WILLIAM COOPER EXHIBIT

(Excerpted from a slightly different version of a chapter in Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief)

"If the evidence doesn't seem to fit a particular conspiracy theory, just create a bigger conspiracy theory."
-- Robert D. Hicks, In Pursuit of Satan

"I am still searching for the truth. I firmly believe that this book is closer to the truth than anything ever previously written."
--William Cooper, Behold a Pale Horse

Conspiracy theories are like black holes; they explain everything, sucking in facts the way black holes suck in matter. And, like black holes, each conspiracy theory is a portal to another universe that paradoxically resides within our own. Everything you've ever known or experienced, no matter how "meaningless," once it comes in contact with that universe, is enveloped by it, and is then cloaked in sinister significance.

People, as well as facts are prone to stumble into one of the many conspiracy universes. Once inside, the vortex only gains in size and strength, sucking in everything that person touches. Bill Cooper, who calls himself an independent UFO researcher, has entered such a universe, and it's likely that he will never return. He identifies with his theory so completely that he thinks anyone who challenges it--even his friends--do so only because they're part of the conspiracy. It is no use to point out contradictions, or even trivial errors, because Bill Cooper knows THE TRUTH.

Though William Cooper is a self-professed regular guy and ex-military man, his claims rival the Weekly World News for sensationalism. Cooper doesn't merely believe that our government signed a formal treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954, or that we have already set up a base on the planet Mars, or any number of other bizarre claims; he knows these things to be true, because while working for Naval Intelligence, he actually saw the secret documents that prove them.

Cooper burst upon the UFO scene with these claims in 1988, and has been a controversial and infamous figure ever since. He gives public lectures, is heard on the radio, sends out newsletters and, in 1991 came out with a book, Behold a Pale Horse. In UFO research circles, Cooper is best known for accusing his colleagues to be CIA agents and for physically threatening them. According to researcher Bob Lazar, "Everyone seems to have a Bill Cooper story..."

Since 1988, Cooper has been accused of being an alcoholic, a liar and a fascist or even worse, written off as a psychopath; with the exception of Jacques Vallee, his critics have focused more attention on his belligerent personality, than on the obvious contradictions and factual errors of his story. His opponents take him seriously enough that they go to great pains to discredit him, in order to defend themselves against his accusations. If the UFO researchers hadn't their own crashed saucer/government cover-up stories to defend, they might see the connections between Bill Cooper's stories and their own, as well as the--possibly inherent--relation between conspiratorial logic and some UFO phenomena.

Behold a Pale Horse is a fine example of conspiratorial logic. Therein, Cooper includes every gory detail of the sinister alien plot to control humanity, as well as the documents which supposedly back it all up. He also includes the story of his own UFO sightings while in the military, background on his involvement with Naval Intelligence, as well as a sentimental account of his ancestors' survival of the American Frontier. Cooper paints himself as a patriotic Red-Blooded American Male who loves Mom and Apple Pie and would fight and die to defend the American Way, who just happened to stumble upon the greatest secret in the history of the world.

Cooper was born into a military family in 1943, and upon graduating high school in 1961 (in Japan) enlisted in the Air Force. During his more than ten years in both the Air Force and the Navy, he was an exemplary member, earning medals, and steadily taking on greater responsibility. Soon after enlisting, he was graced with a Secret security clearance, and, outfitted with a dosimeter, worked around "REAL atomic bombs" on a daily basis. He says that he was part of the elite of the Air Force and though still a young recruit, "met a couple of sergeants who kind of adopted" him. When the sergeants told him stories about being "attached to a special unit that recovered crashed flying saucers," he didn't believe them because they always came out when the group was "half-tanked." Besides, "sergeants were known to tell some tall tales to younger guys like [Cooper.]" But a few years later, he began to believe these stories, after seeing a few saucers of his own.

In 1966, after switching from the Air Force to the Navy, Cooper volunteered for submarines. While on watch aboard the USS Tiru Cooper saw his first flying saucer. At first, Cooper was the only one to see the saucer, which was the size of an aircraft carrier, "rise from beneath the ocean" and then "disappear into the clouds." But within minutes, it was back, this time capturing the attention of several others.

Cooper recounts that everyone who had seen the craft was ordered to keep quiet about it; they weren't even allowed to talk among themselves. Cooper says that he signed documents that spelled out what would happen if he ever told anyone what he had seen: he could be fined up to $10,000, imprisoned up to 10 years, or both. Cooper says that not long after this incident, he "devolunteered" from submarines.

