the same way that all Davidic kings were the Sons of God, and whether in a biological sense the offspring of God as well, or just perhaps the adoptive son of God, still not God Himself. In short, there is just no clear evidence to support the notion that this human man, this historical man that came to be the leader of an apocalyptic Judaic sect, was actually, secretly viewed as a fertility deity, let alone that he did not exist and was invented to represent such a deity.

Another rather ironic claim by mythicists is that there was no Jesus because the stories about Jesus’s life are nearly identical to the stories about another sage who lived at the same time, Apollonius of Tyana, whose existence is widely confirmed by scholars. In such a claim, worded as carefully as I’ve just worded it, they are absolutely correct. According to the principal source for the life of Apollonius, a third-century biography by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, Apollonius’s mother was visited by the apparition of the Egyptian god Proteus and bore this god a son, who would himself be divine. And this son, Apollonius, was a precocious young teen, demonstrating his great wisdom at only fourteen, and he grew to become an itinerant mystic philosopher, performing miracles and mustering disciples. He runs afoul of Roman law, and according to some accounts rises into heaven instead of dying. What’s ironic about Christ mythicists suggesting Apollonius was real and Christ wasn’t is first that they would trust the majority of scholars in this case but not in the other. Indeed it is believed that Apollonius of Tyana did exist, as there are sources independent of Philostratus, including a certain 3rd or 4th century inscription, the Adama Inscription, as well as manuscript sources that Philostratus relied on. However, the sources for Apollonius’s existence suffer from the very same issues, or more! Philostratus was writing in the 220s or the 230s, it’s believed, and that’s far later removed from Apollonius’s lifetime than the gospels were from Christ’s. Like the gospel sources, Philostratus’s sources have now been lost, and one of them, a diary written by one of Apollonius’s acolytes, is believed by many scholars to have been a fictional source made up by Philostratus as a kind of literary device. There are numerous letters supposedly written by Apollonius himself, but some or all of these have also been argued to be later pseudepigraphal works. In some ways, evidence for the existence of Apollonius is weaker than that for Jesus. It simply shows a confirmation bias that mythicists would look at these two figures and argue that the gospels must have actually been about Apollonius, someone who is never even said to have visited Judea, rather than reaching the far more sensible conclusion that the similarities were a result of Philostratus, who was writing later, cribbing from the gospel traditions when he mythologized Apollonius. Interestingly, when mythicists draw this comparison, they are following a long tradition of anti-Christian polemicists going all the way back to the late 3rd century, when Porphyry of Tyre, in his work Against the Christians, argued that the Apollonius story showed that the miracles and achievements of Jesus were not unique or special. And in the early 4th century, during Diocletian’s brutal persecution of Christians, Sossianus Hierocles claimed that Apollonius was an even greater miracle worker than Jesus. But even they didn’t hazard the argument that Jesus was not a real person.

A 2nd century Greco-Roman medallion depicting Apollonius of Tyana, further independent evidence of his historical existence.

I think that, as with my refutation of the entheogen theory of religion, some who have come to view this podcast and my thinking as anti-Christian or anti-religion may be surprised by my spirited defense of the historicity of Christ. But anyone who closely follows my work should recognize that my bias, if we can call it a bias, is to lean heavily in favor of critical thought, reliable evidence, and scholarly consensus. I’ve had my pitfalls, made mistakes regarding what sources I rely on, etc., and I try to own up to them, but I always make a strong effort, in what little time I have to research each episode, to present not only the main points of arguments I think are wrong, but also the evidence that refutes them. Even though I am agnostic with atheist sensibilities, I have no qualms about arguing that Jesus Christ existed historically because the evidence supports that conclusion. This does not, however, mean that I believe he did indeed perform all the miracles attributed to him, that he rose from the dead or that he was in any way more than human. That, of course, is another argument altogether, and more a matter of faith than of history or even science. Interestingly, my view of Jesus Christ is essentially the early Christian view of every other god. There is a name for this argument: euhemerism, named after the 4th-century BCE Greek mythographer Euhemerus. Euhemerism is the argument that the gods of mythology were once just normal men and women, and as their stories were told and retold over time, they became exaggerated, made fantastical, until finally they were deified. Ironically, early Christian apologists themselves relied on euhemerism in their efforts to discredit pagan beliefs. Rather than argue that Zeus and Osiris were entirely made up, they simply said that they were more likely to have been normal men, or kings, perhaps, who were later mythologized into something more. All I would suggest, then, is that the same could be said about their man Jesus Christ, who certainly was a living human being, and perhaps the single most influential spiritual teacher in human history, if nothing else.

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Until next time, ask yourself if, a couple thousand years from now, people might not have a hard time finding concrete evidence that you yourself existed.

Further Reading

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Einhorn, Lena. The Jesus Mystery: Astonishing Clues to the True Identities of Jesus and Paul. The Lyons Press, 2007.

Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. HarperOne, 2012.

Ehrman, Bart D. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quiest fort he Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person. Doubleday, 1991.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume Two: Mentor, Message, and Miracles. Doubleday, 1991.

Sanders, E. P. The Historical Figure of Jesus. Penguin, 1993.

The Mushroom Kingdom: The Entheogen Theory of Religion

Medicine has always had a religious character to it, going far back into the obscuring veils of prehistory. In numerous cultures all over the world, we find medicine men or women, witch doctors, shamans, who are not only folk healers but also spiritual leaders, who are believed to heal through divination and communion with spirits, typically achieved through some sort of trance. The very word medicine, it has been suggested by some, finds cognates in numerous Indo-European languages that indicate its connection to the idea of mediation, of acting as a medium or conduit for divine healing. It is no new idea that such trance states as shamans experience may be accessed through the use of psychoactive substances, or drugs. The word drug, derived from the Dutch drogue, referring to the droge vate, or dry vat of the apothecary, who was known to deal in all kinds of substances, both medicinal and poisonous, has always had a double meaning of a substance used for medication or for intoxication, just as today we may talk about a drug store or a drug dealer. The notion of the religious use of drugs is also certainly nothing new. Many today are aware of the South American shamanic use of ayahuasca, of the Native American use of peyote, or even the Rastafarian use of ganja. However, until the 1960s, it seems many in the Western world were utterly ignorant of this aspect of religious experience. When, through the activities of the CIA in their pursuit of mind control technology, psychoactive substances such as the recently laboratory-synthesized LSD and the psilocybin or “god’s flesh” mushroom first encountered by an American in the 1950s, were brought back to the U.S., a whole new vocabulary had to be developed. The terms “psychotropic” and “psychomimetic” were used, as it was believed these drugs may turn one psychotic, or that they caused a mimicry of psychosis. To the newfound enthusiasts of the trance states these substances induced, they were “psychedelic,” or mind manifesting substances. To others they were “hallucinogens,” or generators of hallucination. But to some of the earlier explorers of these substances, none of these terms seemed appropriate. One man in particular, the man responsible for introducing “magic mushrooms” to the world, would thereafter embark on a hallucinatory odyssey through history, coming to understand the widespread use of psychedelic mushrooms in extremely disparate cultures and time periods, and beginning to suspect their use in Western cultures as well. From the late sixties through the 1980s and today, he would champion a conspiracist view of world history and religions, working together with like minded academics to popularize a new term for such substances, “entheogens,” meaning “revealers of the god within.” By the theory he spearheaded, it was the use of these drugs that inspired all religion. Here we have a compelling alternative theory of religion that has received some significant scholarly support but that also relies on tenuous connections through questionable etymology, and dubious claim of a massive, millennia-long conspiracy of silence.

We cannot explore the entheogen theory of religion without examining the life of one man, Robert Gordon Wasson. Wasson was born before the turn of the 20th century. One thing is clear: Wasson was an intelligent man. He only attended three years of high school before travelling abroad and eventually serving in the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. On his return, he enrolled in Columbia School of Journalism, and after his graduation, he studied at the London School of Economics for a year before returning to instruct English at Columbia for a year. After that, he began writing for a few newspapers, eventually serving as the financial reporter of the New York Herald-Tribune, a role that he would parlay into a Wall Street career. He went to work for J.P. Morgan and Company, where he would work for almost thirty years, earning a vice-president position after around a decade. During this time, he married the love of his life, a Russian pediatrician named Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, and it was on his honeymoon with her in the Catskills that his interest in mushrooms began. His wife recognized some mushrooms that she knew from her youth in Russia, and this sparked a conversation about differing cultural attitudes toward the “toadstools” that Wasson had always been taught to avoid. From then onward, in their spare time and on the vacations that his lucrative Wall Street career afforded them, they researched fungi together, publishing a book in 1957 called Mushrooms, Russia, and History, and in the process essentially founding the academic field that has come to be known today as ethnomycology. During their research on the importance of mushrooms in Russian culture, Wasson became familiar with the ritualistic use of the psychoactive fly agaric mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, among Siberian shamans. This first suggestion of the importance of psychedelic mushrooms in religious experience was certainly a memorable one, as it involved urine-drinking. In Eastern Siberia, shamans would eat this mushroom, experiencing the full and dangerous effects of the fungus and acting as a kind of filter of its toxins, a true mediator of the experience, as others would then drink the shaman’s urine in order to experience more safely the effects of the mushroom. Reindeer were even known to follow around those who were intoxicated by the mushroom, waiting for them to urinate in the snow so they could eat the snow and become intoxicated themselves, which typically made reindeer easier to capture, and even the meat of a reindeer that had been intoxicated by fly agaric was known to confer some residual intoxication on those who consumed it. This psychedelic mushroom pervaded Siberian cultures. Among the Koryak people it was a delineator of class, as the rich would consume the mushroom, and the poor would wait outside their huts hoping to drink their psychedelic urine. So fascinated were Wasson and his wife with this mushroom that they gradually became more and more interested in psychedelic mushrooms specifically, travelling to Mexico and taking part in shamanic rituals with another kind of mushroom, the “god’s flesh” mushroom, about which Wasson wrote in a very influential LIFE magazine article called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because I mentioned Wasson in my episode on MK Ultra. Unknown to him, his efforts to acquire specimens of these mushrooms, classified today as psilocybin after the psychoactive compounds within them, were actually funded by the CIA as part of their search for a substance useful in mind control. Because of this, Wasson is mostly known as the man who popularized psilocybin mushrooms, and in Western culture, when we think about psychedelic mushrooms, we typically think of this mushroom. But during the course of his lifelong investigations into the topic, Wasson believed he discovered a much greater and seemingly hidden history to the Siberian mushroom, classified Amanita muscaria, whose name relates to flies, as does its more common European name, fly agaric, because to most of the world outside of Siberian shamanic cultures, this admittedly beautiful fungus, with its bright red cap and white spots, was just a poison toadstool known only for its use as a fly trap, as it would attract flies when sprinkled with milk. But Wasson slowly came to believe that fly agaric was more widely and secretly used to induce religious visions and trances than anyone suspected.

The Amanita muscaria, or fly agaric mushroom.

Wasson’s entheogenic theory of religion did not really start to take shape until he began researching a book on the Indo-Iranian use of the mystery drug called soma in the Rigveda. This was a longstanding historical mystery. The Indo-Iranian peoples that migrated to the Indus Valley in the second millennium BCE brought with them a unique pantheon of deities: Indra, another Sky Father and wielder of lightning, and Agni, the god of fire. Some of these Hindu deities, or Devas, are better known today in the West than others: Ganesha, Vishnu, Shiva. But in the ancient Vedic literature from which these legends evolved, one was different: Soma, god of the Moon and of night, and of plants and vegetation. What set this god apart from the others was that it was believed one could become this god by ingesting a particular sacramental offering, some sort of food or drink that when taken conferred a religious ecstasy and, it was believed, immortality. In the most ancient of Hindu scriptures, the Vedas, and especially the Rigveda, which was orally transmitted over millennia before finally written down in the Common Era, many hymns refer to this substance, soma, which appears to have been literally deified. More than a hundred hymns in the Rigveda are dedicated to this god-food. More than forty potential candidates for what this substance might have been were suggested by scholars in the 19th century, and by the 20th, dozens more were proposed, until more than a hundred contenders existed. Was it honey? Was it alcohol? Could it have been cannabis? Might it have been the plant ephedra, used today in such drugs as nasal decongestants? Perhaps it was a certain vine used for religious purposes elsewhere in India today? When R. Gordon Wasson looked into it, unsurprisingly, he came to believe it was a mushroom, and specifically the fly agaric, Amanita muscaria. He and his fellow researcher, an Indologist named Wendy O’Flaherty insist that he did not begin his research with any such presumption, claiming he only began to suspect the mushroom when he learned that one particular line in the Rigveda mentions the urination of soma, which to him recalled the Siberian shamans urinating after ingesting fly agaric, and the subsequent drinking of their urine by others. I personally find it highly suspect that Wasson, who was an amateur mycologist and arguably the world’s first ethnomycologist, had started looking into soma without any presumption that it might have been a mushroom. I think it is pretty safe to bet that he hoped to make a case that it was a mushroom and was looking for evidence that it was some fungoid substance. However, the case he puts forth, and which others have since developed further, remains pretty convincing.

Wasson argued that soma could not have been alcohol, for the Brahmans, the Hindu priesthood caste, had alcohol in the form of beer, and this drink was generally disapproved of because of its fermentation process. He suggests that, judging by the geography of the Indus Valley, adjacent to mountains that may have been temperate enough to foster a birch forest, such as the ones in which the fly agaric typically grew, it was possible the mushroom was present there. More than that, in all the hymns, there is no mention of roots or leaves or seeds or flowers in relation to soma, but there are, according to his partner’s translation, lines that refer to stems and caps, and all descriptions of the color of soma match with the red and white color of the Amanita muscaria. Even some lines about a “single eye,” Wasson claims, refer directly to the sight of a mushroom cap sprouting out of the ground. But his clincher was the single line about the urination of soma. Converts of the Wasson view of soma have sought further confirmation in nearby and related cultures, such as in Tibetan Buddhist rituals that involve the ritual drinking of colored water that may be meant to represent urine-drinking in antiquity, but the key word here is “may.” As the critics of Wasson would point out, his theory of soma is as much speculation as any other. The line about the urination of soma, for example, makes no mention of urine-drinking, suggesting he may be misconstruing its meaning. The translations he relied on can be challenged in numerous regards. His argument that nearby mountains might have had birch forests is unconvincing without evidence that birch or any similar woods that act as host to these mushrooms ever grew there. And the fact that there is no mention of leaves or seeds does not mean with any certainty that it must have been a fungus. Perhaps they simply did not mention those particular aspects of it because they ate it as a paste or drank it in a tea. And though the effects described in the hymns do not sound like an alcohol, they also don’t sound like a psychedelic, as a sensation of greater alertness and clarity is mentioned, making it sound rather more like the stimulant ephedra. Perhaps the strongest candidate remains the Cynanchum acidum, or “creeping soma,” a vine and thus leafless and seedless, which remains in use in religious ritual in South India and is widely regarded by Indians as the soma of the Rigveda.

