Mystery Babylon was a hit. In early 1993, Cooper took it on the road, speaking at the Global Deception Conference held at the Wembley Arena in London.
“They’re building their world right under our noses, and unfortunately, because they’re right about us being cattle, those who don’t use their brains, they’re getting away with it,” Cooper told UK fans.
Today’s political crisis, the instinctive lack of trust for once beloved national institutions, went back to Adam Weishaupt himself, Cooper said, citing the illuminist as saying, “In reference to government leaders it is necessary to surround them with our members so the profane will have no access to them. . . . We must do our utmost to secure the advancement of all Illuminati in all civil offices. By this plan we shall direct mankind. To the profane these methods will appear illogical and contrived, so we may, in secret, influence all political interaction.”
“That’s why Franklin Roosevelt said nothing ever happens by accident, everything is planned,” Cooper told the Wembley crowd, characterizing Illuminati goals as “the abolishment of private property, abolishment of patriotism and nationalism, abolishment of family life, abolishment of religion.” Illuminati types were always talking about establishing Utopias. “A Utopia for them,” Cooper told the Brits.
As lecture offers poured in, Cooper seemed well on his way. Someone was even making a movie of his life. According to a document dated September 19, 1992, Cooper entered into an agreement to option Behold a Pale Horse to Phillip Lambro, head of newly formed Trigram Films, “for the purposes of making a major motion picture production tentatively entitled Cooper.”
While a novice movie producer, Lambro was not unknown in Hollywood. Son of Albanian immigrants, he grew up in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, where he showed early signs of being a musical prodigy. Propelled up the class ladder, he studied with Gyorgy Sandor, a protégé of Bela Bartok, and spent afternoons playing tennis with Sylvia Plath, whom he remembered as “immaculate in every way.” By twenty-four, Lambro’s symphonic pieces were being played by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Stokowski, who appears in Disney’s Fantasia, praised Lambro’s “talent” and “capacity.”
As the music director and consultant at the United Nations from 1960 to 1964, Lambro was befriended by billionaire Huntington Hartford, who introduced him to many famous people, like Salvador Dalí, Jack Benny, John F. Kennedy, and Richard Nixon. By 1965, Lambro was in Hollywood ready to make a career as a film score composer. But rather than working for A-list directors, Lambro found himself doing background music for pictures like Hannah, Queen of the Vampires and spending evenings watching old films with Harold Lloyd at the silent movie star’s mansion.
Lambro’s luck appeared to change in 1974 when John Cassavetes introduced him to Roman Polanski. Polanski heard some of Lambro’s modernist orchestral work and thought it might work for his next picture, a dark dream of Los Angeles called Chinatown. Lambro set to work. Polanski and producer Robert Evans loved the music, they said.
However, after a series of disastrous previews in which audiences singled out the score as “scratchy” and “distracting,” Evans told Lambro his music was out. The new score, completed in ten days by Jerry Goldsmith, was credited with “saving” Chinatown, now universally regarded as one of the best of the post-studio-system American films. It was small comfort that Lambro’s original music was kept for the film’s trailer.
Lambro described this episode and many others in his 2007 memoir, Close Encounters of the Worst Kind, after the film by Steven Spielberg, an early Hollywood friend who, like almost everyone else, is roundly trashed in the book. The one person to get a favorable, if brief, mention is Bill Cooper.
“Bill Cooper was a friend of mine,” Lambro told me when I called him in early 2015, only a few months before his death. “I went to see him speak at Hollywood High School,” Lambro recalled. “He showed footage of the Kennedy assassination. I couldn’t believe it. The driver shot the president.
“People told me, don’t touch that story with a ten-foot pole. But I thought, ‘I have to do this,’” recalled Lambro, who hired screenwriter Michael Vernon to work up what became a forty-two-page treatment for Cooper.
The prospective film opens with a title card, JANUARY 20, 1993, over a desolate, restricted landscape. From there the viewer finds himself in a labyrinthine underground base where, the treatment states, “a group of distinguished, but stoically threatening middle-aged men sit around an immense, glass-topped conference table.” The men are watching a giant television screen that shows Bill Clinton taking the presidential oath of office.
One of the men at the table asks another, “What do you think, sir?” The other, clearly in charge, says, “No problem, Mr. Secretary. The targets are ripe for the picking . . . the patriots ready for destruction.”
“You’re right, Mr. President,” says another of those at the table, as Bill Clinton continues to be sworn in on the big screen.