In 1968 Cooper was transferred to Naval Security and Intelligence School where he received special training in preparing and conducting Pacific-area intelligence briefings. His semi-heroic stint in Vietnam came immediately after this. To hear Cooper talk about it, you would think we had been in a war against space aliens rather than Communists:

The whole time I was in Vietnam and especially on the DMZ I had noticed that there was a lot of UFO activity. We had individual 24-hour crypto code sheets that we used to encode messages, but because of the danger that one of them could be captured at any time, we used special code words for sensitive information. UFOs, I was told, were definitely sensitive information. I learned exactly how sensitive when all the people of an entire village disappeared after UFOs were seen hovering above their huts. I learned that both sides had fired upon the UFOs, and they had blasted back with a mysterious blue light. Rumors floated around that UFOs had kidnapped and mutilated two army soldiers, then dropped them in the bush. No one knew how much of this was true, but the fact that the rumors persisted made me tend to think there was at least some truth in them. I found out later that most of those rumors were true.

But it was only when he was back in Hawaii, with an upgraded security clearance (Top Secret, Q, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information), that he found out what all this UFO activity meant. As a member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINPACFLT), it was Cooper's job to brief high-level officers about various documents. The contents of these documents were what led Cooper to an "18-year search" that culminated in writing Behold a Pale Horse.

Cooper's first revelation as a member of the CINPACFLT briefing team was that the Office of Naval Intelligence "had participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that it was the Secret Service agent driving the limo that had shot Kennedy in the head. ..." But this was only the tip of the iceberg. By 1972, Cooper had found out all about the Secret Government, the coming ice age, Alternatives One, Two and Three, Project GALILEO, and most sinister of all, the plan for the New World Order.

Chapter 12 of Behold A Pale Horse, entitled "The Secret Government" reads like The Weekly World News but was originally delivered as a research paper at the MUFON Symposium in Las Vegas on July 2, 1989. It contains Cooper's conspiracy theory in a nutshell. The information was supposedly gleaned during Cooper's stint as a member of the CINPACFLT briefing team, but he cannot divulge the specific sources, "for obvious reasons."

Any one of Cooper's revelations, if true, would have been enough to keep investigators, journalists, historians and scientists busy for the next hundred years. But focusing on any one aspect of Cooper's junk heap of claims is impossible. Each revelation only leads deeper into the sinister tangle of secrecy and manipulation.

Though Cooper believes that secret societies have been running the world for centuries, the modern era of secret government began in 1947, with the advent of flying saucers. Between January 1947 and December 1952 "at least 16 crashed or downed alien craft, 65 alien bodies and 1 live alien were recovered." In addition to the alien bodies, those who recovered the saucers discovered "a large number of human body parts stored within [two of the] vehicles." At the time, a special group of American top scientists were organized to study the alien phenomenon; this was all top secret, of course. In fact, the original CIA, then called the "Central Intelligence Group" as well as the National Security Agency were formed for the express purpose of dealing with the alien presence.

Cooper reveals that not everyone agreed with the policy of secrecy, and were dealt with accordingly:

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal objected to the secrecy. ... He believed that the public should be told. James Forrestal was also one of the first known abductees. When he began to talk to leaders of the opposition party and leaders of Congress about the alien problem he was asked to resign by Truman. ... Forrestal later was said to have suffered a mental breakdown. He was ordered to the mental ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital. ... Finally, on May 21, 1949, Forrestal's brother made a fateful decision. He notified authorities that he intended to remove James from Bethesda on May 22. Sometime in the early morning of May 22, 1949, agents of the CIA tied a sheet around James Forrestal's neck, fastened the other end to a fixture in his room, then threw James Forrestal out the window. The sheet tore and he plummeted to his death. James Forrestal's secret diaries were confiscated by the CIA and were kept in the White House for many years. Due to public demand the diaries were eventually rewritten and published in a sanitized version. The real diary information was later furnished by the CIA in book form to an agent who published the material as fiction. The name of the agent is Whitley Streiber and the book is Majestic. James Forrestal became one of the first victims of the cover-up.

The real story behind the movie E.T., Cooper says, is that the true-to-life alien was actually called "EBE," to stand for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. In 1951 the "chlorophyll-based" EBE became ill and though doctors, botanists and entomologists were called in, their efforts to save him failed; EBE died on June 2, 1952.

Many more aliens were on the way, however. Cooper reports that in 1953, 10 more flying saucers crashed and 26 dead aliens and 4 live ones were recovered. The newly elected President Eisenhower was in a fix because of all this, and turned to Nelson Rockefeller; together they developed a plan to "wrestle and beat the alien problem."