The ritual drinking of Soma, as referenced in the Vedas.

Despite some academic resistance, though, Robert Gordon Wasson moved merrily along, insisting he had proven beyond doubt the identity of the Vedic soma, and intent on further proving the widespread use of hallucinogens among those not only in the East but also in the West, setting his focus next on the Eleusinian Mystery. In ancient Greece, the agrarian mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone, which it is believed had derived their rituals from the more ancient practices of the Mycenaean civilization, held initiation ceremonies every year in the sanctuary at Eleusis. These ceremonies, which were kept secretive and considered profane if performed outside the sanctuary, involved in a variety of dramatic reenactments of myths, the displaying of certain sacred objects, and commentaries on all of them, including warnings that if one were to divulge the mysteries, the penalty was death. It sounds very much like Masonic ritual in that way, and also like Mormon temple rituals, which were cribbed from Masonry. The Eleusinian Mystery was supposed to climax in a grand vision of the afterlife. This, of course, is what led Wasson to suspect the involvement of psychedelics, or entheogens, and he recruited classics scholar Carl Ruck to help him investigate. At some point in the Mystery ceremony, a potion or philtre was consumed by the participants, called a kykeon, so Wasson and Ruck homed in on that element of the ceremony as the ingestion of a psychoactive substance. Unfortunately for Wasson’s mushroom theory, the kykeon’s ingredients were recorded: water, barley, and mint or pennyroyal. But not all hope was lost for their theory, as they brought on a third collaborator, Dr. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, who told them just what they wanted to hear, that a certain fungal parasite, Claviceps paspali, commonly known as ergot fungus, tended to grow on barley and other grains, and alkaloids present in it, long term exposure to which can cause convulsions and gangrenous symptoms called St. Anthony’s Fire, also caused hallucinations. It was in fact ergot from which Hoffman had synthesized lysergic acid.

So it seemed Wasson had found his entheogen theory for the Eleusinian Mystery, which he and Ruck argued was strengthened by the fact that Socrates’ protégé Alcibiades, a known libertine, was once convicted in absentia of having participated in the Mystery rite in a private residence rather than in the sanctuary, giving the impression that the use of this psychedelic was spreading outside the cult of Demeter and Persephone into illicit recreational use. While Wasson might have been disappointed that it wasn’t fly agaric, he seems to have taken comfort in the fact that ergot fungus also, sometimes, developed little tiny caps like miniscule mushrooms. And not to let his beloved mushrooms languish too much, he and Ruck still suggested that, while the potion used in the central, so-called “Greater Mystery” initiation ceremony was infused with ergot, in the preliminary “Lesser Mystery” ceremony, a wild mushroom might have been ingested. Again, as with soma, their theory is by no means proven, but some evidence supporting it did recently turn up outside of Greece.  In northeastern Spain, in what was once a colony of Greater Greece, Mas Castellar de Pontós, a sanctuary built for Greeks unable to sail across the Mediterranean to participate in the Demeter and Persephone Mystery rites at Eleusis, was excavated in the 1990s by an archaeologist, and in one miniature chalice there, not unlike the cups in which the kykeon was served, the chemical signature of ergot alkaloids was detected. Of course, it was also detected in teeth among remains discovered at the site, indicating that ergotism may have been rampant in the region and offering the further possibility that there are other reasons the alkaloids may have been present, but it is at least some archaeological support for the theory, something that Wasson’s soma theory has always lacked. And ergot, it turns out, would take the entheogenic theory of religion a lot further than Wasson’s toadstools.

The Return of Persephone, by Frederic Leighton, a depiction of the myth that formed the basis of the Eleusinian mystery cult.

Already in the late 1980s, before Wasson’s death, he was extending his entheogen theory to encompass all forms of religion, seeing in every culture and every age the presence of his beloved mushrooms or some similar psychoactive agent. While the academic partner he had inspired, Carl Ruck, focused still on ancient Greece, arguing that hints in Greek theatrical writing and philosophy further suggested that the mysterious wine of Dionysus was an entheogen and the mythical Hyperborean fruits from Appollo’s garden were none other than the Siberian fly agaric mushroom, Wasson turned his dilated pupils to another region on the Mediterranean and began to suggest the influence of his mushrooms in ancient Hebrew religion, thus ushering in Judaism and by extension Christianity into the entheogenic fold. He suggested that the biblical story of Adam and Eve eating of the fruits of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was yet another reference to eating the fly agaric, which grew only at the foot of a certain type of tree in certain climates. The fruits eaten by Adam and Eve made them in some way like God, just as the soma Wasson claimed to be the same mushroom allowed its consumers to partake of the divine. He further suggested that any culture that deified or considered sacred a tree, any Tree of Life myth the world over, must also have been a reference to trees at whose foot grew the sacred mushroom. After Wasson’s passing, there was a long lull in publications on the topic, but eventually Carl Ruck and others, like Daniel Merkur and Brian Muraresku, took up where Wasson left off. Merkur argued in his book The Mystery of Manna that manna, the miraculous bread that God provided the Israelites to sustain them in the wilderness, which according to his interpretation of scriptures was also associated with visions of God, was actually bread with ergot fungus. There are, unsurprisingly, problems with this interpretation as well. Even if we were to accept his explanation that the notion of manna having fallen from heaven was pure myth, which I would certainly be disposed to accept, he suggests that this ergot-tainted bread was purposely given to the Israelites by Moses because the prophet had promised them a vision. This would suggest that Moses just had a huge quantity of this tainted bread on hand and knew it would give them visions. If we were to accept this, then we must also ask why there is no mention of ergot poisoning occurring among the Israelites who ate this tainted bread daily. Merkur goes on to connect manna with showbread, a sacramental bread placed in the Temple of Jerusalem, within the presence of the Ark of the Covenant. He argues that this ergot-tainted bread was taken as a prophetic initiation, inducing visions, and that if any died of ergotism because of taking it, they were considered to have been smitten by God himself, a further explanation for the deaths said to have been caused by the Ark. This is certainly a creative explanation, though it does not seem to accord with the biblical accounts of people who died instantaneously simply from touching the Ark, or the many people said to have been killed simply from looking at it the wrong way. And though it is tempting to suggest the plague of tumors visited upon the Philistines when they stole the Ark was really ergotism, which causes extreme skin conditions, the fact is that the small amount of showbread kept not in the Ark but near it at any given time would not have been enough to affect entire populations of people even if it were what Merkur suggests it was and had been stolen along with the Ark.

Merkur and Ruck and most recently Brian Muraresku have extended the ergot sacrament hypothesis further in the last 20 years or so, arguing what is essentially a psychedelic version of the pagan continuity concept, the idea that pagan traditions did not cease to exist but were rather adopted and changed to suit the needs of early Christians—a concept that is all but proven in many regards, as I have demonstrated time and again, particularly in my holiday special episodes. Their argument is essentially that the psychedelic ritual experience of the Eleusis Mystery was embraced by early Christians in the form of the Eucharist, the ceremony commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine were ritually consumed. As with other examples used in the entheogen theory of religion, the Christian sacrament was said to be the consumption of Christ’s flesh and blood, the ingestion of God himself, which confers some aspect of godliness upon the participants. This can be compared to the Mexican ingestion of “god’s flesh” mushrooms, the Hindu ritual of eating the deified soma, and the notion that when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree’s fruit they became like God. Therefore, whether the bread of the Eucharist were originally an ergot-tainted bread, or whether the wine drunk were some psychedelic brew hearkening back to the powerful wines of Dionysus, they argued that the Eucharist ceremony was, in its earliest and most true character, a hallucinogenic experience. One specific piece of supposed evidence Ruck relied on was the 16th century Isenheim Alterpiece, a German painting of the crucified Christ that depicts his skin as pitted with lesions or sores, which Ruck suggested lends credence to the notion that Christ suffered from ergotism. As usual, though, this logic just doesn’t hold up. First of all, we know why Christ was depicted this way on the alterpiece. It was painted for a monastery that specialized in caring for plague victims and those suffering from ergotism, so the idea was clearly to draw a connection between Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the ill at the monastery. But even if we reject this explanation, the idea that the painting revealed a secret about Christ’s ritual use of ergot would require us to believe that this was a known fact even in the 16th century, that it had been kept as a secret for more than a thousand years, only occasionally hinted at in iconography. As we will see, this is the central problem with the entheogen theory of the origins of religion, that it depends on a massive conspiracy theory.

The Gathering of the Manna by James Tissot

Many other claims about entheogens influencing the foundation of both Judaism and Christianity have been put forth. It has been suggested that, since the acacia tree contains DMT, another entheogen that has been called the God or Spirit Molecule, perhaps Moses inhaled it during the episode of the burning bush. And since cannabis grew commonly in the Middle East, perhaps it was the original incense burned at altars, a theory that appears to be supported by recent archaeological discoveries at shrines in Israel, where traces of cannabis were found. This leads to the further notion that cannabis may long have been infused in the anointing oil so commonly described as being applied in biblical times. The anointing oil used by Moses in Exodus is described as being composed of cinnamon, myrrh, and something called “kaneh-bosm,” which it was understandably thought might be cannabis, though others argue that it was actually calamus, or sweet flag. In the early 2000s, Ruck promoted the research of Chris Bennett and Neil McQueen, pointing to the discovery of traces of cannabis in vessels from Judaea and Egypt as further evidence that holy anointing oil was infused with cannabis, leading to the further suggestion that when Christ anointed the sick and healed them or anointed the possessed to cast out their demons, he was actually applying a cannabis salve, the effects of which are known to ease pain and calm seizures, which might of course have been mistaken for demonic possession. Then there was the further and far more extreme argument of John Allegro that early Christians were really a mushroom cult, and that there really was no Jesus at all, that he was just a personification of their sacred mushroom, the Amanita muscaria, an untenable claim that likewise partook of the vast conspiracy theory on which much of these wider claims about the origin of religion rely. I’ll talk in greater detail about Allegro’s claims in this year’s Xmas special, but we can see this tendency just in the theories of Robert Gordon Wasson, the Mushroom King, who more than any others who might have been inspired by his thinking tried to connect all religions to some ancient precursor religion based on ritual psychedelic use.

By Wasson’s reckoning, wherever coniferous trees grew, the fly agaric might grow, and the prehistoric cult of the mushroom may have begun in Siberia, spread to Europe, the Middle East, and even the Far East from this mysterious northern Mushroom Kingdom then called Hyperborea by some. Likewise, this mushroom cult must have been carried over the land bridge into the Americas, thus explaining its persistence among indigenous cultures. And throughout the millennia it evolved, through syncretism entering into new religions and developing new mythological trappings. As evidence, he strings together numerous disparate images, suggesting that the Indo-Iranian people’s reference to the “single eye” must surely have referred to his beloved mushroom, and therefore all other references to beings with only a single eye, like the cyclops, must also have been coded references to psychedelic mushrooms. Likewise, he draws a tenuous connection between any possible mythological creature that has only a single leg or foot as necessarily being a cryptic reference to the mushroom that grows on a single stalk: the “single-foot” soma, the Greek Monocoli or “One-leg” people, the Steganopodes or “Cover-foot” monsters of medieval legend, the “one-sided man” of Siberian Chukchi lore also known as the “halfling” (a connection to Tolkien that I didn’t expect to find), and the hurakan or “one-leg” mentioned in the Mayan Popol Vuh. He even goes so far as to suggest that Satan might represent the red fly agaric mushroom because the devil is commonly depicted as having a club-foot, and thus has only one good foot, though how this identification of the mushroom with evil would work with an overall theory that the mushroom was sacred in Western religions is not entirely clear. When issues like this come up in Wasson’s writing, he merely suggests that the sacred mushroom has been suppressed by what he calls “mycophobes,” or mushroom haters. He blames mycophobes for the negative reputation mushrooms have developed, for insulting nicknames like “toadstool,” and for the disappearance of their use in modern Western religions. Whenever the point is made that mushrooms and other psychedelics are not in use in the very same religious rituals today, he rationalized that in all but a few of the cultures that supposedly used to consider the ingestion of entheogens sacred, their ritual use was put to an end and they were replaced with other substances. As to why this would happen, it must have been the mycophobes who wanted rid of their hated mushrooms, or perhaps it was because of a shortage—though this last notion really doesn’t make sense when it comes to ergot fungus, which might grow on bread anywhere. And the central role of these entheogens in so many religions was kept secret, only referred to in ambiguous language, because, Wasson argued, talking about the most holy mysteries of religious rituals was a taboo. But let’s consider this a moment. The idea that a taboo prevented the open revelation of the nature of so many different religious rituals, even after those rituals had changed and no longer used their former hallucinogenic sacraments, is a bit hard to believe. If the practice was stamped out as a kind of reform, it would have been written about in polemics and preached against. And if it had been suppressed, when had it been suppressed? If clues were present even in medieval and Renaissance art, then it was either still active relatively recently, or at least known about. So in the end, the entheogenic theory of the origin of religion is essentially a claim of massive cover-up, perhaps the most massive conspiracy theory ever dreamed up, as it must involve almost every culture and people from every era of human history. Such a conspiracy claim simply cannot be credited.

A depiction of the first ritual taking of the Eucharistic elements.