The scene then shifts to a rural hospital delivery room where Annie Cooper is giving birth to Pooh. The delivery is difficult, as described in Behold a Pale Horse.
The camera settles on BILL COOPER, who is described as a “burly, rugged man in his late forties.” The story goes on to follow Cooper’s heroic struggle to get the truth out about what is happening in the country. The scene of Cooper being run off the road on his motorcycle by the unknown assailants is vividly depicted in flashback. But it is no use. Cooper’s message is perverted by the powerful. A prophet in his own land, Cooper is ignored.
The treatment ends with another birth scene. Except this time, the baby wears a “helmet covered with wires.” A child being “programmed,” the treatment says, “to easily do the bidding of others.” This is the future, the world Bill Cooper was valiantly fighting to prevent. Asked why the movie never got made, Phillip Lambro said, “They screwed me. They always do.”
One roasting-hot afternoon in July of 1993, Cooper returned to Area 51. He was there to present his Mystery Babylon material at the Little A’Le’Inn. One hundred miles northeast of Vegas, the Little A’Le’Inn, a café/bar/motel, was legendary in ufology circles as the only place to get plastered on a stretch of road known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.
Sitting on a barstool to the right of the video poker machines, Cooper pivoted on his good leg and pulled a dollar bill from his pocket. He asked everyone assembled to do likewise, saying, “If you don’t have a dollar, borrow one from your neighbor. Don’t worry about not paying it back. It isn’t worth anything anyway.”
It was a bitter joke. Because even if everyone at the Little A’Le’Inn knew that Federal Reserve Notes, backed by no gold or silver, had no value sans the government’s say-so, they had no choice but to spend the majority of their waking hours slaving away for the worthless slips of paper. They woke up the next day and did it again; they would until they were dead.
The identity of those responsible for the outrage was printed right there on the greenback dollar itself, Cooper said, telling the crowd to turn the bill to the reverse side, where the Great Seal of the United States appeared. On the right side of the bill was the bald eagle, proud symbol of American sovereignty. Count the number of arrows in the bird’s right talon and the olive branch leaves on the left, Cooper instructed. Add up the number of stars in the glory above the eagle’s head. The answer in all cases was thirteen. There were even thirteen letters in the words e pluribus unum.
“What is thirteen doing all over our seal if it is such an unlucky number?” Cooper asked the crowd.
The fact was, Cooper said, “in the Mysteries, thirteen is the number of sacrifice and rebirth,” the very traits the Illuminists associated with their true God, the light giver, Lucifer. Thirteen was also a memorial tribute to Jacques de Molay. King Philip imprisoned de Molay on October 13, 1307, the original Friday the thirteenth.
Then Cooper directed those assembled to look to the left of the bill, where the reverse side of the Great Seal appears. When the seal was first designed in 1782, perhaps it was possible to believe that the “All-Seeing Eye” that hovers over the pyramid represented the providence of the Almighty. But now, everyone knew, it was the logo of the surveillance state, the unblinking orb of Lucifer himself.
Money, Cooper told those who had come to the desert to hear him speak, was not the root of all evil. It was evil itself. Cooper drew the audience’s attention to the space between the floating “capstone” of the pyramid and the body of the structure below. Closing the space, finishing the job, was what those in the Mysteries called “The Great Work,” Cooper said. Only when the Pyramid met the Eye would the task that began with the first illuminated ape-man be complete. And in case anyone lost sight of the goal of the Great Work, it was written right there on the base of the pyramid. The phrase came from Virgil, the fourth Eclogue, fifth Verse, “Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo,” or Novus Ordo Seclorum, which as Cooper translated it, was the “The New World Order.”
As part of the Little A’Le’Inn program, Cooper showed his most recent video, The Sacrificed King, in which he revisited the Kennedy assassination. The film begins with a shot of a ten-cent picture postcard of Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. Like the Trinity site, like Disneyland and the ancient city of Babylon, “Dallas, Texas, is located on the 33rd parallel, the 33rd degree of latitude,” Cooper narrated. To further make the point, the plaza was named for newspaperman George Bannerman Dealey, a 33rd-degree Mason.
The fact was, Cooper said, Dealey Plaza was a perfect example of the “esoteric” and “exoteric” at work. Thousands of motorists passed through the place every day, thinking about little but the traffic, but the Adepts knew the plaza was in reality “an outdoor Temple of the Sun.”
