A review of Behold A Pale Horse, William 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 a 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 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 caving 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 the 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, 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.
You can see how stupid yourself by purchasing the book through this link
Comments on this entry are closed.
Blase wrote: ” Most of what I said was kind of a funny haha, but then I admit to having a strange sense of humour.”
Or perhaps none at all.
Blase wrote: “Most of what I said was kind of a funny haha, but then I admit to having a strange sense of humour. I am looking further into Cooper and what may have happened to him. It really doesn’t matter what he believed or whether he made things up.”
Oh, contraire: if he spouted complete nonsense, then why would he be the target of a government hit squad. You just can’t seem to grasp that basic fact. No credibility, no conspiracy.
Blase wrote: “I am really only interested in whether or not his beliefs got him killed”
The only possible way I see a relation to Cooper’s beliefs and his death is his abiding sense of paranoia and overall mental illness. The other possibility is the ‘conman’ angle, i.e., he was a dedicated con man, skirting the law, and thus drew down the force of John Law on himself eventually (and it had nothing to do with his muck writing about UFOs and alien-government conspiracy. Think of it: if an alien connection was real, and the things Cooper claimed about them real, then surely they, or their supposed agency, the US government, could have shut him up at will. Especially since America is, as you say, a police state. The fact that we are a police state is why all the loons make movies about killing George W. Bush, etc.
Blase wrote: “As I am sure you know or have heard, many people have been threatened that they will either lose everything or die if they didn’t shut their mouths. It is very interesting to me that he was threatened over taxes. I haven’t read much into his case yet, but I intend to. It is just of interest to me. Does this bother you?”
Threatening people if they don’t shut their mouths has occurred in every context imaginable. But you must realize that the simple fact that “people have been threatened . . . shut their mouths” is not evidence at all. It’s that flawed syllogism I spoke of before (a syllogism is a basic logic tool that has been around for two thousand years or so and is the bedrock of logical inquiry), and is akin to saying: John Smith is a banker: Some bankers have stolen money from their banks; therefore, John Smith is a thief.
If Cooper’s case intrigues you, as it did me, I highly suggest you get a copy of “Behold A Pale Horse” (don’t buy it, borrow it or try the library) to get the measure of the man. Also, as you encounter various documents he presents, the Protocols of The Elders of Zion and the Majestic documents, cross-reference them on the web and read several views of each, balancing your understanding of the evidence with or against the consensus of opinion of others who’ve spent years investigating them.
Taxes do bother me. They’re an excuse for politicians to confiscate worker’s resources and re-distribute them to groups who will empower them (i.e., a way of buying votes.)
Blase wrote: “Now tell me. Why is it so important for you to hear what I believe or not when you already told me and your audience I am not important enough to even censor?”
It is not important for me to hear what you believe. You seemed at one point to be open to a debate on the subject; in that context, and when your claims seem to support what I consider an easily attackable theory, I needed you to clarify the questions I asked to establish lemmas (subsidiary propositions that we can agree on, for the furtherance of debate; however, as you seem not interested in responding in a linear fashion, it matters little to me.
Blase wrote: “You need me and you need an audience. It is like food for you.”
Admittedly , I’m proud of the ideas and theories I’ve developed over a lifetime of research and reflection. If you put said opinions and theories before the public, better be prepared to defend them both eloquently and passionately. Be it UFOs or politics, I am.
Blase wrote: “My opinion of you below. I know you didn’t ask for it, so hope you don’t mind. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
I do not mind. It is as frivolous as it is inconsequential. (It’s akin to me accusing you of being a permanent member of the Tinfoil hat society.) I put in some new paving stones to my patio last week. In doing so I encountered several ants. I did not solicite their opinion on my patio remodeling and neither would I have changed my plans if they were against the project.
Your exchanges have become tedium and odium to me. Ad hoc arguements (look that up) wind up as nothing more than a couple of children saying . . .
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
It is futile to hold a conversation, or debate, when it has degenerated thus. It’s time to come up with something worthwhile if you want to engage me anymore.
Addendum: You are a girl?! And inviting me to come stay with you? That changes things. First: do you have nice tits and do you give good head? Since I’ll be there a long long time waiting for Canada’s socialized health care to get to me, this is of utmost importance. But thanks for the offer.
Dark Brain, uh, blade, there is no jousting match with Blase. She’s skewered already and simply too stupid to know it. Nice to know there’s a male match for intellect in Canada so she can have company while she waits for the mothership to pick her up. What’s this about turd sniffing (not sniffin, you bozo) yankees? Do you have an obsession with fecal matter? I suppose living in the wilds of the Great North these kinds of things are bound to occur to young boys now and then. BTW, you literacy is commendable and speaks volumes about your country: It’s “downright” not down write — unless, as I suspect you have Down’s syndrome and are trying to write? The rest of the world laughs at us? No, they either fear us or rush to flock here. I haven’t noticed any Mexicans flocking to Canada lately. Don’t you have pine straw? Manifest destiny! Dude, we DID expand to the Pacific seaboard, or haven’t you any map reading skills?
As far as the religious right goes, personally, I’m a pagan (not kidding), a Free Mason and a Gnostic. The “religious right” does not support me, though I have more in common with them than with the likes of you. Print more money? How about we just make Canada pony up for their own military defense, hmmmm.