I am not sure how many people of faith listen, how many religious listeners I may still have. While I recognize that several of my episodes in the past may have driven such listeners away, I nevertheless like to think that some remain, listeners whose faith is not shaken by my skeptical polemics. Perhaps some of you who find that your faith does not rely on a literal interpretation of the Bible or who can comfortably reconcile your beliefs with science find that you can enjoy my podcast for what it is: one man’s rational seeking after the truth. For those of you who have faith and still listen, this one’s for you. Although the entheogen theory of religion seems like it might be the kind of view of religion that I would support, as it’s a great topic for atheists and agnostics who may want to make religions look foolish or hypocritical, on further researching the topic, I simply found the scholarship questionable or even downright sloppy, and the overall premise fundamentally flawed. And considering the source, Robert Gordon Wasson, it appears unreliable from the start. He was a tool of the CIA and MK Ultra, but we maybe won’t hold that against him. What’s more relevant is that Wasson was an amateur, a hobbyist. He may have invented the field of ethnomycology, but he didn’t study botany or cultural anthropology. He was a Wall Street guy who got turned on by psychedelics. It’s true, he studied journalism, but he spent far more time with JP Morgan, and it should be noted that he got the job at JP Morgan because he had written an article in 1937 that attempted to exonerate JP Morgan of certain war-profiteering accusations. After the firm hired him, he became a vice president, but it’s not often mentioned he was Vice President, specifically, of Public Relations. His job was rhetoric, spinning the facts to make his preferred view convincing, and that is what he did in his spare time too, arguing that psychedelics had fostered all religion. And certainly he was not neutral in his research, as he sometimes liked to claim. In his dismissal of mycophobes, he identified himself as a mycophile. In his discussion of mushrooms as the forbidden fruit, he portrayed himself and his wife, with whom he began his study of mushrooms, as a kind of Adam and Eve who had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge. In short, he was quite a character, but not very credible. As for those who came after him, Carl Ruck, who certainly was an expert classicist, was again no authority in the more relevant fields of history, religion, ethnology, mycology, chemistry, etc., and certainly was working out of his field of expertise when he began writing about Christian sacraments and Renaissance art. Daniel Merkur is a clinical psychoanalyst, and thus also appears to be a researcher into these religious topics in an amateur capacity. The most recent proponent of the theory, Brian Muraresku, whose book, The Immortality Key, resurrected the claims of Carl Ruck, is a lawyer, but at least his undergraduate degree appears to have been in the Classics, with a linguistic focus on Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. However, one need only look at who he has associated himself with to begin to question his reliability. History falsifier Graham Hancock wrote the foreword to his book, which should be a massive red flag, and he tends to promote the book on the podcasts of those who amplify misinformation and toxic ideology, like Lex Fridman, Jordan Peterson, and Joe Rogan. Overall, while the corpus of writings developing the entheogenic theory of religion do make convincing individual arguments, such as that the Vedic soma and the kykeon of the Eleusinian Mystery were likely some sort of psychoactive substance or narcotic, the grand unifying theory of religion it puts forth has never convinced the scholarly community and cannot be credited as anything other than a conspiracy claim. And I hope that this conclusion will demonstrate to religious listeners that in this podcast, in my own evaluation of claims about religion, I can be open-minded and am willing to defend religions and religious beliefs at least against attacks that lack merit.

Further Reading

Merkur, Daniel. The Mystery of Manna: The Psychedelic Sacrament of the Bible. Park Street Press, 2000.

Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. St. Martin's Griffin, 2023.

Ruck, Carl. “Was there a whiff of cannabis about Jesus?” The Times, 12 Jan. 2003. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/was-there-a-whiff-of-cannabis-about-jesus-b3ncmnl0b8w

Wasson, R. Gordon. Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1968. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.449342/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, Carl A.P. Ruck, and Albert Hofmann. The Road to Eleusis : Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., 1978. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/roadtoeleusisunv0000wass/mode/2up.

Wasson, R. Gordon, et al. Persephone’s Quest: Entheogens and the Origins of Religion. Yale University Press, 1986. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/PersephonesQuest/mode/2up.

Technological Angels: The Religious Dimension of UFO Belief

In considering the cover-up claims made by UFO whistleblowers and conspiracy speculators for the last seventy years or so, one central question is why. Why would the US government or other governments feel compelled to keep such a momentous historic milestone from humanity? Dark sider UFOlogists spin their fiction about a Faustian bargain with malevolent EBEs, selling out citizens in exchange for advanced technology, but of the more down-to-earth conspiracists—and conspiracy claims are so varied that there actually are more pragmatic and realistic conspiracist beliefs—they rely on the old saw that the government wants to avoid a general panic like that seen during the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. In fact, as I discussed in a bonus episode back in 2021 called Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!, there is convincing evidence that the widespread panic caused by the Welles broadcast was overblown by newspapers in a media hoax to make radio look bad, creating a scandal where one did not really exist. In reality, for a long time, we have seen people’s reactions to the possibility of disclosure, as those in the UFO community call the long-awaited revelation of extra-terrestrial visitation. When Bob Lazar’s false claims went viral, people didn’t riot in the streets, but many descended on the town of Rachel, Nevada, near Area 51, hoping to glimpse a saucer. And when Bob went viral again on Rogan, millions did not riot, but rather expressed a similar interest to “see them aliens,” Thousands traveled to Nevada again, and in the end, they just used it as an opportunity to plan a music festival, which was to be called Alienstock. In 2017, when the Pentagon’s UAP program was exposed in the New York Times, and in 2021, when the Department of Defense released and acknowledged already leaked and viral videos of UAP and when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released its first annual report on the topic, and now in 2023, when David Grusch went before congress to allege a secret UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program, on none of those occasions was there panic among the general populace. And this was not because most were skeptical and disbelieved it. Rather, these events were typically met with ironic detachment and indifference. On social media, many posts were made saying “So aliens are real. I still gotta pay my rent.” This summer, during the UFO whistleblower hearings, NBC News remarked on this, with the headline, “Are aliens real? People online don't seem to care either way. The congressional hearing on UFOs was met with a collective shrug by many Twitter and TikTok users.” And the Washington Post likewise reported, “Congress asks: Are aliens real? Many Americans respond: Meh.” So if it’s no longer a panic or riots the supposed government cover-up fears, what else? Some have suggested that the faith of the religious is being sheltered, fearing that the discovery of other sentient species in the universe would challenge ideas about mankind’s unique role as the Creation of God. Such a revelation would be akin to the Copernican revolution, when the world’s religions were forced to reckon with the fact that the Earth was not the center of the universe but rather, as Carl Sagan put it, “an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” But ever since the discovery in 1996 of what was at first believed to be fossilized bacteria in a Martian meteorite, a claim that has since been refuted but still served as a milestone in the field of astrobiology, theologians and believers everywhere have already come to terms with the notion of life elsewhere. Western religion and Christianity, which especially relies on the notion of an incarnation of God being sacrificed to redeem mankind, has proven very adaptable to the notion, considering that God may have likewise redeemed numerous other creations through similar incarnations. In 2016, the Center for Theological Inquiry at Princeton invited two dozen theologians to consider the question, and some of these religious scholars predicted that the discovery of alien life would actually strengthen religious traditions rather than weaken or undermine them, as many would turn to their faith for some sense of how to process and contextualize their new place in the universe. And certainly we can already see this sort of reaction among those in government privy to classified UAP information. As I mentioned in part two of my UFO Whistleblowers series, it appears some in the intelligence community have decided that the unidentified aerial phenomena they hear about must be celestial beings, whether demons or angels. And this view has spread among legislators who are learning more about these UAP programs, like Republican representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, who was quoted as saying “In my opinion I think it’s either angels or manmade.” Then there is the notably unbalanced Qanon-supporting representative of Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently said of UAP, “I’m a Christian and I believe the Bible…. And I think we have to question if it’s more of the spiritual realm. Angels, or fallen angels.” This religious dimension of UFO belief is actually nothing new, though, and looking closely at the intersection of UFO mythology and religious thought and the similarities between belief in religion and belief in alien visitation can help us come to a clearer understanding of the psychological and spiritual drives of such beliefs. Taking a skeptical view of both alien visitation and religion leads me to believe the similarities between these two faiths, one ancient and the other more modern, actually serves to discredit both.

At the beginning of my massive documentary-style series on UFO whistleblowers, I mentioned that early in the podcast, I made an episode on UAP of which I’m not especially proud. At the time, in 2018, I didn’t really know what the podcast was. I knew I wanted to do some critical thinking and dig into some esoteric topics, but I had more of a focus on historical mysteries, and I was cross promoting with some paranormal podcasters that were in the same pod collective as I was back then. In the episode, I relied on the illustrated survey Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times, by Jacques Vallée. At the time, I considered Vallée to be the most academic and reliable of UFO researchers, so I was happy to find this work compiling seeming UFO sightings throughout history by what I then considered to be a credible author. And I still consider Vallée as far more credible than others in his field. For example, he thoroughly debunked the Philadelphia Experiment hoax, and I relied on his work there in my episode on the topic. And although I didn’t mention it in my recent episode on Bill Cooper, Vallée also rather famously interviewed and discredited that conspiracy kingpin. But my opinion of Vallée and the work Wonders in the Sky has since changed. Based on the work of Jason Colavito, I have come to recognize that Vallée and his so-called “Invisible College,” a group of educated scientists who took an interest in UFOs and the paranormal, including J. Allen Hynek of Project Blue Book and physicist Hal Puthoff, who listeners may remember for his research into psychic phenomena and remote viewing, were driven by their obsession with the occult and supernatural and have been instrumental, again and again, in getting the U.S. government interested in funding studies of absolutely bonkers claims, like those at Skinwalker Ranch, where a government research project spent taxpayer money searching for shapeshifting dogmen and space poltergeists. The story of Skinwalker may need to be told elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that Vallée and Puthoff, like the infamous George Knapp, was also on eccentric billionaire Robert Bigelow’s payroll to promote the UFO and paranormal claims of his think tank, the National Institute for Discovery Science. Colavito has also gone point by point through the “prodigies” listed in Vallée’s Wonders in the Sky, demonstrating how he took nearly all of them out of context, relied on poor translations, and presented fake quotes as genuine.  And more recently, researcher Douglas Dean Johnson has made a convincing case that Jacques Vallée is guilty of cherry-picking and omitting inconvenient evidence in order to present stories in such a way that they favor his views. All of this further makes me cringe in embarrassment at that early episode of the podcast, and it may be that I produce a more definitive episode about Vallée and his Invisible College in the future, especially if I can score an interview with Colavito, whom I’d love to have on the podcast. For the sake of this topic, though, I wanted to highlight that much of what Vallée took out of context in his book Wonders in the Sky, the accounts of “prodigies,” or luminous visions in the sky, actually seem to have been references to natural meteorological phenomena, sun dog optical illusions or references to the disk of the sun or the disk of the stars, old astronomical and astrological terms. These prodigies, although explainable with historical context and our modern understanding of the world and our perception of it, were often at the time taken to be some kind of omen or divine sign. What Vallée did was project modern notions of UFOs backward onto these historical accounts of religious visions. That is, by definition, presentism, a kind of cultural bias in historical analysis. Perhaps Vallée can be forgiven this, since he is no historian, but we should instead look at things the other way round. Rather than suggesting that the similarity of UFO beliefs today to ancient religious beliefs and visions somehow proves those ancient beliefs valid and shows that it was UFOs all along, perhaps we should instead consider that belief in extra-terrestrial visitation today is just another example of humanity’s tendency to seek meaning in the skies, and that this should not be considered any more valid than those superstitions in antiquity.

Worship of Aten, the solar disk, a sun worship religion dubiously presented as a flying saucer religion by some.

Certainly in Western religion, the emphasis has been placed on the sky or the heavens as the abode of deities and divine beings, and thus has been designated the focus of believers’ faith. The Hebrew word for heaven, shamayim, is traced back to an Akkadian word for “sky” and another word for “waters,” thus meaning “Sky waters” or “lofty waters.” This derives from an ancient conception of the earth as a flat disk, supported by pillars, and the sky above as a dome, or firmament, that was blue only because of the cosmic ocean of waters beyond. This weird cosmogony was the original flat-earther notion; God had raised this solid dome and supported it on the pillars of the Earth in order to separate the waters below from the waters above, making a pocket of habitable space for mankind. In the dome were installed windows to let in precipitation, and on the underside, God demonstrated His artistry with the lights of the heavens, which served as a kind of bulletin board, as in them could be divined prophetic signs and wonders. Certainly the heavens were the abode of the divine, where angels and God were known to dwell, and whenever these celestial beings came to mankind, or whenever a person went to them, it was referred to as a descent to Earth and an ascent up to heaven. The traditions of Christianity continued this focus on the skies, with Christ locating his “Father who art in Heaven,” with the conception of the Holy Spirit descending from “on high,” and his disciples’ reports that he himself ascended to heaven after his resurrection. Likewise Islam continued this theme with Muhammad’s heavenly ascension, journeying into the skies to observe the stars and speak with angels and the dead. Nor was Western religion unique in this regard. Certainly some pagan and Eastern traditions focused more on our natural surroundings and invested them with the qualities of the divine, but many others venerated sky gods, like Ahura Mazda of Zoroastrianism, Zeus of ancient Greece, Jupiter of Rome, and the Sumerian Anu. The list goes on and on, among ancient Egyptians, the Incans, the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Hindu, and the endless names of Chinese Sky Emperors. From sun worship to wind gods enthroned on clouds, the concept is so widespread across so many disparate faiths and cultures, appearing in so many pantheons, that comparative mythology offers a name for it: the sky father. While proponents of ancient aliens like Erich von Däniken take this as evidence of alien contact in apparently every ancient culture in antiquity, an inversion of their reasoning seems far more logical: this universal tendency to seek supernatural meaning in the skies has in more recent years, with the influence of science and the Enlightenment, evolved to encourage new beliefs about the inhabitants of the heavens that are nevertheless equally religious in nature.