Linchpin to the scenario was the obelisk at the corner of Main and Houston Streets. Constructed of fourteen separate stones, the same number of bodily pieces Isis used to reconstruct Osiris’s dismembered body, the obelisk represented the reconstructed phallus, the life force of the Mysteries. As noted in The Sacrificed King, if seen from the correct angle, the top of the obelisk pointed directly at the sixth-story window of the Texas School Book Depository, from where Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have fired the fatal shots with his Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. This was how, Cooper said, the president’s true assassins mocked the sheeple still crying over the demise of Camelot.
It was no mere coincidence that John Kennedy and Jacques de Molay both died on the same day, November 22, Cooper said. This correlation was important to many of Wild Bill Donovan’s OSS men (Allen Dulles included), who traced their ancestry back to the Templars. Given these factors, Cooper’s hypothesis was fairly straightforward: America’s only Catholic president was killed as part of a centuries-old Luciferian revenge plot upon the Vatican.
This retelling of the Kennedy death was a creaky concoction, with nowhere near the simple audacity of the William Greer scenario, but it was worth a try. Cooper was a family man now, a breadwinner. Telling these stories, selling the videos, was how he kept things afloat.
To link the fates of de Molay and Kennedy, Cooper instructed the audience to “subtract 1307 from 1963. The answer you get is 666! And folks, that is no accident.”
If Cooper was aware that 1963 minus 1307 is actually 656, he wasn’t going to let that stop him. He ended The Sacrificed King by showing a sequence from Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. Kevin Costner, as the earnest truth-seeking New Orleans DA Jim Garrison, sits on a bench talking to Donald Sutherland, aka Mr. X. Behind them looms the Washington Monument, the great obelisk of the capital city’s Masonic designers, a Moby Dick of a phallus jutting stiff into the sky.
Oswald, Ruby, Cuba, the Mafia are “just scenery for the public,” Mr. X blathers on, obviously one more messenger of deception. “It prevents them from asking the most important question, Why? Why was Kennedy killed, who benefited, who has the power to cover it up? Who?”
“Who indeed?” Cooper asks on the soundtrack, freezing the action as Costner and Sutherland sit on the bench, dwarfed by the upward thrust of the lingamic monument.
“Oliver Stone is laughing at you, ladies and gentlemen,” Cooper chortles, “because if you can’t make the connection here, after hours of my instruction, if you don’t understand who’s behind it, what it means and what the symbology is—then I can’t help you. You’re beyond my help. You’re beyond understanding.
“For those of you who are waking up and seeing the world as it really is for the first time, God bless you, I love you. My prayers are with you always. But as for the rest of you . . . You see that big tall thing on the video screen? You’re going to get the shaft.”
It was a living.
During this period, Cooper attended the PhenomiCon, an “Alternative Convention,” in Atlanta, Georgia. A forerunner of the events like today’s massive, deeply commercialized Comic “Cons,” PhenomiCon dealt primarily with the as-yet unbranded cultural boomlet that arose at the end of the Cold War.
Staked to a sliver of zeitgeist-defining territory by such pioneering pop totems as William Gibson’s cyberpunk Neuromancer and Nirvana’s anthemic disaffection, the PhenomiCon drew from the DIY realms of fanzines, anarcho-veganism, Guerrilla Girl art feminism, 2600-era hackers, and followers of southern indie rockers like Dexter Romweber of the Flat Duo Jets, who was rumored to have spent a decade sleeping inside a coffin in his mother’s backyard.
Here were people who had come of age in the aftermath of the Kennedy murder. What they knew of conspiracy came not from rightist sources like hoary old anti-Semites of the Eustace Mullins and Nesta Webster stripe. They’d grown up reading the work of left-leaning “assassinationologists,” i.e., students of the Kennedy murder. A typical starting place was Mark Lane’s relatively staid disputation of the Warren Report, Rush to Judgment. There was also Mae Brussell, daughter of a Beverly Hills rabbi who supposedly gave Rose Kennedy a note saying her son Bobby would be killed by the same people who killed Jack. Beyond that were sundry figures like A. J. Weberman, the “garbologist” who was caught red-handed trying to steal Bob Dylan’s trash and wound up being stomped by the singer. Weberman did not fight back, he said, “because I knew I was wrong.”
