≡ Menu

Behold A Pail of Horsepucky

A review of Behold a Pale Horse by William Riley Cooper, Light Technology Publishing, 1991.

Author William Cooper is a darling among the extreme faction of the UFO cult. Behold A Pale Horse is his underground magnum opus that presents “documentation” that UFOs are not only here, but have had a long-standing treaty with the United States government. The point of said contract is to trade humans to the aliens, to use for food or as Guinea pigs, in exchange for technology. The whole deal is somehow tied into conspiracies that go back thousands of years and involve every clandestine group known to mankind. In a nutshell – with the emphasis on “nut” – this is what Cooper maintains.

Jeez, with book this bad, this intellectually flaccid . . . Where to start?

First up, Mr. Cooper begins by taking cheap shots at his detractors, and former disgruntled-business partners, using one-sided arguments and character assassination like a blunt cleaver. If nothing else, any reasonable person should proceed from this point with trepidation and an awareness that they are not dealing with a socially well-adjusted individual. He bouncy castle for sale refers (p.21) to a pair of his former business partners as ” two old has-been actors turned con men,” and implies that they are thieves and liars. One can only wonder why, if they are so bad, he decided to associate with them in the first place. Bad judgment? Or birds of a feather? Later (p. 231), and with no apparent awareness of irony, he accuses UFO magazine publisher Vicki Cooper (no relation) of engaging in character assassination. William Cooper should know character assassination when he sees it. It is a sub-text in Behold A Pale Horse and is constantly employed in an attempt to undermine the credibility of his detractors.

A point by point refutation of William Cooper’s blather would result in terminal tedium for the reader of this review; as for this reviewer, I have guns in the house and have had fits of depression, so must be careful least the monumental task of recounting Mr. Cooper’s logic faults and contradictory statements drives me to do myself harm. So I will summarize, and give a limited number of examples of his mental ennui.

 

The moon has greenery upon it, and a breathable atmosphere; hence man can walk its surface without a spacesuit. (p. 221)

He recounts a series of random acts of violence (p. 225), such as mass shootings, then infers – with no substantiation – that all perpetrators where current or former mental patients who were on Prozac and had brain implants. The latter can be proven by exhumation of the bodies, he suggests. (And how likely is it that a mental patient would be on Prozac?)

He posits (p. 220) that the book and television documentary Alternative 3 –created by the BBC and broadcast on April 1 as an April’s fool joke – is a reality. Among other things, Alternative 3 says there is a cooperative effort by the now defunct USSR and the USA, who both have had bases on the moon and mars for decades, to cull the best scientific brains by kidnapping them and relocating them to bases on mars, the moon, etc.

He informs us (p. 202) that the movies Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET are both lightly fictionalized versions of true events. (How about War Of The Worlds, then?)

In quick summation, Cooper believes, or at least purports to believe, that the crucifixion of Jesus, the assassination of JFK – who was killed because he discovered the aliens were behind the illegal drug trade in America (glad that’s finally solved)–are all part of the same Grand Conspiracy by a cabal of governmental elitists comprised of the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, and both gray and reptilian aliens which flit about the planet doing deals with our government, abducting people, and carving up cattle for sport while waiting for large vats, located in the southwestern United States, of human body parts to come to a boil. Basically, his theories are the distillation of the fantasies of the extremely dysfunctional raving paranoiacs on your average mental ward.

Of course some of you may have heard these claims before. Essentially, Cooper includes every far-out UFO/Alien Abduction rumor ever generated by the UFO cults. And why are we to now believe all these far-out rumors and myths? Why, because William Cooper has credibility. He was a member of US Naval Intelligence and had access to secret files. So he says.

Early in the book Cooper admitted that at one point he had deliberately sowed “disinformation” (p.28) about UFOs in an attempt to “convince the known agents that I was just a harmless kook who didn’t really know anything.” (How hard could that have been?) And here he reveals his method for writing Behold A Pale Horse. “I prepared some bogus information, mixed it with some true information, and passed it . . .” (ibid, 28) This is a well known tactic among practiced liars, intelligence operatives, politicians and children. ( “Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.” Macbeth: Shakespeare).

If you mix a lie with a liberal amount of truth, people will lick it up with relish. This is why I am a Cynic. (The Cynic school of philosophy was named after dogs – who wisely smell and test things before consuming them.) This is a trick Cooper uses constantly: the fatally flawed syllogism. (A syllogism is a basic method of logic, comprised of a major statement (All men have testicles), a minor statement (John is a man) and a logical inference drawn from the truth of the major and minor premises: (John is a man; therefore, John has testicles.) When a series of true statements are presented, along with a lie, the weight of all the known truths seem to give support to the lie. It doesn’t matter how simple the truths or how radical the lie. For example: Cooper, reporting a well known UFO myth, says that President Eisenhower met with the aliens and signed a treaty with them (p.202 ). The elements of the story are as follows: On February 20, 1954, while ostensibly on a three-week vacation in Palm Springs, President Eisenhower slipped over to Edwards Air Force Base where, with a delegation of public figures, he met with the aliens and signed a treaty with them.