The idea that modern folklore about UFOs and aliens can be likened to religious mythology was not lost on early thinkers on the topic either. French psychologist and UFO researcher Aimé Michel noted the similarity of ideas about aliens to ideas in Greek antiquity about daemons, some of which, so-called eudaemons, were benevolent and others evil, a belief that was later Christianized in notions of angels and demons, the latter even using the same Greek word. And theologian Ted Peters, in the seventies, wrote in “UFOs: The Religious Dimension” that belief in UFOs was nothing more than “scientized religion,” in that believers “do want a celestial savior, but that savior will not be mysterious; instead, he will be fully comprehendible and scientifically explainable according to the laws of nature.” One of the first thinkers to recognize this tendency to place UFOs in the same role as angels and demons or gods and to suggest it was not only an explanation for widespread belief in alien visitation but also an explanation for UFO sightings themselves was Carl Gustav Jung, the Swiss founder of analytical psychology. In his book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, he asserts that it is hard to consider them “objects” at all, “because they behave not like bodies but like weightless thoughts.” Jung surmised that it was no coincidence that our preoccupation with flying saucers and alien contact began during the Cold War, when the looming threat of nuclear war had already invested the skies with the specter of death from above. In contrast to this existential threat, however, UFOs and the ETs that many began to believe piloted them, came to be viewed in the 1950s and beyond as not only technologically advanced but also morally superior beings come to save us from ourselves. This view of aliens in flying saucers as our saviors caused Jung to suspect that UFOs or our ideas about them were simply conforming to the established archetypes of religion. For those unfamiliar with the term, the quintessential Jungian view of psychology was that human beings inherit universal patterns of thought into which we organize our perceptions, and religion specifically can be understood as conforming to these patterns or archetypes. By Jung’s reckoning, in a world of science and technology, humanity was beginning to replace outmoded notions of sky gods with what he called “technological angels.” To Jung, identifying saucer sightings as a kind of religious experience meant that, while in some cases sights of actual things in the sky might be misconstrued according to this quasi-religious interpretation, in other cases perhaps nothing real was seen at all, or rather, the things “seen” were only figments of ecstatic imaginations. Objects actually caught by radar may likewise, he reasoned, be mundane phenomena invested with the religious mystique of the UFO. But Jung actually took his evaluation of flying saucers as a psychological phenomenon beyond the domain of the mind, thinking that perhaps the imaginations of those who believed they saw saucers were actually creating some physical manifestation of their beliefs, which in turn could be seen by others and observed with radar. “[T]he  projection-creating fantasy,” he wrote, “soars beyond the realm of earthly organizations and powers into the heavens, into interstellar space, where the rulers of human fate, the gods, once had their abode in the planets.” Of course, he would not be the first to entertain this parapsychological notion of a thought-form or tulpa, the notion that human belief could make the unreal real. While this is quite a stretch, scientifically speaking, there was further, more concrete reason for Jung’s identification of UFO belief with religion. Not long after the advent of saucer mania came the rise of UFO contactees in the 1950s, and the formation of outright UFO cults, all of which had their roots in alternative religions.

The 1958 cover of Jung’s exploration of UFOs as psychological phenomena.

The tendency to make UFOs and aliens into sacred figures like deities has been remarked on by modern academics, like religion scholar and historian Catherine Wessinger, who observed that “increasingly in new religions, extraterrestrials and space aliens are the superhuman agents that act in the roles previously filled by God, gods, angels, and devils.” These new religions, or as they’re more commonly labeled, cults, actually began to appear long before the rise of flying saucer mania. In 1758, a Swedish philosopher named Emanuel Swedenborg published a pseudoscientific work whose ponderous title is typically translated as Worlds in Space, but in its entirety is Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System, Which Are Called Planets; and Concerning the Earths in the Starry Heaven; and Concerning Their Inhabitants, and Likewise Concerning the Spirits and Angels There from What Has Been Seen and Heard. Swedenborg was formerly a scientist, writing exclusively on chemistry and mineralogy, who had transitioned into theological treatises and then went full-blown visionary mystic, claiming that, much like Muhammad, he had ascended into the heavens, visiting other planets and detailing the anatomy and cultures of all their inhabitants, including the native beings of the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Interestingly, he called them all “spirits,” even though he described their bodies and organs in detail. Swedenborg’s work should be viewed as mere fiction, telling as it is that he only visits the planets of our solar system known by science at the time. His work also conforms to a literary trope, that of the “fantastic voyage,” a popular kind of story, like Gulliver’s Travels, in which a traveler discovers a strange civilization that serves as a kind of satire or parable in order to teach us some lesson about our own world. Swedenborg, however, never admitted to writing fiction, but rather transformed himself into a revelator figure, and though he never founded a religion, he did speak in his works about a “New Church,” and in the years after his death, a cult following did develop in reading groups and among those who studied and interpreted his many weird writings. In 1787, fifteen years after his death, his New Church was eventually organized in England, and this Swedenborgian church would be brought to America by none other than John Chapman, a nurseryman and conservationist who has been immortalized in tall tales as Johnny Appleseed. But besides this Church of New Jerusalem, as it was called, and its several denominations, Swedenborg’s influence can perhaps more widely be seen in his inspiration of another quasi-religious, pseudoscientific movement: spiritualism.

Spiritualists, those who claimed to act as a medium through which contact with the dead and other spirits could be made, first arose in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York, a hotbed of new religions out of which both the Millerites and the Mormons arose. In that milieu, the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, with his claims of psychic ability and spiritual travel and a “world of spirits,” was combined with the teachings of Franz Mesmer, who claimed that a group of people chained together by holding hands could amplify the paranormal power he called animal magnetism, and these two developed into the practices of séance and mediumship. And interestingly, spiritualists did not only claim to be able to contact the dead. They also claimed to contact extra-terrestrials. Helene Smith, a French medium, claimed in the late 19th century that she, too, like Swedenborg, had spiritually traveled to Mars and encountered Martians. And Sara Weiss, an American medium, claimed the same in the early 20th century. Just as Swedenborg’s account of travel through our solar system has been revealed to be false through his omission of all planets not known at the time that he wrote his works, so too the claims these mediums made of having visited Mars have been disproven because of their reliance on inaccurate notions popular at the time. They both included descriptions of canals on Mars, a notion that actual works of engineering could be seen on the planet’s surface, a false notion that arose because of a poor translation of Italian and that has since been definitively debunked with higher resolution imagery of Mars. This conflict between science and those who claim extra-terrestrial contact tends to be persistent. The claims of contactees and UFO religions blend the occult with materialist scientific ideas, and thus when scientific errors are corrected, they too much amend their doctrines. But this never stopped such claims from proliferating. Many are the supposed alien intelligences contacted through séance and telepathy. The most influential of these were the “Ascended Masters” of Madame Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy, a 19th century religion that drew its teachings from her writings, many of which were proven to have been plagiarized. Blavatsky’s religion grew directly out of spiritualism, for she started out as a medium. Eventually she claimed to be in contact with and passing on the teachings of these “ascended masters,” who were extra-terrestrial entities dwelling on Venus. Despite the many and thorough debunkings of Madame Blavatsky as a con artist, which is a whole can of worms that I’ll have to open in a future episode, Theosophy had an outsized influence on on many thinkers. In fact the notion of a tulpa, or thought-form, which Carl Jung was playing with in his explanation of UFO sightings, was itself a Theosophical concept. And Blavatsky’s assertions about alien intelligences from Venus being “ascended masters” have cropped up time and time again in the stories of contactees, some of whom also went on to found religions of their own. Guy Ballard, a California mining engineer, began claiming in 1935 that he had met with Blavatsky’s Venusian ascended masters in a cavern inside Mount Shasta, and he went on to found a cult called the “I AM Activity” in which he supposedly passed on the new teachings of Blavatsky’s Venusians to his followers. Following the advent of saucer mania, perhaps the most influential or infamous of supposed contactees, George Adamski, who faked UFO photos and claimed to have been taken on a Swedenborgian voyage across the solar system, was known to have been a Theosophist before making his claims, and his Nordic-looking aliens also just happened to come from Venus. And George Van Tassel, a contactee whom I mentioned in a recent episode, who would start a religion called “The Ministry of Universal Wisdom,” claimed to have been in contact with an “ascended master” from Venus named Ashtar, whose spiritual revelations he compiled and passed on to his believers.

Emanuel Swedenborg, the originator of so-called “astrotheology.”

Many are the UFO religions founded on the spiritualist concept of channeling or telepathically being in contact with extra-terrestrial intelligences or spirits, such as the Mark-Age movement, based on the claims of a supposed contactee whose organization received promotion in the pages of Ray Palmer’s magazine Fate, which did so much to propagate UFO myths, or similar groups whose teachings were always received through channelers, like the Universarium Foundation and the Extra-terrestrial Earth Mission.  Some emergent UFO religions or cults did not seem to have much connection to spiritualism or Theosophy but rather represent a kind of syncretism of Christian theology and UFO mythology. The most prominent example of these is the Human Individual Metamorphosis group, who also called themselves Total Overcomers Anonymous, or UFO People, but who went by another name during the last years of their existence, a name that would become infamous after the group’s mass suicide: Heavens Gate. Other UFO groups, however, tend to mash up all of these influences, spiritualism and Theosophy with Christian elements, like the Aetherius Society and the Summit Lighthouse, whose founders claimed to be in contact with Ascended Masters from Venus and claimed that Jesus had been one such Venusian being. One of these religions was based on the teachings of a supposed venusian called Unarius, a group led by two channelers, Ernest and Ruth Norman, who also claimed to be reincarnations of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene. Then there is the more atheistical Raëlian Movement, whose prophet, a Frenchman named Claude Vorlihon who had taken the name Raël, began claiming that he had been contacted by extra-terrestrials called Elohim. Elohim is, of course, a word translated as angels in the Bible, and Raël claimed these aliens had simply been mistaken for angels in antiquity. Throughout history, he claimed, the Elohim had created alien-human hybrids to serve as their prophets, among them included the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, and, of course, himself. His organization relies on membership fees, and one of their major practices is “sensual meditation,” as adherents are guided toward achieving “cosmic orgasm.” The church’s founder, Raël, also organized an exclusive order of women meant to serve as the sexual consorts of the Elohim, which until their arrival would just sexually gratify him, it seems. So here we find many of the hallmarks of a cult, but not all UFO religions are so easily categorized. One of the most successful UFO religions is Scientology, which is classified also as a secularized religion or a psychotherapeutically oriented religion, or just as a privatized religion or scam, but can certainly also be classified as a UFO religion because of its emphasis of an ancient alien myth regarding the origin of humanity, the “Xenu myth,” which they themselves call a “space opera,” admitting its science-fictional nature.

Even among UFO contactees who never start or join a religion focused on UFOs, though, we still see the clear connection of their UFO beliefs with religious concepts and experiences. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the claims of UFO abductees. Of course, much of the alien abduction phenomenon can be adequately explained based on the issues with hypnotic regression. I spoke a bit in my most recent patron exclusive minisode, which delved a little into the famous claims of Betty and Barney Hill, specifically highlighting some theories about the surfacing of traumatic memories surrounding accidental awareness, or waking up under anesthesia during medical procedures. There is also the general unreliability of hypnotic memory regression, which I will likely discuss more in my next patron exclusive. And a further rational explanation of many other abduction claims is that they conform to the experience of sleep paralysis, which may involve hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations. Interestingly, this phenomenon can also be used to explain other supposedly supernatural phenomena or myths. As I spoke about in my episodes on vampires, it serves as a clear explanation of the accounts of revenants troubling townspeople in their sleep. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis and its attendant hallucination also explains claims of demonic visitation, and has even been called the “incubus phenomenon,” named after demons that supposedly attack one sexually while one is in bed, an incubus being a male version of this demon and a succubus the female version. Taking a Jungian view of these experiences, religious symbolism is most common in dreams, and while religious views of the past might have colored interpretations of the shadow figures of sleep paralysis hallucinations as demons, if our collective unconscious has adopted a newer, space-age conception of sky gods, as Jung suspected, it is reasonable to believe that many modern minds would interpret these hallucinations as extra-terrestrials today rather than as demons. Moreover, we see the sexual aspect of incubus and succubus encounters present also in many of these abduction experiences. Abductees claim to have been not just poked or probed painfully, but to have their genitals examined and to engage in sexual intercourse, claims that have led to the belief that extra-terrestrials seek to inter-breed and create some hybrid offspring. Whether or not the experiencer views their alien abductors as benevolent, neutral, or malicious, they still tend to be led to a kind of religious epiphany by the experience. Many abductees claim their abductors impart some moral lesson for them to pass on to the rest of humanity, an aspect that further helps us categorize these as quintessentially spiritual or religious experiences. Then there are those whose abduction experiences are horrifying, who view their abductors as evil, or we might say demonic, like horror writer Whitley Strieber, whose book on the topic bears the very religious-sounding title Communion. Indeed, he explicitly compares his “visitors” to demons, claiming they wield a “technology of the soul.” Strieber has actually argued against an exclusively materialist interpretation of abductee experiences, emphasizing their religious character. And seemingly unrelated to his abduction experience but further indicating his tendency toward religious experiences or visitations resulting in spiritual epiphany, Strieber later claimed to have been visited by an angelic type of character, a mysterious man who came to his hotel room and helped guide him to a new understanding of God.

“Der Traum der Gräfin Marguerite von Flandern” by Vincenz Georg Kininger, a clear depiction of the incubi phenomenon that may today present as the alien abduction phenomenon.

One last way in which UFO beliefs have been observed syncretizing with religious traditions is simply through the reinterpretation of Western religion through the lens of UFOlogy. This is the very kind of presentism I spoke about in the beginning of the episode, which serves as the bread and butter of ancient astronaut proponents like Erich von Däniken. These revisionists will scour scriptures for anything that might be construed as sounding related to the UFO phenomenon and hold it up as evidence of their UFO beliefs. Thus the descending of God onto Mount Sinai, which if anything just sounds like the description of a thunderstorm, is construed as the landing of an extra-terrestrial vehicle. Likewise the pillar of fire that led Israelites out of Egypt must also have been some ET craft. Perhaps the most commonly cited is Elijah’s ascent into heaven in a chariot of fire, though if we read that closely, this chariot of fire, led by horses of fire, only is said to separate Elijah from his son, and he is actually borne into heaven by a whirlwind, but even a whirlwind is close enough for those who want to find flying saucers in the Bible. They look at the Star of Bethlehem and see a saucer, they look at the heavens opening and God’s Spirit descending on Christ at his baptism and see a saucer, they look at the bright cloud that appears at Christ’s transfiguration and see a saucer, and they look at the cloud that hid Christ from their sight during his Ascension and again see a flying saucer. Whenever an angel appears, whenever the Holy Spirit descends, they speculate that it may have been a UFO or an alien or some kind of beam technology, and this backward thinking, this inverted logic, can be seen also in claims that UFOs are commonly depicted in religious art from the Renaissance. Indeed, there are numerous paintings, such as “The Annunciation with Saint Emidius” by Carlo Crivelli, 1486, in which a beam appears to come out of a circle in the clouds right into the Virgin Mary’s head, and “The Baptism of Christ” by Aert De Gelder in 1710, which depicts the Spirit descending on Jesus like beams of light out of a circle in the sky, and “The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John” by Domenico Ghirlandaio, sometimes called Our Lady of the Flying Saucer because of a luminous shape in the sky up at which a shepherd stares in the background. To my embarrassment, I actually used details of this painting, without any analysis, as the artwork of my old episode on UAP in history. The more I research and realize the problems with that early episode, the more I cringe at keeping it up in my feed. So while I quietly remove the episode from my public feed, let’s look at these Rennaisance paintings to see why they most certainly are not depicting flying saucers.

