Researching a book and attempting to get at the nature of truth when the main figure is a world-class fabulist presents its challenges. Is it important to get the story right as the storyteller tells it, or to follow the more traditional route of proof? What matters more, fact or metaphor? Often, with Bill Cooper, a middle path seemed appropriate. For instance, did Cooper actually see John F. Kennedy murdered on live television as he claimed in Behold a Pale Horse? Er, no. The Dallas motorcade was not broadcast, but that wasn’t the point. Perhaps Cooper needed to say that to get to his further claim that Secret Service agent William Greer, the limo driver, shot Kennedy in full view of hundreds of people. After all, we are not listening to someone like Cooper for the facts, ma’am, just the facts. He is not Joe Friday. Herein lies the journalist’s dilemma. To report such a story, you have to meet the storyteller at least halfway.
Cooper’s short but antic career in the public eye began in the time of the mimeographed handout and ended at the dawn of the broadband era, but his legacy lives on almost exclusively on the web. By the time I finished this book, I’d collected several hundred bookmarks pertaining to Cooper and related topics. This was augmented by numerous Facebook pages, Twitter posts, and Instagram feeds, more than a few displaying tattoos of the cover of Behold a Pale Horse emblazoned on the arms and backs of fans.
Now, as always, the best source for Bill Cooper–related material remains www.hourofthetime.com. It is here that one finds not only the lineup of the Complete Cooper, but also a treasure trove of the HOTT Virtual Research Library. This includes dozens of pdfs of the volumes in Cooper’s (and Doyel Shamley’s) personal library, a wide array of material on such far-flung topics as animal traps and hide tanning, covert activities, secret societies, and a selection of survival manuals. Especially interesting are the various pdfs of Masonic lodge constitutions and manuals, many dating back to the nineteenth century.
A good deal of Cooper UFO material is available at the venerable www.bibliotecapleyades.net, an unbeatable gathering of information on everything fringe on this planet and beyond. For transcripts of many of Cooper’s broadcasts and speeches, see http://deceivedworld.blogspot.com and AnoNews Vienna (https://viefag.wordpress.com). The Wayback Machine at http://archive.org/web has many of the Mystery Babylon episodes transcribed.
As noted, there are hundreds of Cooper YouTube videos, usually replays of popular broadcasts, like the 9/11 prediction playing over user-created images. Those illustrated with the artwork of David Dees, the R. Crumb of the libertarian right, are worth searching out. Blurry videos of lectures abound. A quick search will bring up Cooper’s classic speech to the 1989 MUFON Symposium along with the full eleven hours of the Porterville Presentation. Active Facebook pages dealing with Cooper material include “William Cooper—Mystery Babylon” and “Bill Cooper—Exposing the New World Order.”
There are several additions to the extended Cooper terrain that hold attraction for fans. John Lear’s site, The Living Moon (http://www.thelivingmoon.com), is always fascinating. Comic relief can be found in the work of “dallasgoldbug” (WellAware1.com), who never tires of the idea that Cooper faked his own death and now occupies the body of fellow conspiracist Jordan Maxwell. Also bizarre is Barbara Aho’s “William Cooper and the Three Bears,” which asserts that Cooper is somehow a “false prophet” tied up with a satanic bloodline of the Merovingian Dynasty (https://watch.pairsite.com/william-cooper.html).
The most recent high-profile addition to the Cooper canon are the postings of “QAnon,” a reputed government insider who claims to have access to classified information on the ongoing attempt of the so-called Deep State to overthrow the Trump administration. In February 2018, “Q,” as he is known to the followers of his “intel drops,” wrote of his deep admiration for Cooper and his work. Sales of Behold a Pale Horse immediately spiked, landing the twenty-seven-year-old book at number 17 on the Amazon bestseller list.