On November 10, 2001, I was in Mobile, Alabama, speaking at a "Journeys Beyond" conference. Five days earlier, sheriff's deputies, attempting to serve a warrant, were shot at by conspiricist William Cooper who gravely wounded one of them, deputy Robert Martinez. The other deputies returned fire and Cooper was killed.
For those unfamiliar with his activities, William Cooper was once a divisive, almost unavoidable presence at UFO conferences and on the radio and the Internet. His wild and woolly stories were completely unbelievable, though a loyal band of followers clung to his every word. At the time, the belief that JFK was murdered by a CIA cabal was not at all unusual, but Cooper gave the killing his own weird twist. Kennedy was shot, he claimed, by the driver of his <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about car" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A> in the middle of the Dallas parade. This Secret Service hit man, he said, turned away from the steering wheel and fired point blank at the president, narrowly missing Mrs. Kennedy, John Connally and Mrs. Connally.
I once asked a Cooperite why the CIA would carry out the murder in the middle of a parade when all eyes were on the president's car, pictures were being taken, films were being shot, and three eyewitnesses (the Connallys and Jackie Kennedy) were only a foot or so away from the gunman. The Cooperite answered that since this method was so daring, no one would ever believe that it was done that way, and so the CIA could easily get away with it. And Cooper's idea of the motive for Kennedy's assassination? To keep him from revealing what he knew about the UFO coverup!
I wondered at the time of Cooper's demise how long it would take before a myth of martyrdom would arise among his fellow conspiricists. I knew that this alcoholic, emotionally disturbed man would eventually be enthroned in the far-right's Valhalla of "government victims" - innocent, peace-loving martyrs like Timothy McVeigh, James Earl Ray, David Koresh and a strange assortment of white supremacists, psychopathic homophobes and killers of abortion providers.
Well, I saw signs of Cooper's elevation five days after his death, when I was attending that conference in Mobile, Alabama. A confused young man approached me and referred to the government's "murder" of William Cooper. In the telling, the rural sheriff's deputies who tried to serve their warrant soon after metamorphosized into a sinister government SWAT team. The mythmaking machinery of paranoid rumor and Internet misinformation was on the way.
What sort of man was the late William Cooper? Shortly after his death, he was described by his friend Bill Hamilton as "an inveterate liar," and a man who "had a real love for booze and firearms." Hamilton recalled that Cooper once invited him to go to a gun show with him to "buy a type of gun that would blow a hole in an engine block. I asked why I would want to do a silly thing like that. His reply was that I should protect myself against the government." Even more significant was Hamilton's delicately worded statement that Cooper "had a difficult time telling truth from fantasy." A perfect description of the conspiricists' central affliction.
I first came into Cooper's crosshairs through the efforts of a New York City doctor, an emotionally disturbed man who wrote to Cooper to accuse me of being a CIA agent. Apparently this doctor said that he knew I was a secret CIA agent because I had told him so! (That's the way we undercover types always work: "Hello there, I'm a secret CIA agent. Don't tell anyone, particularly Bill Cooper.")
This ludicrous accusation appeared in Cooper's magnum opus, "Behold a Pale Horse," a book which also included the infamous anti-semitic, 19th century Czarist forgery, "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," Hitler's favorite late-night read. Cooper's personal style of hate-mongering manifested itself over and over again in many different areas. After UFO Magazine editor Don Ecker exposed his lies about his military records, Cooper responded by claiming that Don's wife and fellow editor, the delightful Vicki Cooper, was a former prostitute. It was, of course, a charge made up out of the whole cloth and as disgusting a false accusation as Cooper ever made.
The New York doctor in question, Cooper's source of the CIA charge against me, has harassed me for years, sending scores of letters and leaving bizarre messages on my answering machine. Once he accused me of hiring CIA agents to dress up as Con-Edison workers to dig up the street near his office so that the noise of the drilling would bother his patients. He accused me of "complicity" in the murders of both Martin Luther King and President Kennedy. In one message he listed the major traitors to America, intoning in a deep, portentous voice: "Alger Hiss...Benedict Arnold...Walter Andrus...Budd Hopkins..." Paranoia - as well as politics - makes strange bedfellows.
All the doctor's messages weren't so absurd and amusing, however. One, delivered in a cold, sepulchral voice, was simple and chilling: "I place a curse on your daughter's head." Grace was only about twelve years old at the time, and though I said nothing to her about the threat, not wanting to frighten her, for a while I tried to be near the front door to check the street whenever she went in and out of the house. And there was another message, one which finally sent me to the police: "My mind is completely gone," he said. "Now I know I can kill."