First of all, it is absurd to think that these paintings prove something about events in the Bible. They were painted more than a thousand years after the events they depict. The only thing they can show us is how such religious traditions were being conceived of and portrayed in Rennaisance artistic trends. And we must look back at the scriptures that inspired them to understand these portrayals. The heavens are said to have opened at Christ’s baptism, so the circle overhead through which the spirit of god descends like beams of light is not a disk-like object but rather a circular opening, a window in the firmament, or heavens. As for the circle in the sky beaming something into Mary’s head in Crivelli’s “Annunciation,” we know from the title and subject of the image that this is meant to portray angels communicating to Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God. There are very high-resolution images of this painting online, and if you zoom in, you can clearly see that it’s no flying saucer. Rather, it is two concentric rings of angels in a roiling cloud. You can see their cherubim faces and wings. This unlocks the meaning of all of these paintings, including the strange object hanging in the skies behind Our Lady of the Flying Saucer. These depictions derive from the Renaissance artists’ clearer understanding of how biblically-accurate angels were described. Most I think have by now seen the viral social media memes saying “Here’s what angels really look like,” suggesting typical depictions of angels are all wrong and that the religious don’t even know their Bibles because angels really were just a terrifying mass of wings and eyes. There is some element of truth to this, as specific angels, seraphim and cherubim, are described in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation as having numerous wings, not just two, and numerous eyes as well as multiple faces. Of course, there are also descriptions of angels and archangels as being humanlike, so as always, don’t get your understanding of history or mythology from a meme. But the clincher here comes from the numerous detailed descriptions of angels in Ezekiel. The prophet’s vision repeatedly talks of cherubim forming into “wheels,” or circling up. Likewise, his vision of God enthroned describes how the throne is borne aloft by these very same angelic wheels. Of course, those who seek some confirmation of UFOs in the Bible take his description of “wheels within wheels” out of context and claim it to be yet another biblical flying saucer, but what Ezekiel is actually describing is the formation of angels into rings that encircle and carry the throne of God. It seems abundantly apparent that this is what Renaissance artists were depicting when they painted divine circles in the sky: either rings of angels or the very throne of God as described in the Bible. To project modern ideas about space aliens onto the intentions of these artists or onto the traditions of ancient religions is really to misrepresent and revise them.

Aert de Gelder’s “Baptism of Christ” (c. 1710)

The modern tendency to project newer ideas about space travel and alien visitation onto old, inherited religious ideas, and the desire to reconcile the two claims into one coherent worldview, may be more deeply entrenched among military officials, the intelligence community, and lawmakers than we might suspect. One of the first signs that this perspective was spreading in those fields came in 1994, when two former Air Force officers self-published a book called Unmasking the Enemy, claiming that because witnesses had described UFOs as vanishing like ghosts, they must actually be demons. That’s right, they jumped right past hallucinations and mass hysteria and any sort of rational explanation having to do with experimental technology like stealth, and they went right to demons! And in 2010, UFO and paranormal researcher Nick Redfern claims to have stumbled onto what appeared to be a secret group within the Department of Defense called the Collins Elite that was dedicated to investigating the possibility that UAP are actually angels and demons. Redfern is known to uncritically repeat some of the most outrageous claims of conspiracy and the supernatural in his work, so I would caution that he’s not exactly a reliable source, but after his book, when wild conspiracy claims about the Collins Elite began to spread online, he tried to correct the record, explaining that the only thing he had discovered, by being put into contact with members of the alleged group through a priest who had been approached by them, was that they started out as a group of Christians who came to this conclusion about UFOs in the 1980s, met and discussed their ideas with others, growing their numbers during the 1990s, and eventually, through the Defense Department contacts of some involved, ended up getting some state funding. According to Redfern, they are not a large or powerful organization, just an assemblage of like-minded people, and their activities are mostly focused on briefing congressmen and senators on their theory that UFOs are demonic. This is absolutely a baseless conspiracy claim from an unreliable and unverifiable source, but based on the fact that we know, from the book Unmasking the Enemy, that this theory was prevalent in the Air Force in the 90s, and we further know from the comments of Lue Elizondo that some shadowy figure in the Pentagon expressed the same theory, and we know that legislators like Marjorie Taylor Greene have started floating this theory themselves, it certainly seems believable. Redfern suggests that the Collins Elite specifically chooses to approach legislators who might be likely to believe their theory, and the notion that some rogue group of religious officials in the Pentagon may be whispering into the ears of already bonkers representatives like Greene that UFOs are probably demons is terrifying.

It seems quite possible that such a group as the Collins Elite, working behind the scenes like lobbyists, may have pushed for the recent congressional hearing in order to make a public spectacle and bring the issue into the limelight—a kind of religious evangelism through government that should be prohibited by the separation of church and state. But still, while such a group, if it exists, may be growing in its influence, and the syncretism of Christianity with UFO beliefs appears to be continuing apace, it is my personal view that there are others within the military and intelligence community who will never subscribe to such a theory since they already know that UAP are not angels or demons or aliens because they know exactly what classified technology is being mistaken for them. My personal pet theory, which I did not arrive at on my own and has been floating around for decades, is that most sightings that are hard to explain with mundane phenomena like birds and balloons and optical illusions, can be explained by radar spoofing technology. Indeed, certain recent UAP described by Navy pilots as orbs with a cube inside have been identified as radar-reflecting balloons. And for any sightings that involve impossible maneuvers or speeds, there is the potential explanation that particle beams may be theoretically projected, from the ground or from an aircraft, creating a glowing plasma ball in the sky that can be seen by the naked eye and by instrumentation, could be made to look like it was performing maneuvers and achieving speeds that no aircraft possibly could, and could be made to disappear at will simply by hitting the off switch. This is, admittedly, only theoretical, which any deeply classified technology would be until it has been revealed that we have had it for years, but it should be noted that we use very similar technology today in the medical field, to project protons for targeted radiation on cancer, in a procedure called proton beam therapy. It may likewise be speculation, but to me it seems a more rational and feasible explanation that does not smack of religion at all.

Further Reading

The Gods Have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds. Edited by James R. Lewis, State University of New York Press, 1995.

https://journalnews.com.ph/the-collins-elite-what-in-hell-ufos-demons-and-putting-the-picture-straight/

Gallant, James. “Angels of the Singularity.” The Fortnightly Review, 16 Oct. 2022, https://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/10/gallant-angels-singularity/.

Jung, C.G. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Translated by R. F. C. Hull, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/carl-jung-flying-saucers-a-modern-myth-of-things-seen-in-the-skies-0_202012/mode/2up.

Partridge, Christopher. “Alien demonology: the Christian roots of the malevolent extraterrestrial in UFO religions and abduction spiritualities.” Religion, vol. 34, no. 3, July 2004, pp. 163-189. ScienceDirect, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048721X04000570.

UFO Whistleblowers, An American Tradition - Part Three: Bob Lazar

This does not represent a complete transcript of the episode or list of my sources, as the podcast version of this episode contains significant archival audio, some of which actually serves as source evidence for the argument I make. Please listen if you are interested!

Just a few years ago, in September of 2019, a proposal for American civilians to descend upon a Top Secret military research installation gained viral support on social media. The U.S. military base in question is located within the Nevada Test and Training Range at Nellis Air Force Base. Specifically, it is part of the Tonopah Bombing Range located at the dry bed of Groom Lake, a tract of land known as Area 51, famous in urban legend for being associated with flying saucers and aliens. The event to Storm Area 51 was treated as a joke by both the media and the participants, but the government appeared to take it seriously, issuing stern warnings ahead of the event and beefing up security during the gathering, which only drew about 1500 curious youth and spectators to surrounding towns, with only about 150 actually trekking out to the gates of the facility. It ended up being more of a fun happening or festival than a serious raid. The response of the federal government, though, only served to exacerbate longstanding myths about the base’s harboring of secret alien technology. Strangely, this event came years after the government began to ease security and tug back the veil of secrecy surrounding Area 51. Indeed, the fact that the dry bed of Groom Lake was being used as an airstrip was rather openly acknowledged from the beginning of the site’s use. Though the existence of the facility there and especially its purpose had long been classified, in 1998, the Air Force did acknowledge the “location known as ‘Area 51’” on Groom Dry Lake, asserting the “[s]pecific activities and operations conducted” there “remain classified and cannot be discussed publicly.” Then in 2013, when in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, the CIA finally released an official history of certain spy plane programs, the existence and purpose of Area 51 was further acknowledged, complete with maps of the site. As a result of this declassification and release of information, as well as a great deal of investigative reporting in previous years, the world actually knew a lot about Area 51 and what really went on there long before some kids started planning their Naruto run at its gates. We know that, in 1955, the Central Intelligence Agency visited the Nevada Test Site, a nuclear proving ground under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, and decided that the Groom Lake salt flat was a perfect natural airstrip for their spy plane project. Since the end of World War II, reconnaissance of Soviet atomic facilities had become paramount, and stealth was the name of the game. Groom Lake would be the perfect site for testing the U-2 spy plane and for training its pilots, and the site would remain in use for decades for test flights of the Lockheed A-12 and the F-117 Nighthawk. The flights of these high-altitude experimental aircraft also provide a clear and rational explanation for many of the reports of strange sightings in the skies over the area as well. But regardless of this revelation, which was already something of an open secret by that time anyway, the myth of Area 51 aliens or extra-terrestrial technology persisted and inspired the social media event of 2019 mainly because of the claims of one man, Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked at a secret facility outside Area 51 on a UFO reverse engineering program. This supposed whistleblower has been absolutely discredited, but today another man, David Grusch, is making very similar claims about top secret programs reverse engineering non-human craft, and Lazar, as well as his longtime promoters, have been asserting that Grusch’s testimony somehow vindicates Lazar. In this third and final installment of my series on the longstanding American Tradition of UFO Whistleblowers blowing hot air, I look at Bob Lazar’s complete lack of credibility and suggest that rather than Grusch vindicating him, his disproven assertions rather should cast doubt on the reliability of Grusch’s similar claims.

At the outset of this episode, I must explain how the claims of a UFO hoaxer, which as I said had been thoroughly debunked decades earlier, could have possibly been influential on the Storm Area 51 phenomenon and might even be connected today to the claims of David Grusch before Congress. While it is true that Bob Lazar’s claims had long ago been systematically refuted and exposed as false, because of a recent documentary, he was having something of a moment in 2019. The movie was called Bob Lazar: Area 51 and Flying Saucers, and during the promotion of this film, Lazar appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience. This was in June 2019, and by the end of that summer, millions of people were threatening to storm Area 51. I think it’s pretty common knowledge the kind of reach Rogan’s podcast has. At the time, he was boasting some 190 million downloads a month. The importance of Joe Rogan’s amplification of Bob Lazar’s old, refuted claims and filmmaker Jeremy Corbell’s promotion of them cannot be underestimated. He gave Lazar a massive platform, and though he may have asked a few pointed questions, it’s clear throughout that he’s handling Lazar with kid gloves, as though careful not to confront him too much. After this episode, I’m sure you’ll agree that there is much that Rogan should have raised in the interview and made the audience aware of, facts that Corbell’s documentary also failed to emphasize. The fact that the viral Facebook post suggesting the storming of Area 51 was created within a week of the airing of Rogan’s interview of Lazar, I think makes the connection exceedingly clear. Corbell and Lazar and Rogan absolutely could have gotten some kids shot with their reckless propagation of conspiracist misinformation. And now 4 years later, just this summer, we saw another UFO whistleblower sit before a congressional panel and make very similar claims about the reverse engineering of alien technology. Now I should clarify that Grusch currently enjoys legal whistleblower protections that Bob Lazar never did. In fact, the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 came into effect a month before Lazar ever went public with his claims, yet he never attempted to claim these legal protections. Moreover, unlike other true whistleblowers who went public with real information, like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, he has never faced federal prosecution or prison, which should serve to discredit his claims at the outset. While these contrasts may seem to put Grusch into an entirely separate category from Lazar, what may surprise many is that there are suspicious connections between Lazar and Grusch. Now, here at the end of my series, I finally tie that red yarn around a pin in the photo of George Knapp, veteran Las Vegas TV news reporter, and pull it taut to John Lear, whose wild alien conspiracy claims Knapp aired on television, and I take that red string past my photo of Lear’s first supposed whistleblower protégé, Bill Cooper, to the photo of Bob Lazar, another “whistleblower” that John Lear would introduce to the world and whom George Knapp would put on TV. From Lazar’s photo, that red string originating from George Knapp extends to Jeremy Corbell, Knapp’s protégé and cohost of his podcast, who made the film that put Lazar back on the map. And finally, the red string terminates at my photo of David Grusch, who long before his testimony to Congress had met with both Corbell and Knapp, discussing his supposed revelations with them and perhaps even being counseled or coached by them. After all, look at the film of Grusch’s appearance before Congress, you can see these two, Knapp and Corbell, Bob Lazar’s biggest boosters, sitting right behind Grusch.

