Milton William Cooper’s Behold A Pale Horse: A Blueprint for the X-Files

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

The hole in the ozone layer was made by people to let excess heat escape into space. There are colonies on the moon and mars. JFK was killed by his driver because he was going to tell the public about aliens. Whitley Strieber is an agent of the CIA. 600 aliens live with Bo Gritz in Area 51. Tobacco is purposely grown in fields covered in uranium so that more smokers will get cancer. Timothy Leary was an MK ULTRA agent. The Pope made the gas canisters used in German concentration camps.

Oh and the Illuminati run everything, AIDs was invented to kill homosexuals and black people, and the human race is just an alien experiment, but I’m assuming you knew all of that already.

Behold A Pale Horse – Milton William Cooper

Yes, I finally got around to reading Bill Cooper’s conspiracy classic, Behold A Pale Horse, the book that served as a blueprint for the X-Files. I’ve known of its existence for a long time, but it’s over 500 pages of intense paranoia, and I didn’t want to put myself through it. What I didn’t realise was that it’s not exactly a cohesive work, and you don’t actually have to read every single part of it to get the idea. Much of it is scans of letters, newspaper clippings and bizarre documents.

To try and summarise this book would be pointless. Cooper is so paranoid that he doesn’t really commit to any specific theory. At times he seems confident that there are aliens living on Earth, but then he points out that he might only think that because that’s what the Illuminati want him to think. At one point he claims that the apparition at Fatima was a warning in which aliens showed children a hologram video of the actual crucifixion of Christ. He then ruminates on whether the aliens actually travelled back in time to record the crucifixion or if they just animated it themselves. He then goes on to point out that if they have the power to do either of those things, they may have staged the entire Jesus thing for their own purposes. Trust no-one.

Ultimately, I quite enjoyed Behold A Pale Horse. I also got the names of several other books I’ll be trying to track down in the near future. I assume that those books will also be complete rubbish, and I only hope that they are as sincere as this bizarre masterpiece. I don’t know if it’s the frenzied nature of Cooper’s writing or the knowledge of what happened to him after writing this book that makes his writing captivating.

Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America – Mark Jacobson

Directly after finishing Behold A Pale Horse, I read Mark Jacobson’s Pale Horse Rider, a book that analyzes Cooper’s life and works. Much of what it covers is contained in Behold A Pale Horse, but it’s reassuring to have somebody sane confirm that Cooper did actually mean the things that you’ve just read in his book.

Pale Horse Rider also covers Cooper’s radio show, his surprisingly powerful following in the hip-hop community, his shockingly accurate prediction of 9/11, and his unfortunate end. William Cooper spent his last months living alone on a mountaintop convinced the police were going to come and kill him. The police eventually came up the mountain and shot him in the head.

One thing that this book briefly mentions about Cooper’s life that is not included in Behold A Pale Horse is the time he spent in a mental institution after returning from Vietnam. He was crazy in the literal sense. He also seems to have been an unpleasant person to be around, an angry, paranoid mad man. I’d say I wish he was still alive, but part of him still is. Alex Jones is basically a poor man’s Bill Cooper, and a lot of the right-wing militia style conspiracists seem to have admired Cooper. Timothy McVeigh came to visit him before bombing Oklahoma. Cooper did include a photocopy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Behold A Pale Horse, and he loved the 2nd amendment, but his politics weren’t as cut-and-dry as many of his ilk today. I’d like to think of him dismissing Q-Anon and Pizzagate as Bilderberg disinformation campaigns to make truth-seekers look stupid. (I mean… that’s what they are, right?)

I recommend reading both Cooper’s own book and Jacobson’s book about Cooper, but if you are a normal person, the latter will probably suffice. It’s very entertaining.

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been really into conspiracy theories since reading Programmed to Kill and JFK and UFO recently. It’s a field I’ve been avoiding for a few years, but I’m quite enjoying it at the moment. More to come soon!