In the meantime, astronomers had found that large objects, first thought to be asteroids, were fast approaching earth. The objects were in fact more alien spaceships. The government subsequently used radio communications and "computer binary language" to arrange a landing, which resulted in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and this second race of aliens, who left a "hostage" as a "pledge that they would return and formalize a treaty." But yet a third race of aliens--enemies of the second race--was arriving as well. After they landed at an Air Force Base in Florida, they "offered to help us with our spiritual development," but in exchange, wanted us to dismantle our nuclear weapons. Needless to say, we didn't take them up on the offer.

By 1954, the second race of aliens had landed, and met with Eisenhower to sign a formal treaty. The U.S. Government received an alien ambassador during this meeting, whose name was "His Omnipotent Highness Krlll," but "in the American tradition of disdain for royal titles he was secretly called Original Hostage Crlll, or Krlll." Cooper says that this meeting was filmed and that the films still exist. Later, Krlll "gave lots of information, scientific data, some of which was published in the open scientific literature under the name of O.H. Krill, after being sanitized. ...Krill is still alive."

Cooper knows all the details of the treaty with the extraterrestrials. It stated that we wouldn't interfere in their affairs and they wouldn't interfere in ours; we would keep their presence a secret, and they would furnish us with their technological advances; they were allowed to abduct human beings on a limited basis for medical examination and monitoring of our development, as long as they didn't harm anyone in the process; there would also be a swapping of 16 personnel each, for educational purposes; underground bases would be constructed for the humanoid guests. One of these underground bases, a "super-Top Secret facility," was built at Groom Lake in Nevada, code-named "Area 51." Cooper adds, "According to documentation that I read, at least 600 alien beings actually resided full time at this site along with an unknown number of scientists and CIA personnel."

All these crashed and orbiting saucers, three alien races, treaties, and a cover up of the whole thing, required almost the entire U.S. government to deal with it all. But international groups, such as the Bilderbergers (which now controls the world) and the Trilateral Commission (formed in secret before 1973) became involved as well; in fact the main reason these groups were formed was to deal with the alien question. Cooper adds that "the name of the Trilateral Commission was taken from the alien flag known as the Trilateral Insignia."

Cooper's version of the now-famous "MJ-12" story is as follows: Eisenhower established a permanent committee, made up of future members of the One World Government, which became known as Majesty Twelve (MJ-12). This group would "oversee and conduct all covert activities concerned with the alien question." Among its 19 members were Nelson Rockefeller, Allen Dulles, John Foster Dulles, J. Edgar Hoover, George Bush and Dr. Edward Teller. Since George Bush was on MJ-12, he obviously knew the alien secret while President. But the general policy was to keep the alien presence so secret that even the President didn't know. Kennedy did find out, however, and the reason he was assassinated was because--you guessed it--he was about to divulge the alien secret to the American People.

William Cooper--the biggest whistleblower of them all--has not yet gone the way of Kennedy and Forrestal. The reason for this, Cooper says, is that this would show the world that what he says is true. All the conspirators can do at this point is harass and discredit him. The reason he is having conflicts with the larger UFO research community is that most UFO researchers, including Stanton Friedman, William Moore, Philip Klass, John Keel, Charles Berlitz, Budd Hopkins, Dr. J. Allen Hynek (now deceased) and even horror novelist Whitley Strieber, are really working for the CIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Even UFO Magazine, with its obviously slim budget, is financed and controlled by the CIA. And, though Jacques Vallee isn't mentioned in this particular blacklist, after one meeting and several phone conversations, he too joined the ranks of the accused.

Besides the fact that they're all famous for being involved in the UFO question, about the only thing these people have in common is that they don't agree with Bill Cooper. But, since Cooper knows the truth, questioning his information is tantamount to blasphemy. I have seen three accounts of Bill Cooper from among those on that list; two from UFO magazine, and one from Jacques Vallee. Both Vallee and UFO reveal simple details that show the obvious falsity of key elements in Cooper's story. When presented with these details, Cooper brushes them aside, sticks to his story, and eventually becomes enraged.