Bob Lazar is sometimes credited with being the first to reveal the existence of Area 51 to the public, but this is not really accurate. Certainly Lazar’s claims helped to spread the word about Area 51 and to popularize notions about it, but his naming of Area 51 was not proof of inside knowledge of the facilities there. First of all, there had long been reports linking the Nevada Test Site and Groom Lake to UFO sightings. These sightings had actually begun with the first U-2 flights. The extreme altitude at which these planes flew meant that, when the pilots of commercial aircraft caught sight of them, they simply could not comprehend what they might have been. And though they flew at night, they were at first silver and reflected lights from below. They would actually be painted black in order to help them better blend in and reduce the number of such UFO sightings. Nevertheless, Groom Lake had a reputation already, years before Lazar’s appearance, as a hotbed of UFO activity, and Lazar was not even the first to reveal on television that this secret part of the base was called Area 51. This occurred the year before, in 1988, on the television program UFO Cover-Up?: Live! On this program, Bill Moore and his partner Jaime Shandera, the men responsible for spreading the “Majestic-12” forgery, introduced two informants, Falcon and Condor, whose faces were hidden in shadow and whose voices had been electronically garbled, claiming they were high-level UFO whistleblowers. These individuals seem to be the first to publicly identify the facility as Area 51. So who were these men? One common theory about Falcon was that he was none other than Rick Doty, the AFOSI disinformation agent tasked with feeding crazy ideas about aliens to UFOlogists. Bill Moore so strenuously denied this that it seemed like he protested too much. If this were the case, if Doty were Falcon, it would mean the Air Force themselves had revealed that the facility was called Area 51, and that they had done so in order to encourage the false belief that there was spooky alien stuff happening there, rather than the very real spy-plane programs and other classified projects that probably were being conducted. The UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program made a big deal about confirming Falcon’s credentials, which of course, in the case of Rick Doty, they would have been able to do.

But actually, the mention of Area 51 by name came from the other informant on this program, Condor. Even with his voice garbled, the tenor and cadence is very similar to that of John Lear, at least to my ear. Could John Lear, aviator turned “dark side” UFOlogist conspiracy nut, have been Condor? Interestingly, years later, when a screenwriter was working with Bob Lazar on adapting his claims to film, Lazar went through an old calendar with the writer, and on October 14th, 1988, Bob had indicated that he’d watched the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, and he is on tape telling the screenwriter that he watched it to see John Lear on TV, the same John Lear whom his calendar indicated he had met ten days earlier. Well, this program can be viewed in its entirety online. John Lear did not appear on the program, unless, indeed, he was one of the supposed government informants. And even a year before the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program, back in 1987, John Lear was already telling George Knapp on Channel 8 that the government was hiding alien technology out at Groom Lake. So the question then becomes, how did John Lear learn the official name of Area 51? If we look back into Lear’s past, before he ever went on the air with George Knapp to express his UFO cover-up hypothesis, we find that he was an anonymous source on a scoop story out of Knapp’s news center about stealth aircraft being tested at the Nevada Test Site. Bob Stoldal, the head of KLAS-TV News and George Knapp’s boss, had worked with Lear before, and as it turns out he had done a great deal of digging into the Nevada Test Site for years, learning more and more about a particular patch of ground that went by various names. Apparently, he learned from a map on the back of a brochure printed for the visit of President Kennedy that this section of the test site was designated Area 51. Thus we see the name Area 51 was earlier turned up through good old-fashioned investigative journalism, was probably learned by John Lear through his association with the television news journalists of that station, and was then repeated through a voice garbler on live TV and shared with his other darksider UFOlogists, as well as, most likely, with a certain gangly man who came to meet him in 1989, interested in UFO research, who later that year would claim he managed to get a job out at Area 51.

According to George Knapp, Bob Lazar’s first appearance on television came as a result of a last-minute cancellation. Apparently, Knapp reached out to John Lear seeking someone else to interview, and Lear recommended Bob Lazar. Knapp conducted his first interview with Bob Lazar in a news van on John Lear’s front lawn. Lazar appeared in shadows, using the false name Dennis. He claimed that there were numerous extra-terrestrial craft—flying saucers—being dismantled and tested out at Groom Lake. This is the first time he claims that he was involved in working on the propulsion system of the craft as well. The interview spread these claims very far at a time when the Internet was still in its infancy, being aired on other stations. Well George Knapp knew ratings gold when he saw it, and he managed to get Lazar to come back and go on the record under his real name. In this second interview, he went more in-depth about the propulsion systems he was supposedly working on, mentioning anti-matter reactors. He describes being flown to Groom Lake and placed on a bus that drove him to an even more secret facility, S4, at another dry lakebed, Papoose Lake, south of Area 51. Now this little detail, about the flights conducted by military contractor EG&G to Area 51 has been highlighted as proof that Lazar was telling the truth, because EG&G did in fact conduct these flights, called Janet Airlines, ferrying workers to the base frequently. Moreover, his knowledge of the geography of the base seems to impress people that Lazar is being truthful. However, if we examine the calendar that Lazar shared with the screenwriter interested in adapting his story, we find, first, several inconsistencies, as well as indications he had doctored the calendar to support his story, and some indications of what he was actually up to. So for example, he had noted several trips out to the area before he supposedly started working there, and one entry that mentioned getting an old photo of Groom Lake blown up, which is exactly what one might do if they were planning on making up a story about the place. He had also written and then scribbled out EG&G in more than one place. He said some of these entries were his interviews with the contractor, but he could not explain the scribbled-out entries. Perhaps he was actually researching EG&G and learning about their regular flights out to Area 51. Some have suggested the Janet flights were not as secret as has been claimed. But what appears to me to be the biggest indicator that Bob Lazar was never actually on such a flight is that he seems to have told George Knapp that the flights left from EG&G or near EG&G. In fact, they departed from the westernmost terminal of MacCarran International Airport, some three miles from the EG&G facility. Perhaps he knew something about these flights. He may have even known people who did work for EG&G, people had taken a Janet flight out to the base, but as we will see, there are numerous reasons to doubt that he ever did.

The true start of Bob Lazar’s involvement with UFOs appears to begin with his friendship with one Gene Huff. George Knapp identifies Huff as a real estate appraiser. It has since been revealed that Gene Huff and Bob Lazar were already taking an interest in UFOs a full year before he started making claims publicly about working at Area 51, and several months before he was supposedly hired to work there. Gene Huff had contacted John Lear in June of 1988, wanting copies of certain UFO research materials that Lear had and offering to appraise Lear’s house in return. Huff brought his buddy Bob Lazar, who claimed that he had previously worked at Los Alamos National Lab, and because of his Q clearance, he would know whether such things about UFOs are true. As I mentioned in the Bill Cooper episode, this notion that anyone with a Q clearance who works at a lab would be able to confirm or deny all the biggest national secrets is just preposterous. If that were so, my buddy who holds a Q clearance to work at Lawrence Livermore Labs would be keeping some awful big secrets for an IT guy. It appears that Huff and Lazar may have been planning their hoax when they approached Lear for research materials. Huff would be a mainstay in Lazar’s early career, appearing with him in numerous interviews to help him keep his story straight. Once again, Lazar’s calendar and what he said about the entries in it show that he was hiding his early association with Lear, as when an entry indicated multiple meetings with Lear before the development of his claims, such as in September and October, when the UFO Cover-Up?: Live! Program aired, and November of that year. Lazar tried to claim that some of these were actually some other, random person also named John Lear. In an unbelievable coincidence that John Lear either knew was a lie or was gullible enough to believe, Lazar began telling him that now, since their discussions about UFOs, during which Lazar had supposedly been skeptical, that now he just happened to get a job at Area 51, where the secrets of aliens and their technology were revealed to him.

In March of 1989, he took Gene Huff and John Lear out to a certain spot in Tikaboo Valley to view some lights in the sky, which he claimed were saucer tests. The video footage is too poor to make out anything but a spot of light. We can hear Lear and the others marveling at its movements, but as far as we can tell by viewing it today, these are actually the movements of the camera and the unsteady hand filming it. A few different explanations have been put forth for what they saw that Wednesday night. One is that it was an experimental spy plane. Another is that it was just the Janet Airlines flight taking workers out for the night, something that happened like clockwork. One more outlandish explanation that is still more rational than aliens is that it was a test of a particle beam technology used for radar spoofing, the beam of which would not have been visible, but which would terminate in a bright globe that might have looked like a saucer below and could be dragged around the skies like a spotlight. Whatever it was that they saw, like Bob’s apparent knowledge of the Janet flights, his apparent knowledge of when there would be something to see in the night sky is sometimes touted as proof of his veracity. In fact, though, it was apparently common knowledge among area UFO enthusiasts when activity seemed most common over the base. For example, the next year, Norio Hayakawa, the very same lecture promoter of Bill Cooper briefly mentioned in the last episode, came out to Las Vegas to interview Lazar for a Japanese magazine, and he said that he came on a Wednesday because “that was the day we’d heard on the radio they did flying saucer tests.” And there is very clear, irrefutable evidence that Lazar was already driving up to those mountains and watching lights in the sky months before he ever claimed to have gotten a job there. These excursions appeared on his own calendar, and he told John Lear all about them during those early months when they first met. So there is really no reason to believe he had to have some insider knowledge to know when one was likely to see lights in the sky there.

Bob Lazar’s story was communicated in broad strokes in his interviews with George Knapp and afterward fleshed out in a short film written, produced and directed by Gene Huff and himself, The Lazar Tape…and Excerpts from the Government Bible. In one of the most hilariously melodramatic openings I’ve ever seen, Bob Lazar is filmed driving across the desert in a sportscar, approaching from a distance as eerie music plays until he is close enough to step out of the car and start telling his story. Bob says he was a physicist at Los Alamos. He claims that one day, Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, was speaking at Los Alamos and Bob saw him reading the local newspaper, the Monitor, on the cover of which was Bob, as a local reporter had written a story about him installing a jet engine into his car. According to Lazar, this somehow impressed Teller, and years later, after bankruptcy and his association with John Lear, neither of which he mentions, Teller remembered Lazar when Lazar sent him a resume and asked for his help finding a job. Lazar claims Teller telephoned him and gave him a contact at EG&G, and after some tough interviews, he was hired and flown to Area 51, then bussed to the super-secret S4. It is perhaps worthwhile to recall, here, that according to the lore surrounding Area 51, not even the president had clearance. At least that’s what Bill Cooper used to claim. Yet we are to believe that a civilian with financial troubles was granted access. Financial difficulties, it should be noted, are a well-known reason for the denial of a security clearance since financial difficulties can be leveraged to get people to reveal secrets. But no, Lazar claims he had no difficulties being granted his clearance, and soon he was being shown nine different flying saucers in the hangars of S4. They didn’t work up to this reveal. They didn’t keep him in the dark at first to see if he could be trusted. They just drove him right out to see the flying disks. Lazar described three projects related to the alien craft, projects Galileo, Sidekick, and Looking Glass. The first, Galileo, was about the method of the craft’s propulsion and fuel, which Lazar described as being gravitational wave produced by anti-matter. The second, Project Sidekick, dealt with some beam weapon of extraterrestrial origin. The third, Looking Glass, was about some technology the aliens used to look backward in time. According to Lazar, they read him into all these projects, allowing him to view a file detailing alien contact with human civilization going far back in history. Let’s just consider this. I think most people understand the value of compartmentalization on top secret programs. Lazar explains that he was brought in to reverse engineer the flying disks and worked principally on their means of propulsion. There would have been no clear reason to inform him about Project Sidekick or Project Looking Glass at all, then. So on this, the most highly classified and secret project in our government’s history, there was no compartmentalization at all, and they saw fit to just reveal everything to this former Los Alamos employee simply on the recommendation of Dr. Teller, who himself apparently had nothing to do with the project.

Lazar has told different stories about Teller’s involvement, sometimes claiming that he was not active in anything other than a consultant capacity, and other times claiming he actually ran the UFO program. The only part of Lazar’s claims that appears true is that Edward Teller was at Los Alamos the day after that newspaper article about Lazar’s jetcar appeared, but at the time, and during the 6 years that followed, Teller was not running some top secret UFO program. His papers show where he was traveling, and it was only rarely to Las Vegas. He was devoting his time in those years to political activism, and in fact, on the day that Lazar claims Teller phoned him to recommend him to EG&G, Teller was actually busy giving a speech at Cal State Northridge, which both his archives and the university newspaper confirm. The idea that he would have been so impressed by Lazar strapping a jet engine to his car that he remembered him 6 years later and thought he should be working on reverse engineering extraterrestrial technology is just preposterous. Yet this is really the only evidence Lazar has ever provided that holds up to scrutiny. In his videotape, he puts an image up of the Los Alamos Monitor cover, and then he further shows the image of a clipping mentioning Teller’s visit to Los Alamos, as if this were proof of their meeting. And at the end of his video, he shares a clip of a 1990 interview with Dr. Teller in which it appears that Teller is refusing to answer a direct question about Lazar. If we pay attention to the entirety of that clip, though, it’s clear that he is saying that what the interview keeps badgering him about is just not interesting, and that if the interviewer keeps pestering him about it, he will refuse to answer. In fact, it’s unclear if he even registers the question about Lazar, whose name he may not have even recognized. One can find this snippet of a longer interview, which was edited and taken out of context in The Lazar Tape, all over the internet, but I and other researchers I’ve contacted have been unable to find the entire interview anywhere. I suspect that if we were to listen to it in its entirety, it would be clear that it’s not the nefarious refusal to address the topic that it is presented to be. It is admittedly difficult, given the poor audio and Teller’s  heavy accent, but with some effort you can make out what he’s saying at the beginning of the clip: “if you use nuclear fuel, and not definitely, possibly…nuclear fuel is feasible, but whether these very great velocities are feasible, which are interesting if you ever want to get to another star, that is an important question. And that’s about all I can say.” So it seems clear, even from the bit Lazar and Huff took out of context, that the interviewer was putting questions to him about the kinds of propulsion Lazar was describing. Making no remarks that indicate any knowledge of some anti-matter reaction capable of producing gravitational wave propulsion, as Lazar had claimed, Teller was just commenting on the general feasibility of a nuclear fuel, unsure if such a thing might make interstellar travel possible. When he said, “That’s all I can say” it was more like “I don’t know anything more than that” rather than “official secrecy proscribes further comment,” and when the interviewer kept pushing on the same topic, that was when he said he would stop answering the questions. But even if what Lazar said about meeting Teller and about Teller recommending him to EG&G were, despite all likelihood, true, there are other issues that would have certainly come up, preventing him from being granted clearance to the Nevada Test Site and Area 51, for it seems Bob Lazar’s past was just a tissue of lies.

