From the late 1980s until his death in 2001, Cooper became one of the best-known and most influential conspiracy theorists, beloved by figures ranging from Timothy McVeigh (who visited Cooper shortly before the Oklahoma City Bombing) to Alex Jones (whom Cooper despised) to members of the Wu-Tang Clan. Through his radio broadcast, The Hour of the Time, he popularized the phrase “Wake up, sheeple” and injected a host of now-common conspiracy theories into the mainstream: not just his JFK theory, but also postulations that AIDS was one of many secret weapons devised by the US government for use against its own people.
Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America traces Cooper’s life and the unlikely spread of his book Behold a Pale Horse, released in 1991 by Melody O’Ryin Swanson, a New Age publisher who claims she’s never read it, despite its perennially strong sales. It’s a story of the incubation of the politics of conspiracy, a kind of prologue to our era of Birthers, Pizzagate, and QAnon. Framing his book around Donald Trump’s win on November 8, 2016 (when, Jacobson writes, the presence of Cooper’s ghost became “palpable”), Behold a Pale Horse attempts to connect this story to the world we now inhabit, one where belief has eclipsed truth, and paranoia has eclipsed trust.
Cooper first came to prominence in the late 1980s, through an early Internet message board devoted to UFOs called Paranet. John Lear, the disinherited son of the Learjet magnate, had been posting wild conspiracies about secret government relations with aliens. They were the kind of thing no one took very seriously, until Cooper appeared from nowhere, corroborating them. With his background in Naval Intelligence, his supposedly independent verification of Lear’s bizarre story gave it instant credibility. (When Paranet’s mod Jim Speiser first introduced Cooper to the board, he described Paranet as being “deeply indebted to, and a little honored by” Cooper’s presence.)
Soon, Lear and Cooper had teamed up, relaying an increasingly manic and terrifying story of alien collusion with secret governmental forces while drinking each other under the table. In 1989 they released an “indictment” against the US government, demanding it “cease aiding and abetting and concealing this Alien Nation which exists in our borders.” They went on to demand that it must “cease all operations, projects, treaties, and any other involvement with this Alien Nation,” and ordered “this Alien Nation and all of its members to leave the United States and this Earth immediately, now and for all time, by June 1, 1990,” calling finally for a full disclosure of all Alien-Government interactions.