In search of perspective, I called up Paul Krassner, the much-revered editor of The Realist (1958–2001), the “magazine of social-political-religious criticism and satire” known for running “impolite” interviews with sixties heroes like Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Catch-22 author Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, and Ken Kesey, along with then-not-un-PC articles like “Terry Southern Interviews a Faggot Male Nurse.” Krassner had been through the assassinationologist mill, so I asked when conspiracy moved from the ostensibly left-wing persuasion to the right.
“Ah, the bend in the river,” said Krassner, who was then into his eighties and living in the California desert, but still talking like he hadn’t stepped off the Brooklyn streets. This was a pretty deep question, Krassner said, but for sure it had something to do with “smoking dope.”
Conspiracy was about connecting dots that seemed irrationally arrayed. Religion did it one way, but pot did it another, said the author of the 1981 Realist piece “My Acid Trip with Groucho Marx.” THC was “a prime dot connector,” Krassner said. A few puffs and suddenly the esoteric linkages became exoteric, and vice versa. If once marijuana was supposedly only for hippies and jazz musicians, use became far more inclusive over the years. Rednecks were just as likely to be chawing down on an edible as anyone else. They brought their own perspective with them, and had since the halcyon days of the Marshall Tucker Band. So, of course, they thought conspiratorially. Now that grass was increasingly legal in the US, one could only expect more paranoid-patterned thinking in the future, Krassner said, leaving me with the well-known quote from Charles Manson.
“Have you ever seen the coyote in the desert?” Manson asked in a 1970s interview in Rolling Stone magazine. “Watching, tuned in, completely aware. Christ on the cross, the coyote in the desert—it’s the same thing, man. The coyote is beautiful. He moves through the desert delicately, aware of everything, looking around. He hears every sound, smells every smell, sees everything that moves. He’s in a state of total paranoia, and total paranoia is total awareness.”
Cooper was not without his fans at PhenomiCon. Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, author of such syncretic stews as Saucers of the Illuminati and long discussions on then-canonical multi-reality texts like Philip K. Dick’s VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System), admired Cooper as something of a brilliant primitive. They loved Cooper’s contention, as described in Behold a Pale Horse, that the Galileo probe recently launched by NASA to explore the moons of Jupiter would in fact set off a solar-system-wide cataclysm that will result in “a new star that has already been named LUCIFER.” It was his ambition, said Keith, who died in 1999 after falling off a stage at Burning Man, “to become the hip Bill Cooper.”
That said, it was a neat piece of synchronicity that landed Cooper on the same PhenomiCon panel as Robert Anton Wilson. Born in 1932 at Methodist Hospital in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn into a working-class Irish American family, RAW, as his many acolytes came to call him, was afflicted with polio at an early age, thereby affording him a lot of time to plow through the works of such authors as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and H. P. Lovecraft, along with huge stacks of 1950s sci-fi of the fantasy-tinged Theodore Sturgeon variety.
This reading proved to be an early aid in short-circuiting the concrete hustle designed to make Brooklyn boys lose their souls. By age eighteen, according to RAW’s semi-autobiographical The Cosmic Trigger, which comes equipped with an introduction by Timothy Leary, he had “a strange experience of coming unstuck in time like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. . . . I had a kind of spontaneous Satori, a sudden awakening to the immanent divinity of all things,” RAW wrote.
By 1962, at the age of thirty, Wilson began to experiment with mind-altering drugs, i.e., “psychedelics” or, as dolphin researcher John Lilly put it, “metaprogramming substances” that would enable the human mind to reach “a new state” in which “we can reorganize or re-imprint our nervous system for higher functioning.”
This was part of entering what Wilson described as “the door to Chapel Perilous,” defined as a realm of experience that “cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments.”
For Wilson, the practical side of this portal opened while in the employ of Hugh Hefner, who charged him with the task of running the Playboy Forum, a faux-philosophical discussion center with a pile of frat-boy sex talk thrown in. As legend has it, it was the odder inquiries Wilson and his coeditor, Robert Shea, received that gave them the notion to create the eight-hundred-plus-page The Illuminatus! Trilogy, first published in 1975.
According to Wilson, all his work (he wrote thirty-five books altogether) is to one degree or another an exercise in “guerilla ontology” in which the author “mixes the elements of each book [so] that the reader must decide on each page ‘How much of this is real and how much is a put-on.’”
No doubt this was the plan for The Illuminatus! Trilogy, in which Wilson and Shea trace their cartoon noir characters from Vegas lounges to dusty back alleys of Atlantis and on to the inner circle of Adam Weishaupt’s Bavarian Illuminati. Forty years later, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, considered by its authors to be a “fairy tale for paranoids,” remains exhaustingly entertaining, with the sequence of gunmen representing every major assassination scenario firing at the president at the same time at least as funny as anything to be found in similarly themed efforts by literary stars like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo.