The story becomes even more preposterous as we look further into his credentials and see he has completely misrepresented himself. The parts of his story that have most thoroughly debunked have to do with his education and thus his claims of having been a physicist. He claimed to have masters’ degrees from both MIT and CalTech. First of all, having a master’s degree is simply not as impressive as it may sound. I have a master’s degree, and I would presume that the government, wanting an expert to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology would seek out someone with multiple doctorates. But regardless, there is ample evidence that he doesn’t even hold these degrees. One UFOlogist who actually was a nuclear physicist, Stanton Friedman, was among the first to discredit Lazar based on the fact that he simply did not have the advanced degrees he claimed to have. Neither MIT nor CalTech have any records of his enrollment. He doesn’t appear in their yearbooks. No thesis written by Lazar has ever been produced. The only education of Lazar’s that can be confirmed is his high school education, where he finished in the bottom third of his class, which means he would not have gained entry into the prestigious university’s he claimed to attend. Otherwise, he does appear to have attended a junior college, and records show he was matriculating there at the same time that he claimed to be attending MIT. Moreover, he has been consistently unable to name classmates at MIT or CalTech, and none have every come forward. When asked to name an instructor he had, he feigned an inability to recall, and then actually named an instructor from his junior college in California. Other researchers have dug up his 1980 marriage certificate, which shows that he had only completed the 12th grade. How does Lazar explain these discrepancies? Well, he says that the government is erasing any record of him. Let’s consider that a moment. For this to be true, dozens of admissions office workers at MIT and CalTech would also have to be in on it, as would his instructors and classmates. The government would have to be able to erase memories and doctor all existing copies of those schools’ yearbooks. Not only that, even if the government were capable of such an erasure, Bob Lazar himself would be able to prove it. He would have copies of his own thesis, copies of his own transcripts, copies of recommendation letters from those instructors whose names he conveniently forgot. And Lazar only ever complains about how the erasure of his credentials has discredited him, not how it has affected his livelihood or opportunities in any way, which would be the foremost effect of having one’s hard-earned graduate education revoked. Anyone with some experience of higher education knows that these things are true and thus Lazar’s claims must be false. George Knapp, however, tends to complain that he covered these things right from the start. To his credit, he did mention them. But think about that. Knapp put Lazar on the air with his identity hidden in May of that year, and then in November, he revealed his identity along with the claim that the government had already erased his past. That is a quick cover-up. It seems more likely that Lazar knew, if he revealed his identity, these lies would be promptly exposed, so he simply gave this excuse to account for them. But Knapp claimed that the mere fact Bob Lazar had worked at Los Alamos proved his educational background must have been confirmed at some point in the past. But did Lazar really work as a physicist at Los Alamos?

Knapp himself found that Los Alamos had no record of Lazar’s employment. However, Knapp dug further and discovered a phone book with listings for all workers at Los Alamos during the time when Lazar claimed to be there, and lo and behold, there was Bob’s name. Knapp presented this as evidence of a cover-up. But it has since been shown that the phone book in question listed not only scientists and other staff at the labs, but also contractors working for the Kirk-Mayer corporation, and Lazar’s name had the initials KM afterward, indicating he was just an outside contractor there, not a physicist. Kirk-Mayer hired technicians to do low level work at Los Alamos, and this lines up with other things we know about Lazar’s work history, as that 1980 marriage certificate lists his occupation as “electronics technician.” Later researchers actually managed to get physicists and co-workers of Lazar’s from Los Alamos on the record stating that Bob was something of a do-nothing employee who had been fired for trying to use the labs’ toll-free phones system to run a personal business venture. No one could doubt that Bob was certainly in Los Alamos at the time, because of the newspaper story about him and his jet car in the Los Alamos Monitor. The fact is that Bob probably misrepresented himself to this journalist, Terry England, in the same way he would later misrepresent himself to the world. But Knapp and the documentarian Jeremy Corbell have made much of the fact that the article’s author called him a physicist. Corbell, on Rogan, claimed that England told him he had confirmed Lazar’s status as a physicist at the lab back when he wrote the piece. However, in a more recent interview, England says he took Lazar at his word and denied ever saying otherwise to Corbell. Perhaps even more telling, though, is the fact that records show Bob was running a photo processing business at the same time, there in Los Alamos. On his bankruptcy filing, he lists his photo business and mentions nothing about his work with Kirk-Mayer at Los Alamos National Lab, further indicating that his role there was minor, and certainly not that of a physicist, as it was not his principal source of income.

Further evidence of Bob Lazar not being a physicist is the fact that he has never agreed to speak with a confirmed nuclear physicist who might probe his genuine knowledge. One of the first such nuclear physicists he has avoided was Stanton Friedman. And ever since, he has carefully avoided any one-on-one with anyone who might actually be able to tell he was anything other than an auto-didact, a self-taught science enthusiast who is good at giving the impression of his general understanding of scientific subjects. He is far more comfortable with other auto-didacts, like Joe Rogan. And we know he relies on technobabble to overawe and impress people. Take his jet-powered car, for example, which was supposedly such a feat of engineering that it earned him a job reverse-engineering the most secret technology on earth. Well, it turns out that, growing up in San Fernando Valley, he knew the inventor of those jet engines, Eugene Gluhareff, and as a teen he had strapped a similar engine to his bicycle. In the infamous newspaper article about his car, he claimed that the engine produced 1,600 pounds of thrust, but this is an apparent lie meant to impress the newspaperman, a further example of his self-promotion and misrepresentation. The largest Gluhareff jet engines produced only 700 pounds of thrust, and the one he had in his Honda was much smaller. Such lies for self-promotion even seem to have continued through more recent years. After Knapp’s original promotion of Lazar’s claims, but before Jeremy Corbell reinvigorated his hoax, Lazar ran a business selling mail-order supplies to amateur scientists and science teachers. When his home was raided in 2003 because he was selling the materials   make illegal fireworks and explosives, Wired Magazine wrote a short piece about it called “Don’t Try This at Home,” which amazingly made no mention at all of Bob’s claim to fame. In the article, Bob claims to have a particle accelerator in his backyard, a rather absurd claim since any particle accelerator worth its salt would be many kilometers long, and could not be powered by the Van de Graaf generator that Bob claims powers it in the article, as such generators could only produce several megavolts and a real accelerator would require hundreds of megawatts. Not to mention the simple fact that, if the authorities raided his home out of concern for explosive materials he was selling, they certainly would have also confiscated a device that uses high-energy proton beams to collide particles. Such a device could be infinitely more dangerous than any illegal fireworks.

The image used by WIRED magazine for their piece on Bob’s lab supplies business.

The most prominent display of Lazar’s supposed scientific knowledge is provided by his discussion of the means of fuel and propulsion that he claimed was used by the flying saucers he reverse-engineered at S4. In his video, he explains the science in the simplest of terms, as a “science lesson.” To summarize, he claims that the craft fire and collide particles—and here we go again with a small particle accelerator—and these are particles of a non-earthly element that Lazar supposedly located on the periodic table as Element 115. Particles of this element, he says, create anti-matter, can produce gravitational waves, and with this warping of the fabric of space and time, enables the craft to travel great distances. Now, it’s important to note that anti-matter propulsion may actually be feasible. But lest we think that this is proof of what Lazar claimed we reverse engineered in the 1980s, the fact is that we have known about antimatter for a long time, since it was first theorized by Paul Dirac in the 1930s. Even the idea of antimatter propulsion was not new, having been proposed by German scientist Eugene Sanger in the 1950s. But that idea of antimatter propulsion was to harness the energy produced by its annihilation effect, a reaction that happens when antimatter and matter collide. This annihilation effect is also the reason that it has been so difficult to harness. But the important thing to note here is that it is NOT about producing gravitational waves. Nor was the idea of gravitational waves a new idea, having been famously predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity back in 1915, long before Lazar came around. Even the idea that the warping of space and time through gravitational waves could make instantaneous travel across great distances possible was also not new. This idea really was dreamed up by children’s book author Madeline L’Engle, who after reading a book about Einstein’s theory in the late 1950s began adapting the idea for her famous novel, A Wrinkle in Time. Anyone who read this book as a kid or saw the recent film adaptation should recognize that Lazar was doing little besides paraphrasing some children’s science-fiction. What’s really interesting is that it wasn’t until 2016 that Einstein’s prediction was proven accurate, when the LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, managed to detect gravitational waves, which was not easy, since they are nearly imperceptible. It is worth mentioning, then, that the waves detected by LIGO originated from far away, generated by neutron stars. If the government were testing and operating flying saucers that generate gravitational waves right here on Earth, in Nevada, then the two LIGO observatories in Washington and Louisiana would surely have detected it.

Another supposed prediction of Bob Lazar’s touted as proof that he was telling the truth came in 2003, when Element 115 was officially discovered, or more accurately synthesized. However, any science student with a working knowledge of the periodic table could tell you that predicting an element of that designation was not some incredible feat. It was long known that an element with that atomic number might one day be discovered or created. Such is the nature of the periodic table, and Bob, who certainly did work in some capacity at Los Alamos, would have known about the search for these elements, as the Meson Physics Facility there, where he claimed to be a physicist, houses an incredibly powerful accelerator used for similar work. Teams operating comparable accelerators all over the world had been working on creating and observing these missing elements for decades. In 1970, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, they managed it with the previously unknown elements 104 and 105, and in Russia, they observed element 106, all in 1974. In the 1980s, when Bob worked as a contract technician at Los Alamos, the same was achieved for elements 107 through 109 at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, and it surely would have been talked about a lot at Los Alamos. The nineties saw the discovery of 110 through 112 and 114, and the 2000s saw not just element 115 but also 113, 116, and 118. To suggest that the discovery of this element was the result of the recovery of some extra-terrestrial material is just wrong and fails to acknowledge all the hard work of physicists in this field for decades. More than that, one of Lazar’s central claims is that element 115 was stable. Some have suggested that he read this prediction in Scientific American, which had proposed a possible “island of stability” around Element 114 in an article back in 1969, and again in an article called “Creating Superheavy Elements” in May of 1989, the same month that Lazar went on TV. When Element 115 was finally discovered, though, it wasn’t stable as Lazar had predicted, and it could not possibly be used for anything, since it only lasted a fraction of a second. Lazar also claimed element 115’s melting point would be 1740 degrees Celsius, but actually it seems to be 400 degrees Celsius. And While most are focused on the synthesis of 115, Lazar also made very specific claims about element 116, which has also since been discovered and named Livermorium. He said that, when it was synthesized—again in a very small accelerator, by firing a particle at element 115—that the resulting element emits antimatter as it decays. But now that 116 has been synthesized, we know it only emits alpha particles, which is actually typical of radioactive decay.

The problematic W2 and ID badge Lazar provided as his only evidence of his claims.

Beyond the false science that Lazar spouts, there is the false evidence he has provided of his employment at Area 51. First and foremost, his timeline for the granting of his clearance is entirely unbelievable. Understandably, since it would require an extensive background investigation, getting a high level clearance takes a long time. My friend who works at Lawrence Livermore Labs tells me it was a grueling process that took a year and a half and involved interviewing not only him but also his friends and family. But Bob Lazar claims that, for a much higher level clearance and a much more secret facility, he was interviewed by an outside contractor and within five days was on site being shown flying saucers. As evidence of his short-lived employment at S4, the supposed subsection of Area 51 he claimed to work at, he provided a W2 and an ID badge. First of all the ID badge has the letters MAJ on it, which he says was the highest level clearance possible, called Majestic clearance. I think by now my listeners will realize Lazar was trying to jump on the bandwagon of the Majestic 12 hoax, based on forged documents. But besides this, we know from other employees of Area 51 that have since gone on record (more on that shortly), that the ID badges should have showed the name Wackenhutt, the security contractor then in charge of issuing such badges. Moreover, both the badge and the W2 say “U.S. Department of Naval Intelligence.” In reality, this “department” has not existed since World War II, when its name was officially changed to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Moreover, as we know now from declassified information, the Navy was not even in charge of the base or Area 51. It was the CIA and, because they were testing aircraft, the Air Force. The notion that the Navy was in charge likely came from John Lear, who may have gotten it from his contact at the local news station, Bob Stoldal, George Knapp’s boss, who tells a story about a mysterious man claiming to be from Naval Intelligence coming to question him about the sources of his investigation into Area 51. Knapp would later describe the responses he received from the Navy to his inquiriesas his being stonewalled, but knowing the Navy was not in charge of the facility, it rather sounds more like he was seeking information from the wrong entity. Nevertheless, this notion that the Navy ran Area 51 passed via Lear into the darkside mythology of his protégé Bill Cooper, who embellished it by claiming that the Navy got control of Area 51 and alien technology through Majestic 12. We know Lazar was weaving the claims of darksider UFOlogists into his narrative, as he did it more than once. Another thing Lazar claimed was that Russians worked hand in glove with Americans on alien tech there at S4, which again seems to be Lazar’s attempt to confirm things claimed by Lear and Cooper. In truth, everything tested at Area 51 was used to spy on the Soviets, and all the secrecy surrounding the site and probably all the UFO disinformation spread by Doty and the AFOSI, was meant to confuse public perceptions of what was going on there in order to further shield the site from Soviet scrutiny. Lazar eventually admitted the badge was a fake—a “reproduction,” he called it—but he has never admitted the W2 was fake, even though it only showed that he earned a measly 958 dollars for his supposedly high-level work there, and it provided an Employer’s Identification Number, or EIN, that the IRS has told researchers simply does not exist.

