Bill Cooper and Behold a Pale Horse

Bill Cooper and Behold a Pale Horse

Person	Milton William "Bill" Cooper (6 May 1943 – 5 November 2001)
Book	Behold a Pale Horse (Light Technology Publications, 1991)
Sales	Well over 300,000 copies officially
Claimed service	Air Force, Navy and Naval Intelligence to 1975; records confirm Navy petty officer second class, with a Vietnam tour
Key claims	Secret alien treaties and bases, Majestic 12, Kennedy assassination by his driver, AIDS as a plot
Radio	The Hour of the Time, from Eagar, Arizona, 1992–2001
Death	Killed in a shootout with Apache County deputies, 5 November 2001
Date	2004
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Bill Cooper, Tim Cooper, John F. Kennedy
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 158
Year	2004 in UFO history
Timeline	2004 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	4

Milton William "Bill" Cooper (1943–2001) was an American conspiracy theorist and radio broadcaster. He said that while in U.S. Naval Intelligence he had seen secret documents about aliens, the Majestic 12 group and joint human–alien bases.^[1] His 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse became one of the most influential conspiracy texts of the 1990s. It joined UFO lore to theories of a secret world government, and was described by The Guardian in 1997 as "the manifesto of the militia movement".^[1][2] Researchers found his claims contradictory, and much of the book turned out to be plagiarized or based on unsubstantiated documents.^[1][2]

Military service

Cooper was born on 6 May 1943 in Long Beach, California. Little is known of his background beyond his own accounts.^[1] He claimed to have served in the Air Force, the Navy and Naval Intelligence until his discharge in 1975. Public records show only Navy service, at the rating of petty officer second class (E-5), including a tour in Vietnam with two service medals.^[1] At the end of the war, while in naval intelligence, he served on a briefing team for Admiral Bernard A. Clarey, commander of the Pacific Fleet. By one account he was a "low-level clerk" who would not have had the clearance to see classified documents.^[1] He then attended junior college in California and worked for technical and vocational schools, living quietly as a school administrator until 1988.^[1][2]

UFO claims

In the summer of 1988 Cooper posted on ParaNet, an early UFO computer bulletin board. He said that in 1966, aboard the submarine USS Tiru sailing from Pearl Harbor to Seattle, he and other sailors saw a metal craft "larger than a football field" repeatedly enter and leave the water, and were ordered never to speak of it.^[1][2] His biographer Mark Jacobson argues that the Tiru story alone would not have made his name. What did was contact a few days later with another ParaNet poster, John Lear, son of the Learjet founder Bill Lear and a pilot who said he had flown for the CIA.^[1] Lear's post "The UFO Coverup" drew on the mythology fed to Paul Bennewitz by the Air Force agent Richard Doty, including secret treaties with grey aliens and experiments at underground bases.^[1][2]

Cooper and Lear spent much time together from 1988 to 1990, and Cooper's views were heavily shaped by Lear's story of alien collusion with secret government forces. In 1989 they issued an "indictment" of the U.S. government for "aiding and abetting and concealing this Alien Nation". The partnership broke down after a few years, with each accusing the other of being a CIA plant.^[1][2] Ufologists later said that some of the material Cooper presented as naval intelligence documents had been plagiarized from their own research, including items they had invented as pranks. Don Ecker of UFO Magazine ran a series of exposés on him in 1990.^[1]

In his telling, President Eisenhower negotiated a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954 that let them abduct humans in exchange for technology. He also claimed Eisenhower set up an inner circle of the Illuminati to manage the aliens and keep them secret.^[1] He tied the death of Defense Secretary James Forrestal to Majestic 12, the supposed committee of officials that appears in fake documents first circulated among ufologists in 1984.^[1][3][4] Some documents he cited could not have existed when he said he saw them.^[1][3]