Perhaps the most embarrassing weakness in Cooper's story is his claim that he saw a document authored by "O.H. Krill," whom Cooper identifies as the alien ambassador to the United States. Apparently this document is well known in the UFO field. According to UFO magazine, it was conceived by John Grace a.k.a "Val Valerian," head of the Nevada Aerial Research organization. The name "O.H. Krill" was an inside joke; a woman who appeared on the TV special, UFOs: It Has Begun, had channelled an entity name CRYLLL, and Grace had "just pulled the O.H. out of thin air." During the time when Cooper was teaming up with John Lear, Cooper told a TV interviewer that he'd seen an O.H. Krill document in the early 70's. Lear apparently turned "beet red," pulled Cooper aside, and tried to tell him that O.H. Krill was just a joke. Cooper stuck to his story, however, and replied that he really did see that document in 1972. Lear subsequently dropped the issue, but then "began to wonder just how much of Bill Cooper was real."

A similar incident involves yet another document Cooper claims to have seen during the 70's. UFO researcher Bob Lazar says that in 1988 he wrote a paper at Los Alamos concerning "Project Excalibur," an "earth-penetrating, nuclear-tipped missile designed to destroy underground facilities." He gave a copy to Lear, who then gave a copy to Cooper:

...I heard Cooper reading it verbatim, word for word, at the (1989) MUFON convention. He claimed to have seen it in the mid-'70s. I then heard him on the Billy Goodman show. I called him; he recognized the voice. He said he knew who I was. I then asked him, "Bill, that Excalibur missile thing, did you get that at John Lear's or did you read that in the '70's?"

I gave him an out if he had forgotten. He said no, "I read that word for word in 1973." I said okay and thanks. That was my first confirmation that this guy was a complete liar.

Another reason that I don't think Cooper is consciously deceiving people is that Vallee had observed during his contact with him that Cooper seemed very sincere. His writing, as well, is sincere to the point of embarrassment. His behavior suggests someone who is emotionally attached to certain ideas, and the holes in his story don't seem to be the product of a slick liar, but of someone who is naive, ill-informed and very gullible. Vallee interprets Cooper's story--as well as the entire mass of disinformation floating around in UFO circles--as possible manipulation by an unknown third party; Cooper might simply be a pawn in someone else's game. Vallee suggests that Bill Cooper and others may have been fed false "top secret" documents for various reasons, such as to cover up bona fide secret military information, to test responses to alien invasion, or even to promote fascist ideology. Certain UFO sightings as well, Vallee suggests, may have been staged.

Though Cooper may well have seen some falsified documents, many of those he claims to have seen simply didn't exist at the time. Vallee's interpretation may account for certain aspects of Cooper's story, but not all of it. If Cooper is being deceived by someone, it's most likely himself. He himself suggests that he may have been manipulated, with the alien scenario as "the greatest hoax in history designed to create an alien enemy from outer space in order to expedite the formation of a one-world government."

Rather than a UFO researcher, Cooper is a classic conspiracy theorist, who cloaks 19th century xenophobia in Space-Age guise. His book even contains a reprint of the entire text of "The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," with a prefatory note, explaining that references to "The Jews" should be replaced by "Illuminati" and the word "goyim" replaced with the word "cattle." Though Cooper is trying to leave the Jews out of his list of conspirators, he's not trying hard enough. Cooper had remarked to Vallee:

There are four types of aliens. There are two kinds of Grays, including one race, not commonly seen, that has a large nose. Then there are the Nordic types, tall blond Aryans, and finally the Orange ones. They come from Orion, the Pleiades, Betelgeuse, Barnard's star and Zeta Reticuli. ...

You know, I'm not a religious man. But if you look at the Bible... The Angels could be the Nordic types and the Grays could well be the demonic ones. After all, the Bible talks about a pact with the Devil in the last days, after Israel is reinstated. Leading to Armageddon.

Cooper also reprints some documents which purportedly show the "U.S. Army Intelligence Connection with [the] Satanic Church." Michael Aquino, leader of the "Temple of Set," it seems, is also a member of U.S. Army Intelligence. I'm not sure what this information is supposed to prove, but it's clear that the principles of Freedom of Religion and Separation of Church and State mean nothing to Cooper, who claims that his only political stance is "constitutional."

In fact, Cooper believes himself to be serving a higher cause than the U.S. Constitution; he is engaged in the battle between angels and demons which will culminate in Armageddon and Doom's Day. Discrepancies, errors and even false statements just aren't very important, when you're serving TRUTH.

References

Cooper, Vicki. "The UFO Fascists," UFO, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1992.

Cooper, William. Behold a Pale Horse. Sedona, AZ: Light Technology Publishing, 1991.

Ecker, Don. "The Whistleblowers - Part I: Focus on Bill Cooper," UFO, Vol. 5, No. 4, 1990.

Vallee, Jacques. ,Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception. New York: Ballantine Books, 1991.

© 1995, Donna Kossy