In addition to notions about Majestic 12 and Naval Intelligence running Area 51, Bob Lazar also repeated claims made by both John Lear and Bill Cooper about extraterrestrials coming from Zeta Reticuli, a claim with a lot of history in the field of UFOlogy. When we notice these parallels with previous claims, there are two tendencies. We either believe Lazar’s claims corroborate and strengthen them, or we see through him that he is just parroting previous claims and claiming that what he saw substantiates them. When we examine how Lazar’s claims appear to conform to previous UFOlogical claims, it is important to remember that, as they have themselves admitted, months before Lazar ever claimed to work at Area 51, or S4, Lazar and Gene Huff came to John Lear wanting his UFO files and tapes. Specifically, it has been stated that they were interested in Lear’s files on the claims of one Billy Meier. Billy Meier is a Swiss man who in the 1970s began faking flying saucer photographs and videos. According to him, he had been in contact with the pilots of these “beamships” since he was 5 years old. They were very humanlike, he claimed, but came from the Pleiades. This is the origin of the notion of “Aryan” Pleiadians that would later be repeated by Bill Cooper and many other UFOlogists, with a clear undercurrent of racism. Billy Meier, though, was squarely on the light side of UFOlogy, asserting his Pleiadians were benevolent, founding a religion called the Free Community of Interests for the Border and Spiritual Sciences and Ufological Studies, claiming to be a reincarnation of numerous ancient prophets, including Jesus and Muhammad. While his saucer pictures and videos are just manifestly models suspended from strings—if you watch the films, you can clearly see them wobbling and swinging back and forth from what is likely fishing line—they nevertheless appear to have been used by Bob Lazar as the model for his saucer designs, many of which he has sketched in detail. Ridiculously enough, in one of his early interviews with Knapp, an image of one hoax Billy Meier photograph is put on screen in order to illustrate what Lazar says the saucers looked like. And it seems Lazar may have modeled his claims even more on Meier’s claims than just in the likeness of the saucers. Billy Meier too attempted to describe the workings of his saucers through technobabble, though he said they were powered by tachyon particles and thus were capable of time travel. It seems Lazar just tweaked this to make it more believable.

A comparison of Lazar’s and Billy Meier’s saucers

The last of the claims of Bob Lazar to consider, and perhaps the ones most subject to definitive refutation, are his claims about the specific facility where he supposedly worked. Not at Area 51 on Groom Lake, but rather a place called S4 on Papoose Dry Lake some miles to the south and west of Groom Lake. He describes being put on a bus and driven out to S4, where hangar doors hidden in the side of a mountain opened to reveal the nine saucers he saw. It has been pointed out quite a bit that he estimated the hangar door dimensions to be forty feet and elsewhere stated the saucers were fifty feet in diameter. Certainly this is one more piece of evidence against his credibility, but there is strong evidence that no such facility as S4 even exists at Papoose Lake. There is an Area 4, but that is outside of the restricted airspace, on the other side of Yucca Flats, more squarely in the middle of the Nevada Test & Training Range. Probably the closest thing would be Site-4, but this is some 50 miles northeast of there, at the Tonopah Test Range, where they train Air Force pilots in electronic warfare. So what do we know IS at Papoose Dry Lake, where Bob Lazar claims there are secret hollow mountains holding alien spacecraft? Well, we know that about half of this salt flat that he claims was used as a runway for saucer tests isn’t even within the restricted airspace that protects the neighboring Area 51 at Groom Lake, so it doesn’t seem like the government is too concerned about protecting any secrets there. We also have former employees of Area 51, who worked for years in security at the site, who have gone on record saying there is nothing out there. These witnesses’ identities can be confirmed because their employment at Area 51 was declassified when they sued the federal government in the 1990s for exposure to the toxic fumes of massive burn pits, which caused skin conditions and respiratory illnesses. It was this lawsuit and the numerous court filings and FOIA requests that would come with it that would eventually force the government to acknowledge the so-called “black facility” at Area 51. One such employee, a security guard named Fred Dunham, has gone on the record, revealing that those who really worked there view the myths about Area 51 as something of a joke.  He further describes that he and another security officer checked on Lazar’s story upon first hearing it, and saw that he had never signed in at Area 51, which any employee flying in on Janet Airlines would have had to do. Speaking of Janet Airlines, he insisted that the lights Bob Lazar showed John Lear in ’89 were just the daily commuter flight. Of Papoose Lake, Dunham insisted there is nothing out there. He further gave the reason that there was nothing out there because that area is irradiated from old nuclear testing by the Department of Energy.

This is perhaps the most important point. If Bob Lazar were telling the truth about working in a facility on Papoose Lake, spending time out on the dry lakebed during test flights, etc., then both he and everyone that worked at S4 would have developed radiation poisoning or cancer by now. They never would have built a facility in such an irradiated wasteland. We further know this to be the case because of the sad story of Jerry Freeman, an archaeologist, who infiltrated the area on foot in search of artifacts left by ‘49er prospectors. George Knapp, who’s made a good deal of money continually promoting Lazar’s story over the years, addressed the Freeman story at a conference in Denmark where he was paid to speak. Freeman did claim to find a chest of ‘49er artifacts though these were later proven to be forgeries, likely perpetrated by him since it’s unlikely anyone else would hike out there to plant them. What’s relevant here is that Freeman spent about a week hiking around Papoose, which even Knapp admits at the conference is still highly irradiated, and it led to his succumbing to cancer not long after. Knapp glosses over this, not acknowledging the evidence that this area is radioactive or the simple fact that Freeman saw no hangar doors or installations or even any UFOs while he was out there. Instead, he takes one little section out of context to suggest Freeman did see these things. What Freeman actually reported in the journal he kept was as follows: “North of my position, I occasionally caught sight of the Black Hawk helicopter, chasing the tourists away from the Air Force's front door near Groom Lake. That night as I lay awake in the darkness, high above that ancient playa, I half expected a "close encounter of the third kind," but no such luck….Near the mountainous side of Papoose I saw lights. Security vehicles? Hangar doors opening and closing? I don't profess to know.” The mention of lights on the side of a mountain, and the speculation about them being hangar doors should have been enough for Knapp. It must be remembered that Freeman was writing in 1997, long after Lazar’s claims about hangar doors on mountainsides had been made, and that Freeman was himself a known hoaxer, so we should not give much weight to his remarks, especially since his later death proved that Papoose could not be an acceptable site for any top secret facility. But Knapp was not content to just pull that bit out of context. Instead, he claims Freeman saw UFOS exit a portal in the sky. This alone should be enough to totally and finally discredit George Knapp, the Las Vegas newsman responsible for delivering the claims of John Lear and Bob Lazar to the world.  

Despite all the problems I have discussed, George Knapp consistently tries to rehabilitate Lazar’s reputation and his story, to which Knapp has harnessed his media career. He claimed that Bob had passed lie detector tests. As it turns out, Knapp was close personal friends with the former law enforcement official that he asked to test Lazar, and when the first test showed indications of deception, this polygrapher just kept testing Bob until less deception was apparent. He claimed to have gotten other Area 51 employees on the record confirming all of Lazar’s claims, but those additional witnesses have never been named or confirmed. And it was George Knapp’s protégé, a former yoga instructor and mixed martial artist turned amateur documentarian, who would go on to bring Bob Lazar’s claims back into the limelight again. Initially, it seems Corbell was working on a documentary about Knapp’s first UFO whistleblower, John Lear, but when it turned out Lear had already sold the rights to his story, Corbell went to work on the Lazar documentary. And it is telling that none of the problems with Lazar’s story are mentioned in the documentary except the inability to confirm his education and background, which is heavily implied to be the result of a cover-up. In fact, numerous researchers who have done a great deal to debunk Lazar, some of whose work will be linked to on this blog post, have revealed that they reached out to Corbell to make sure he had this information. But just like his mentor George Knapp, it seems Corbell was less interested in even-handed journalism and more interested in self-promotion. The two have crafted a wide-ranging career out of their UFO cover-up conspiracy speculation, co-hosting a podcast called Weaponized and appearing on Joe Rogan both with Bob Lazar and without him. When Lazar got a book deal for an autobiography out of all this, Knapp wrote the Foreword, and in it, he claimed that Lazar had proven his bona fides by taking him on a tour of Los Alamos, where people seemed to recognize him. I don’t know what to make of this claim. Some have said that the Meson Physics Facility did not require a high level clearance of its employees, but it still does not seem believable that an employee who hadn’t worked there for years would be allowed to give people self-guided tours and that they would be allowed to film. At Lawrence Livermore Labs, where my friend works, current employees may register friends and family to take a tour only every five years or so, and they are held to strict security protocols, led not by the employee who invited them but by a specific guide, and they are explicitly prohibited from filming. So all I can say is, that sounds like another falsehood or exaggeration George Knapp has used in his efforts legitimize Lazar.

Much as Knapp has been guilty of stretching the truth or misrepresenting the facts in order to keep the Lazar story alive, so too has his boy Jeremy Corbell. Not only did Corbell omit from his documentary the preponderance of evidence demonstrating Lazar’s dishonesty, he also misrepresented statements of sources that he cites, such as the aforementioned newspaperman Terry England, but also a Los Alamos scientist named Krangle, who denied telling Corbell that he remembered Lazar being a physicist, as Corbell reported, and Mike Thigpen, who denied confirming to Corbell that he had conducted Lazar’s security clearance, as again Corbell reported. A pattern can be seen here of a lack of journalistic integrity. Why would they risk their reputations in this way? The answer is clear going all the way back to Lazar’s first interview with Knapp, which he says had the highest ratings of any news report they ever produced. His reporting on UFOs earned him accolades from United Press International, and later it got him work with a think tank bankrolled by billionaire UFO enthusiast Robert Bigelow, who was himself obsessed with a supposed Utah hotbed for UFOs and the supernatural called Skinwalker Ranch. This, of course, led to Knapp co-authoring multiple books on Skinwalker and Corbell filming a documentary adaptation. Since then, Knapp is credited as the producer of not only Corbell’s Lazar documentary, but also another prominent UFO documentary called The Phenomenon. In short, the motivation is probably money and self-promotion. Knapp won a Peabody in 2008 for some other investigative work he produced, but otherwise his entire career is tied up in stories like Lazar’s. Knapp and Corbell would probably protest that they don’t make much from these endeavors, but considering they also get paid to speak at UFO conferences, like the one you heard Knapp speaking at in Denmark earlier, we should take such claims with a grain of salt. Bob Lazar likewise tells people that he never made a dime off his story, but considering that he sold his Lazar Tape back in the 90s for about $30 a pop, and also took a cut of a flying saucer plastic model assembly kit sold by the Testors Corporation in 1996, and has been handsomely paid to speak at many conferences and on many programs, and the fact that he probably was paid nicely for his autobiography, that too seems to be a lie.

The Testors model of Lazar’s saucer.

The events of Bob Lazar’s life continue to be misrepresented by Corbell and Knapp today. Their big gotcha evidence in the documentary has to do not with any evidence that flying saucers or aliens are real, but rather that a hand scanner Lazar described was actually in use back then. Well, Lazar described it as measuring bones, when actually, 1980s newspaper articles about the scanner’s use in Army base ATMs says it “measures the length of fingers and the translucency of the webbing between the fingers.” It turns out, this hand scanner, the IDentimat 2000, was not so secret that Bob could not have heard of it. It appeared in magazines in the 1970s and was actually shown being used in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, making it not impressive at all that Lazar would describe it, knowing as we do that he regularly cribbed from science fiction. And when, during the filming of the documentary, Lazar’s home and business was raided by police, Corbell and Knapp tried to capitalize on it, adding a new dimension to the story by suggesting Lazar had actually stolen some of Element 115 thirty years earlier and the government had only now shown up in biohazard suits to repossess it. The truth was that Bob’s company, which had been raided before for selling explosive compounds, was then being raided in connection with a murder case, because he had sold a chemical to a killer who used it to poison someone. But Knapp and Corbell don’t let facts get in the way of a good story, and that is what makes me even more leery about the claims of David Grusch, which he made before Congress this summer with George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell sitting right behind him. It appears that a year before coming forward, like John Lear and Bob Lazar before him, Grusch came to George Knapp first, at a Star Trek convention. And it seems that Knapp and Corbell were originally supposed to speak under oath at the same hearing, but instead they were just thanked. Maybe this is because congressional representatives realized the credibility of the entire hearing would be undermined by putting those two on the stand. What this should make us realize is that, despite the bona fides of Grusch’s credentials and the official channels he went through as a whistleblower and the legitimate circumstances in which his claims were made, we have no more reason to believe him than we do proven liar Bob Lazar. He is claiming the same things about reverse engineering alien craft. He provides the same amount of evidence, which is absolutely none. And he came to the world’s attention, first and foremost, through the promotion of two known UFO hucksters. So here at the end of our red string, we’ve connected Grusch to a line of BS going back more than thirty years to a crackpot pilot and a hungry Vegas reporter, and hopefully our look back at UFO whistleblowers of the past has shown us that such figures who may arise in the future may be as little deserving of our trust or confidence.

Until next time, remember, behind every fraudster there are always accomplices and enablers, people who either actively take part in the dreaming up of the lies or who support and promote them and spread it far and wide, knowing, I think, deep down, or even not that deep down, that no matter how they garnish it, what they’re helping trying to feed the public is really just a plate of crap.

Further Reading

Aguilera, Jasmine. “Area 51 Is the Internet's Latest Fascination. Here's Everything to Know About the Mysterious Site.” TIME, 17 July 2019, https://time.com/5627694/area-51-history/.

Armbruster, Peter, and Gottfried Münzenberg. “Creating Superheavy Elements.” Scientific American, vol. 260, no. 5, 1989, pp. 66–75. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/24987248. Accessed 25 Oct. 2023.

Bob Lazar Debunked. https://boblazardebunked.com/.

Freeman, Jerry. “Desert Diary: Jerry Freeman Chronicles his Trip through the desert.” Wayback Machine, 20 April 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190420154107/http://67.225.133.110/~gbpprorg/stealth/diary6.html.

Gorman, Steve. “CIA Acknowledges Its Mysterious Area 51 Test Site for First Time.” Reuters, 16 Aug. 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-area51-cia/cia-acknowledges-its-mysterious-area-51-test-site-for-first-time-idUKL2N0GH1P020130817.

Jacobsen, Annie. Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

Mahood, Tom. Area 51 and Other Strange Places, OtherHand.org, https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange-places/.

Papoose Lake Institute. https://www.papooselake.org/.

Sicard, Sarah. “How Area 51 Became a Hotbed for Conspiracy Theories.” Military Times, 26 Jan. https://www.militarytimes.com/off-duty/military-culture/2023/01/26/how-area-51-became-a-hotbed-for-conspiracy-theories/

SignalsIntelligence. Medium, https://medium.com/@signalsintelligence. (Anonymous research articles with on record interview material and primary source documents)

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

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.

 Further Reading

Jacobson, Marc. Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. Blue Rider Press, 2018.