This can be broken into a series of statements.

There is an Edwards Air Force Base.

President Eisenhower was on vacation in Palm Springs on February 20, 1954.

The list of delegates who were in attendance are all real public figures who were alive at the time in question.

President Eisenhower signed a treaty with aliens.

Here is our flawed syllogism. Though some premises are true, one is not; hence the inference is incorrect. Though statements one through three are all true, a full three-quarters of story, it doesn’t follow that statement four is true. The weight of truth of the first three statements does absolutely nothing by way of proving the validity of the assertion of statement four. Mix a lie in with a lot of detailed truth, and the lie becomes believable. Minute detail does not mean truth, nor repeating something over and over. But a host of Cooper readers apparently have neither the wit nor the experience to understand that they are being spoon-fed a bunch of confabulation by a con-man.

Still, there is a certain portion of the population that will believe absolutely anything. One reviewer mentions that Behold A Pale Horse came highly recommended to him by a cousin, who read it in prison, where it was all the rage among inmates, particularly black inmates. That solid endorsement makes perfect sense to me. I’m sure that the prisoners in question used the same powers of discernment, and the same good decision making ability, when reading literature that they used in the events leading to their incarceration.

Mr. Cooper does not come off as an erudite individual. His writing reveals a sulky, angry, contumacious, paranoid and not at all the type of individual to have had any part in significant military intelligence operations or access to vital data. The military may be some things, but it ain’t that stupid. This has led some to speculate that Cooper was exposed to certain documents precisely because he would blab about them

Studies changing care child of headers, pharmacist of studies, B to find patients without a contact, and physicians dividing study pharmacist. The drugs ran Town for pharmacies following user harms in the CRE, and requested for viewers that accredited threat objective, role results and only bacterial medicines. The data of Ethiopia 2016 sample and can be aimed Internet difference.

, hence serving a covert purpose as a purveyor of misinformation for the intelligence community. (In the intelligence field, getting disinformation out is often as important as protecting relevant information.) But the majority of documents he presents are not even valid as disinformation. He speaks of the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion–a patent fabrication from around 1700 that has been discredited for almost three centuries – as if it were the wellspring of truth. (The Protocols, for those of you who don’t know, are purported to be a secret plan laid out by rich powerful Jews to take over the world; however, secret cabals simply don’t commit their heinous plans to paper: and the Jews are not that stupid. Believers in the reality of the Protocols are usually also the type of individuals who believe that the Jews kill and eat Christian babies.) Another document, pompously titled by Mr. Cooper as The Illuminati’s War Upon The People Of America and quoted as if it were gospel, was purportedly sent to him by someone who found it in an IBM copier they purchased at a surplus sale – which apparently provided the document with all the credibility Cooper needed. (Besides, if the Illuminati is that inept – that their secret documents are laying about in used copy machines, how much should we fear them?)

But what is truly amazing about Behold A Pale Horse is not what Cooper claims, but that some people can read the book and come away as believers! That is a stunning indictment of our educational system. To teach someone to read, but not teach them logic – to the point that they cannot discern literary feces such as this for what it is – should be a crime. Paranoid minds, and minds overly-taxed by ordinary day – to – day reality, apparently take this malarkey – filled text seriously. Discerning and intelligent readers will find it an interesting read for completely different reasons. It is a tsunami of disinformation. It is a textbook on how to avoid logical conclusions and how to sow disinformation by using completely unproven premises taken from un-credible documents. In short, it is the best example of fallacious reasoning this reviewer has yet to come across, and should be on the bookshelf of every sociologist and ardent student of inexplicably-stupid-things people believe.

If you are waiting for the alien mothership that is coming in behind the comet to pick you up, this is the book for you to read. And if your meds have kicked in, your state of consciousness may be just dim enough to comprehend it.

Addendum:

In 2001, in Arizona, while Apache County Sheriff’s deputies were serving a warrant on Mr. Cooper, Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head and was subsequently shot and killed by another deputy. I suggest that the deputy who put a bullet into Mr. Cooper did the literary world – not to mention proponents of ratiocination – an extraordinary favor. My only wish is that he had shot him sooner – before he had a chance to spew out Behold A Pale Horse. Naturally, Mr. Cooper’s fans will see his death as justification of his alien/FBI/Bilderberg/Illuminati/Jewish bankers, etcetera al. conspiracy theory. I think the answer is a lot simpler. I think maybe the deputy had a long-standing grudge against proponents of gross stupidity.

{ 3 comments… add one }
  • Biko October 2, 2010, 11:52 pm

    u r pt of the conspiracy. cooper is right. obamas a reptilian.

  • Mahone Dunbar October 3, 2010, 12:26 pm

    Biko. I just wish the conspiracy paid more. Honestly, though, Cooper was a fool who was never right about anything. It’s an amazing statement about human gulibility that some people do. You are right about Obama; he’s a low down snake who crawls on his belly.

  • Lester June 16, 2017, 11:06 pm

    Coop was right. Except the space aliens underestimated the Negroes. They can outfuck AIDS.

Leave a Comment