I don’t know where your pathological hatred of John Wayne came from, but if you are interested in my opinion of him it is available at in Mahone’s Archives at “Duke or Duchess.” Google it if you dare. I never mentioned the Maple Leafs that I remember . . . and why would I? There’s only two things I like about Canada . . . well, three . . .: SCTV, Daniel Negreanu, and the fact that I don’t have to live there. Someone needs to tell you they’ve invented a new thing to go with most computers, it’s called a spell checker. I’d suggest you get one, then hire someone to show you how to operate it. Like I said, you are a fine example of the Canadian intellect. I can just see you at your computer, you hoser, wearing your mullet, surrounded by beer cans, your pet beaver by your side, a plate of macroni on your lap, spamming everyone in sight. As full of venom as ignorance. What a fine life you must lead. Your fondest desire is to be mounted by a mountie.
Sorry for all the hassle, Mahone: I ‘ve really been having some rough periods lately; when I get them the dog pesters me all day, so I tend to take it out on the world. I’ve decided to forgo alien exploration and go to church this Sunday. Pray for me everyone.
Mahone said: She’s shewered already and simply too stupid to know it.
Making up new words now Mahone?
You deleted my last post so here it is again. I see you posted Darkblades post on the other Paxety page. I could post my last response to you there and in all your favorite little hangouts if you like.
Mahone said: Oh, contraire: if he spouted complete nonsense, then why would he be the target of a government hit squad.
Exactly. Most if not all of his spouting off probably hit a nerve and got him murdered.
Mahone said: Think of it: if an alien connection was real, and the things Cooper claimed about them real, then surely they, or their supposed agency, the US government, could have shut him up at will.
Yes! and isn’t that what they did?
Mahone said: The fact that we are a police state is why all the loons make movies about killing George W. Bush, etc.
Glad to see you admit it. Now you should get everyone together and do something about that.
Did you see when George Bush had a NIN concert shut down because of their political statements?
Go take a look around you. See what your American brothers and sisters are talking about.
http://www.internettrash.com/users/chainbreak/fascistamerica.htm
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=185255952
http://www.fdrs.org/has_america_become_a_police_state.html
http://forums.starnewsonline.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/1661088265/m/9671036156/p/8
http://www.taosdaily.com/index.php?fuseaction=home.viewarticle&article_id=1538
Fascism and the Fog of War
Adios Free America
http://www.taosdaily.com/index.php?fuseaction=home.viewarticle&article_id=1537
Just to give a few places to go and state your position on this subject instead of playing it safe here where you only have a Canadian to try and argue with.
Mahone said: Threatening people if they don’t shut their mouths has occurred in every context imaginable. But you must realize that the simple fact that “people have been threatened . . . shut their mouths” is not evidence at all. It’s that flawed syllogism I spoke of before
There for you look at all of the evidence surrounding the situation and go from there. Looks pretty fishy to me on both accounts mentioned here regarding the suspicious deaths. If you look into both of them I’ll bet there is more evidence than needed and then you would need to find a judge who hasn’t been payed off (good luck with that).
Mahone said: If Cooper’s case intrigues you, as it did me, I highly suggest you get a copy of “Behold A Pale Horse”
I am sure it intrigued you, but am also certain you already had your mind made up on the man simply because he speaks of ufos.
Mahone said: It is not important for me to hear what you believe. You seemed at one point to be open to a debate on the subject; in that context, and when your claims seem to support what I consider an easily attackable theory
Easily attackable, hmmmm. I gave you a perfectly good answer more than once on Cooper. You also wanted to debate ufos, well I ask you to give me PROOF that they DON’T exist then. For me, there is absolutely nothing to debate on extraterrestrial vehicles as I KNOW they exist. I am sorry that this scares you so. I highly doubt tin foil hats will save you, but go ahead and try as you might.
Mahone said: I think I see part of your problem here. You’ve got the United States confused with Cuba.
Hmmm… Are they easy to confuse the two? Maybe hey.
Mahone said: Your exchanges have become tedium and odium to me. Ad hoc arguements (look that up) wind up as nothing more than a couple of children saying . . .
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
“Yes you are!”
“No I’m not!”
It is futile to hold a conversation, or debate, when it has degenerated thus. It’s time to come up with something worthwhile if you want to engage me anymore.
I believe I already said pretty much that, but am glad to see you are finally agreeing.
Mahone said: Addendum: You are a girl?! And inviting me to come stay with you? That changes things. First: do you have nice tits and do you give good head?
Dream on loser. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I think Darkblade would much rather you stay with him. He’d have fun with your ass. Be gentle with him Darkblade, he’s delicate. Also, I am sure Darkblade wouldn’t mind getting with one of those cute female mounties we have in Canada.
BLASe – you really have a lot to learn about blogs. If you’d notice, it’s me, not Mahone who controls this blog – I pay for it – it’s mine – it’s not a democracy.
The person who posted Darkblade’s comment was clearly identified as me.
Now you have committed the unpardonable sin. You have posted a comment which I have chosen not to allow – you posted it as Mahone. Free debate is allowed here – posting as someone else is not.
Therefore I’ve closed comments on this post. If you want to comment on other posts, you are welcome to do so, so long as you do it as yourself. In case you don’t know, when you post a comment your IP address is revealed.