But back to Cooper for a moment. In 1992 I had major surgery. My right kidney was removed because of an encapsulated cancerous tumor, and as part of my recuperation I left the city for a short rest. When I returned, I found that Cooper himself had left a series of messages on my answering machine. He had apparently come to New York the week I was away to give a talk. His first message demanded that I attend his lecture and answer his "charges" against me, but he very generously offered to let me in free. The second bullying message was rather more vicious, saying that if I didn't come it would be an admission that I was a CIA spy, and, his language coarsening, he threatened me with even more attacks. (I assumed he had conferred with his source, my harassing doctor, about my having sent disguised CIA men to dig up the street.)
In the third message, Cooper, adopting an amazingly inept Russian accent, pretended to be a friend of Bill Cooper and warned that I had better, goddamit, show up at his lecture, OR ELSE!. For his last message, Cooper dropped the phony accent and the fake identity and berated me so obscenely that I cannot reprint it here on a family website.
I'm dwelling on all of this unpleasantness because there are still so many active conspiricists among those interested in UFO phenomena. As Cooper demonstrated, common sense is the first victim of this kind of paranoid thinking, an unfortunate situation since we need all the common sense we can muster. But I believe it is equally important to understand some of the mechanisms behind a great deal of current conspiracy thinking. One basic mechanism is the need to establish the hated group, the feared enemy, as the real cause of whatever bad thing happens in the world. Thus, to Cooper and the militia groups, Tim McVeigh didn't bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City, he was somehow a dupe, and the real bombers were the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI!
As we have seen over and over again, among conspiricists fanatical hatred and crippling paranoid fear will always edge out rational thinking and common sense.
]
Which brings me now to our field, UFOs and the abduction phenomenon, where we have lived with the knowledge that at least some branch of the government has for decades concealed from the public what it knows about UFOs. But now this generally accepted truth has been wedded to a ludicrous assertion by yet another medical conspiricist, Dr. Steven Greer. Greer ties the coverup issue to his absurd claim that all UFO abductions are really being carried out, not by the aliens, but by his own hated enemy, some dark, unknown "black" branch of our own government!
.
Since I have investigated UFO abduction cases which date as far back as the 1920's, by Greer's logic Calvin Coolidge's administration and Roosevelt's and Hoover's and Harding's all contained a black "secret government" which possessed the technology, the motive - whatever that may be - and the infallible secrecy to carry out abductions on thousands upon thousands of American children and adults over most of the twentieth century. This idea is not only preposterous, it is insulting to the vast number of abductees who recall exactly who did abduct them and what was done to them.
.
For those unfamiliar with his activities, William Cooper was once a divisive, almost unavoidable presence at UFO conferences and on the radio and the Internet. His wild and woolly stories were completely unbelievable, though a loyal band of followers clung to his every word. At the time, the belief that JFK was murdered by a CIA cabal was not at all unusual, but Cooper gave the killing his own weird twist. Kennedy was shot, he claimed, by the driver of his <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about <A TITLE="Click for more information about car" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A>" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||cars|AA1VDw">car</A> in the middle of the Dallas parade. This Secret Service hit man, he said, turned away from the steering wheel and fired point blank at the president, narrowly missing Mrs. Kennedy, John Connally and Mrs. Connally.
I once asked a Cooperite why the CIA would carry out the murder in the middle of a parade when all eyes were on the president's car, pictures were being taken, films were being shot, and three eyewitnesses (the Connallys and Jackie Kennedy) were only a foot or so away from the gunman. The Cooperite answered that since this method was so daring, no one would ever believe that it was done that way, and so the CIA could easily get away with it. And Cooper's idea of the motive for Kennedy's assassination? To keep him from revealing what he knew about the UFO coverup!
I wondered at the time of Cooper's demise how long it would take before a myth of martyrdom would arise among his fellow conspiricists. I knew that this alcoholic, emotionally disturbed man would eventually be enthroned in the far-right's Valhalla of "government victims" - innocent, peace-loving martyrs like Timothy McVeigh, James Earl Ray, David Koresh and a strange assortment of white supremacists, psychopathic homophobes and killers of abortion providers.
Well, I saw signs of Cooper's elevation five days after his death, when I was attending that conference in Mobile, Alabama. A confused young man approached me and referred to the government's "murder" of William Cooper. In the telling, the rural sheriff's deputies who tried to serve their warrant soon after metamorphosized into a sinister government SWAT team. The mythmaking machinery of paranoid rumor and Internet misinformation was on the way.
What sort of man was the late William Cooper? Shortly after his death, he was described by his friend Bill Hamilton as "an inveterate liar," and a man who "had a real love for booze and firearms." Hamilton recalled that Cooper once invited him to go to a gun show with him to "buy a type of gun that would blow a hole in an engine block. I asked why I would want to do a silly thing like that. His reply was that I should protect myself against the government." Even more significant was Hamilton's delicately worded statement that Cooper "had a difficult time telling truth from fantasy." A perfect description of the conspiricists' central affliction.