Behold a Pale Horse

Published in 1991 by a small New Age press, Behold a Pale Horse has sold well over 300,000 copies officially, and many more have been photocopied or passed around free. Decades later it still sold well on Amazon.^[2] It opens with Cooper's biography, from beatings by his father to an expanded version of the submarine story and his account of discovering dark secrets in Naval Intelligence. The rest is a patchwork. It ranges over UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, a coming ice age, "depopulation" plans and a secret world government, alongside supposed secret documents, public bills and executive orders, newspaper clippings and transcripts of phone calls.^[2]

Scholars have characterized it in harsh terms:

• The political scientist Michael Barkun called it "among the most complex superconspiracy theories", and among the most influential, since it sold in militia circles and mainstream bookstores alike.^[1]
• The historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke described it as a "chaotic farrago" of conspiracy myths and extraneous documents.^[1]
• The sociologist Paul Gilroy summarized its sweep, from the Kennedy assassination to the Illuminati's supposed war on Americans.^[1]

Much of it was borrowed or unsupported.^[2]

• Its "Newstates Constitution" was lifted from a 1974 book by the economist Rexford Tugwell.
• Its opening document, "Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars", was said to have been found in a surplus IBM copier in 1986. A sovereign citizen, Hartford Van Dyke, wrote from prison in 2003 that he had written it himself in 1979.

Cooper claimed that Kennedy's driver, William Greer, shot the president with an alien-derived device, citing a video that television analysts found to be a crude fake built from the Zapruder film.^[1] He presented AIDS as a plot to reduce the black, Hispanic and gay populations. South Africa's health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang was criticized in 2000 for circulating that chapter to officials.^[1] Early printings reproduced the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with a note telling readers to substitute "Illuminati" for "Jews". The publisher removed that chapter from later printings.^[1][2]

Later years

From 1992 until his death Cooper hosted the shortwave radio show The Hour of the Time from his hilltop home in Eagar, Arizona, sending it to WWCR in Nashville for broadcast.^[1] The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as well known in the militia movement. The Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was reportedly a fan, and Cooper also appeared on Alex Jones's early shows.^[1] As he moved from ufology toward the militia and anti-government subculture in the late 1990s, he retracted his claims linking aliens with the Illuminati.^[1] On the day of the 11 September 2001 attacks he began broadcasting the "controlled demolition" theory.^[1]

Cooper believed President Clinton and the Internal Revenue Service were targeting him. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion and evaded the arrest warrant, and in 2000 the U.S. Marshals Service named him a "major fugitive".^[1] On 5 November 2001 Apache County deputies tried to arrest him at home on charges of aggravated assault and endangerment arising from disputes with local residents. In an exchange of gunfire Cooper shot one deputy in the head and was himself killed. A Marshals Service spokesman said he had vowed not to be taken alive.^[1] One later account says the shootout left the deputy dead; the main biographical account says only that the deputy was shot in the head.^[1][2]

Legacy

Cooper's writing stayed popular in hip hop, with references by Public Enemy, Tupac Shakur, Jay-Z and members of the Wu-Tang Clan, and Killarmy's 1997 album Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars took its title from his work.^[1] The X-Files drew on his mythology of a secret government colluding with aliens, including the idea that Kennedy was killed to stop him revealing them.^[1] Conspiracy Watch traces much of today's "conspiracy theory of everything", including strands of QAnon, anti-vaccine and "Deep State" movements, back to him and the book.^[2]

People and topics

• Bill Cooper — Author of Behold a Pale Horse.
• Tim Cooper — California researcher who said he received many MJ-12-style documents from anonymous sources in the 1990s.
• U.S. Navy — The U.S. naval service, whose pilots reported the UAP encounters revealed in 2017.
• MJ-12 — Disputed documents describing a secret committee managing crashed saucers.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• John F. Kennedy — 35th U.S. president, named in disputed MJ-12 memos.

On the Timeline

• Charles Bowsher audit claim (7 August 2004) — A consultant says a former U.S. comptroller general found a 'crashed UFO program' in an audit.
• Ramey memo (2004) — A 1947 photo of Gen. Ramey holding a message is enlarged, and its text is debated.

See every 2004 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Milton William Cooper”, “Majestic 12”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.