It tickled Wilson that many of the details and concepts trotted out in his Illuminatus! books, “real” or “put-on,” eventually found their way into widely believed conspiracies that emerged during the 1980s and ’90s, Bill Cooper’s work included. As RAW commented, anyone seriously “researching occult conspiracies that have taken over the world” will eventually reach “a crossroads of mythic proportions” from which the seeker would emerge “either stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way.” For his part, RAW said, he became “an agnostic,” a knower of and believer in nothing. As for everyone else, he wished them the best of luck.
Cooper was certainly familiar with Wilson’s work at the time of their meeting. A number of RAW’s books, including Cosmic Trigger, were found in Cooper’s storage units after his demise. Cooper also owned a copy of the Principia Discordia, which Wilson freely acknowledged as a main inspiration for many of his works. He dedicated The Illuminatus! Trilogy to Principia authors Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley.
Thornley’s sad tale deserves mention here since he was almost certainly the first Kennedy assassinationologist to write about Lee Harvey Oswald. Thornley met Oswald in the Marines when they were both stationed at the El Toro base in Santa Ana, California, during the late 1950s. When Oswald defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, Thornley decided to make him a major character in the novel he was writing, The Idle Warriors. After the book was finished in 1962, Thornley lost the original typed manuscript but still wound up getting subpoenaed by the Warren Commission.
Later, Thornley, strung out and living a down-and-out life in the New Orleans French Quarter, began to claim that he was actually a would-be assassin himself, a virtual physical double for Oswald (whom he looked nothing like), “in competition” with his former Marine buddy to see which one of them would wind up shooting Kennedy first.
Despite their stretch of shared conspiratorial ground, Cooper and Wilson did not hit it off. By the early nineties, RAW was content to play the counterculture’s last man standing, a Mr. Natural figure for third-generation Grateful Dead fans. He was on record as saying that while Cooper and Lear’s MJ-12 notions made for a “wonderful metaphor,” taking such “bad 1950s science-fiction B-movie plots” seriously was akin to believing in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the Easter Bunny.”
One of the tropes most associated with Wilson is Operation Mindfuck (OM). A central tenet of discordianism, Operation Mindfuck usually takes the form of a practical joke, or “situationist prank,” aimed at shocking a person or group of people out of their overly rigid worldview, known as a “reality tunnel.”
At the Atlanta PhenomiCon, as Cooper sat close by, Wilson proposed an Operation Mindfuck to ascertain what percentage of the population could be convinced “beyond a shadow of doubt to attribute all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies to the Illuminati.” It would be a ton of fun, Wilson said.
What happened next is recalled in a 2001 Internet post following Cooper’s death. It came from “the Reverend Ivan Stang,” the “sacred scribe” of the discordianesque Church of the SubGenius, a parody religion alleged to have been founded in 1953 by Ward Cleaver look-alike J. R. “Bob” Dobbs. The SubGenius Church was at the PhenomiCon to stage what they called a “Swingin’ Love Corpses and Devival,” a sort of open-mic “prayer meeting,” said Rev. Stang, who accompanied Wilson—the honorary “Pope Bob” of the SubGenius cult—to the panel discussion where Cooper was present.
“It was the WEIRDEST scene!” wrote Rev. Stang on the alt.slack Usenet site, describing how he, Wilson, UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe, and “a string of little old ladies who were New Age seers or such hocus pocus” were arrayed around a large table.
“Then there was BILL COOPER, a great big guy, all florid and red faced, partly from acne scars. He was MAD AS HELL. He immediately started to ‘take command’ of the panel by denouncing these NEFARIOUS people on the right end of the room—me and Pope Bob—who had TRIVIALIZED and MOCKED the very serious subjects that this convention was all about, and that we were TRAITORS TO AMERICA just as bad as the Feds. . . . Pope Bob and I just sort of looked at each other, like, damn, busted.”
Some yelling and screaming ensued, after which Cooper got up and left, reportedly nearly smacking his head on the door as he went. “You think everything is a joke, don’t you,” Cooper said, training his gaze on an eternally amused RAW.
“Laugh all you want,” Cooper screamed at the coauthor of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. “You’ll see soon enough how funny it is.”