I first came into Cooper's crosshairs through the efforts of a New York City doctor, an emotionally disturbed man who wrote to Cooper to accuse me of being a CIA agent. Apparently this doctor said that he knew I was a secret CIA agent because I had told him so! (That's the way we undercover types always work: "Hello there, I'm a secret CIA agent. Don't tell anyone, particularly Bill Cooper.")
This ludicrous accusation appeared in Cooper's magnum opus, "Behold a Pale Horse," a book which also included the infamous anti-semitic, 19th century Czarist forgery, "Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion," Hitler's favorite late-night read. Cooper's personal style of hate-mongering manifested itself over and over again in many different areas. After UFO Magazine editor Don Ecker exposed his lies about his military records, Cooper responded by claiming that Don's wife and fellow editor, the delightful Vicki Cooper, was a former prostitute. It was, of course, a charge made up out of the whole cloth and as disgusting a false accusation as Cooper ever made.
The New York doctor in question, Cooper's source of the CIA charge against me, has harassed me for years, sending scores of letters and leaving bizarre messages on my answering machine. Once he accused me of hiring CIA agents to dress up as Con-Edison workers to dig up the street near his office so that the noise of the drilling would bother his patients. He accused me of "complicity" in the murders of both Martin Luther King and President Kennedy. In one message he listed the major traitors to America, intoning in a deep, portentous voice: "Alger Hiss...Benedict Arnold...Walter Andrus...Budd Hopkins..." Paranoia - as well as politics - makes strange bedfellows.
All the doctor's messages weren't so absurd and amusing, however. One, delivered in a cold, sepulchral voice, was simple and chilling: "I place a curse on your daughter's head." Grace was only about twelve years old at the time, and though I said nothing to her about the threat, not wanting to frighten her, for a while I tried to be near the front door to check the street whenever she went in and out of the house. And there was another message, one which finally sent me to the police: "My mind is completely gone," he said. "Now I know I can kill."
But back to Cooper for a moment. In 1992 I had major surgery. My right kidney was removed because of an encapsulated cancerous tumor, and as part of my recuperation I left the city for a short rest. When I returned, I found that Cooper himself had left a series of messages on my answering machine. He had apparently come to New York the week I was away to give a talk. His first message demanded that I attend his lecture and answer his "charges" against me, but he very generously offered to let me in free. The second bullying message was rather more vicious, saying that if I didn't come it would be an admission that I was a CIA spy, and, his language coarsening, he threatened me with even more attacks. (I assumed he had conferred with his source, my harassing doctor, about my having sent disguised CIA men to dig up the street.)
In the third message, Cooper, adopting an amazingly inept Russian accent, pretended to be a friend of Bill Cooper and warned that I had better, goddamit, show up at his lecture, OR ELSE!. For his last message, Cooper dropped the phony accent and the fake identity and berated me so obscenely that I cannot reprint it here on a family website.
I'm dwelling on all of this unpleasantness because there are still so many active conspiricists among those interested in UFO phenomena. As Cooper demonstrated, common sense is the first victim of this kind of paranoid thinking, an unfortunate situation since we need all the common sense we can muster. But I believe it is equally important to understand some of the mechanisms behind a great deal of current conspiracy thinking. One basic mechanism is the need to establish the hated group, the feared enemy, as the real cause of whatever bad thing happens in the world. Thus, to Cooper and the militia groups, Tim McVeigh didn't bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City, he was somehow a dupe, and the real bombers were the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI!
As we have seen over and over again, among conspiricists fanatical hatred and crippling paranoid fear will always edge out rational thinking and common sense.
]
Which brings me now to our field, UFOs and the abduction phenomenon, where we have lived with the knowledge that at least some branch of the government has for decades concealed from the public what it knows about UFOs. But now this generally accepted truth has been wedded to a ludicrous assertion by yet another medical conspiricist, Dr. Steven Greer. Greer ties the coverup issue to his absurd claim that all UFO abductions are really being carried out, not by the aliens, but by his own hated enemy, some dark, unknown "black" branch of our own government!
.
Since I have investigated UFO abduction cases which date as far back as the 1920's, by Greer's logic Calvin Coolidge's administration and Roosevelt's and Hoover's and Harding's all contained a black "secret government" which possessed the technology, the motive - whatever that may be - and the infallible secrecy to carry out abductions on thousands upon thousands of American children and adults over most of the twentieth century. This idea is not only preposterous, it is insulting to the vast number of abductees who recall exactly who did abduct them and what was done to them.
.