History Lessons: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 1-41

I know that last week I said I was going to skip the very long introduction, though I did also say that there were some bits that needed to be explained...so we're going to cover the entire 40-page introduction in this post. There are some points that need to be covered as I think it gives us some insight into the author himself. One of my academic interests in this subject is how people got into it. What motivates a person to wake up one day and accept the conspiracy world as true. With Robison and Allen before him; the motivating factor seems to be a loss of control over the world. Not personal control but the shifting of the status quo for which they enjoyed an elevated position. In both works, the authors try their best to explain how it is that the world had changed around them and both blame it on nefarious controllers. So, with Cooper, it's going to be more interesting (hopefully). 

The first 20 pages are a family history which is just biographical. It's not that interesting. We see that Cooper has an idealized view of his family. It would seem that his father did not show affection, which is standard for the time. His mother was the platonic ideal of a southern belle...it's not much really. 

On page 19 (of the PDF remember) Cooper joins the Air Force. He wanted the Navy but his disposition to sea sickness negated that. He is assigned to the 495th Bomber Wing of the Strategic Air Command. This is where his story gets odd. First off there was never a 495th bomber wing....ever. There was a 494, so we might want to chalk this up to a simple error. However, I've known plenty of veterans (my father was one for example) and this isn't a mistake you make. This is a pretty egregious error, people in the military remember with pride the units they were assigned. The second odd thing is that he claims the unit's designation was changed from 495 to 4245. However, this is not right, in fact, it was the opposite. The 4245 was replaced with the 494th, though this change is in name only. Cooper is correct that the 494 was a strategic bombing wing and thus would have been a fleet of atomic bombers. What's puzzling here is that Cooper is claiming that his unit was real tight, they went to clubs and drank a lot together--but was that in the 495th, 494th, or the 4245th? It is here that Cooper hears a story about a unit that retrieves downed UFOs. 

That's right folks, Cooper isn't just a New World Order (NWO) theorist, he's a UFO guy too. 

In the 19502 and 1960s, there was a golden age of new technology. The Cold War was in full swing and the race to test new technology often crossed with creating new ways to detect technology. I have no idea if Cooper is making this up, if the sergeant that told him the story made it up, or if this one of those things where the U in UFO, does all the lifting here. It's possible if the story is true and that this "Sgt. Meese" was in a unit that recovered crashed recon planes and atomic detection equipment (which is what actually crashed at Roswell). This part of the story ends with Cooper watching on Nov. 22 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. 

Cooper claims he watched this live on the break room television set. However, like the false memory of thousands of school kids who claim they watched the Challenger explode on television; this is the same thing. Kennedy's motorcade was important in Dallas, but nationally, it was another stop on a campaign tour. The motorcade might have been broadcast locally in Dallas, but not at Sheppard airbase 150 miles away. After a few harrowing days under DEFCON 2; I can find no evidence that the US military was placed on DEFCON 2. However, the Strategic Air Command, would have a different state of readiness from the NORAD DEFCON that we are familiar with. According to official documents the US has only ever been at DEFCON 3 (claims that we were under 2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis are apparently a mistake). 

Cooper leaves the Air Force in 1965; only to join the Navy. Which he admits was difficult because of his seasickness. He's stationed in Hawaii on the USS Tiru, the last of the WWII era Balao Submarines. He makes two friends on the Tiru: an African American named Lincoln Loving and a Native American that they called, sigh, "Geronimo." Cooper recounts the shenanigans they got into aboard the Tiru, and having met two sailors in my day--it all tracks. Then Cooper relates the story of the UFO he saw in the sky. 

It's a very X-Files story. Cooper sees it, an Ensign Ball, his pal Geronimo, they track it in the sky on radar, and then someone comes with a camera. According to the story, "It was a metal machine, of that there was no doubt whatsoever. It was intelligently controlled, of that I was equally sure. It was a dull color, kind of like pewter. There were no lights. There was no glow. I thought I had seen a row of what looked like portholes, but could not be certain."

When the Tiru is docked back at US Naval headquarters at Pearl Harbor, everyone who saw the UFO is interviewed by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) where he's told to be quiet and that he saw nothing. 

My issue with this entire story is that he was supposed to be on a submarine. The sub he described, the Tiru, didn't have radar. Why was everyone on deck? I know submarines surface for various reasons, but this story is just so odd. Cooper keeps quiet and moves from various jobs to job in the Navy. Finally, he ends up commanding a patrol boat (think of the boat in Apocalypse Now) and operates in the Da Nang river. A friend of his is lost in combat and now the war became personal. Cooper brags about the number of combat missions his boat was involved in and how many enemy engagements he survived. He complains about the war in a way that is familiar to me from the numerous books I've read on the subject. The constant rotation of people in and out of areas made it difficult to create unit cohesion or to be effective in combat.

I read in a book about the Vietnam war this same complaint. One Army infantry unit would be stationed in the Mekong Delta and then after a year they would be transferred to this very dangerous area around a bridge, then a year later somewhere safer. The author of the book (I cannot remember the name of it), complained that being near the bridge sucked, but after a few months, the platoon became familiar with the terrain. They would know when something was out of place and they could rely on the other members to do the same only to get rotated out to somewhere that, on paper, seemed safer, but because they didn't know it was actually more dangerous. I don't doubt his Vietnam story, I do doubt that UFOs were really the U in that initialism. I'm sure all of the lights, over an active war zone (I'm sorry--peacekeeping operation), are very explainable. 

After 'Nam, Cooper is back at Pearl working for ONI. He's given "Q-Clearance" (yes the same Q level clearance that Q-anon claims) where he learns that ONI killed JFK. The Secret Service agent who is driving the Limo killed Kennedy. An impressive feat when you consider that JFK was behind and to the right of the driver and the fatal shot which killed Kennedy was to the right side of the president's head. He also learned about Project Galileo, the coming ice age, the New World Order, and "Alternatives 1, 2, & 3."

Cooper is discharged and avoids two assassination attempts as he tries to leak this information to a reporter. The book we are about to read is that information. Every paranoid UFO conspiracy theory is in this book. In fact, it's the genesis for a bit of it. Cooper book is an amalgamation of a number of different conspiracy theories as he gained prominence in the UFO movement spearheaded by Stanton Friedman. As Cooper's star faded, he jumped into the conspiracy movement. With his Naval history he had a certain clout that others did not. Moreso because his Naval work is verifiable. While liars like Bob Lazar can claim all this history in Area 51, Cooper can show discharge papers. 

The rest of the introduction is a mix of his life with his wife and child--which is sad because of how it ends (it's not in the book but I know the rest of the story); and his fights with other conspiracy theorists at the dawn of the "patriot movement" in the 80s. Cooper was a violent alcoholic and was likely suffering from PTSD from Vietnam. The UFO community exorcised him because he was notoriously difficult to get along with and he became more paranoid seeing every misfortune as a plot against him. 

Next week we will begin chapter 1: Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.