Majestic: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 197-201

After several short chapters, Cooper begins a very long one titled, "The Secret Government." It's a rather important chapter because Cooper is promising us a deep dive into "Majestic." We need a little background since our experience has been that Cooper is not going to provide in a sensible manner. We'll get it from him, but we'll get it in bits and pieces scattered across the chapter like Legos in my house. 

Majestic, is the secret government agency that deals with the UFOs and the reports that they put together. You can read them here. The story of Majestic begins with President Truman at the end of WWII. Right off the bat, one problem with the existence of Majestic is that a different program already existed at the same time called "Project Blue Book." Why the government needed two at the same time is explained easily: Blue Book never turned out proof of aliens and it was the cover story to placate the population. Majestic was the real deal: not only did it find alien technology, and alien bodies, but in tellings like Cooper's they dealt with the aliens directly. The Majestic group directly and undeniably inspired the secret group "The Syndicate" in the X-Files. I should add that every independent person or group, including some Ufologists, has considered the Majestic documents to be a forgery. Going through the link above, you can see an inverse relationship between a "zinger" paper and its authenticity. Some of the more authentic documents concern the more innocuous reports. That's the basis of what we need to know about them.

Cooper begins by bragging. Anytime there is a popular conspiracy theory document or film, Cooper has not only seen it; but he saw it way before anyone else did when he was in the Navy (this will include some well-known hoaxes too). Here is no different. The Majestic documents first made their way into the public in 1984 when they were "revealed" by an UFOlogist and film producer named Jamie Shandera. Cooper claims that his knowledge is a result of "my own research into the TOP SECRET/MAJIC material which I saw and read between the years 1970 and 1983 as a member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet." 

His timeline is a bit messy. We know he was in the Navy, and we know that he was on a gunboat during the Vietnam War; but it seems like he's putting himself in two places at the same time. He wouldn't have been on this team while at the same time operating a gunboat in the Mekong Delta. 

"Since some of this information was derived from sources that I cannot divulge for obvious reasons, and from published sources that I cannot vouch for, this chapter must be termed a hypothesis."

This is a trick that conspiracy theorists do quite frequently. They claim that they have this knowledge but they cannot reveal how they got it. Part of this is understandable. If someone is feeding you knowledge you want to preserve the secrecy of the source so that you can get more information and keep them out of jail/alive. That's how reporting would work, but there's an ethical obligation to reveal all materials if the thing you're revealing is the imminent genocide of the planet. Jones and Icke pull this crap all the time—they claim to have been in meetings with "high-level people" in the conspiracy but they signed an NDA so they can't tell us about it. None of that matters if these people are the most evil of evil people that ever existed. Does Cooper/Icke/Jones really think they are going to honor an agreement? They must. 

Cooper calls this chapter a "hypothesis" but it's very clear that he does not consider it to be so. He's hiding behind the term "hypothesis" because concrete claims are subject to concrete attacks. 

We begin the story of the "Secret Government." Cooper gives a brief synopsis of the state of the world and a stunned President Truman, who saw a crash in New Mexico (I'm assuming Roswell but Cooper does not indicate this) of "an alien spacecraft piloted by insectlike beings from [a] totally incomprehensible culture had crashed in the desert of New Mexico." 

This is odd, because it's usually the "Greys" that crashed. These creatures are, at least, unique. I imagine them as Zerglings from StarCraft. 

Cooper then explains that between 1947 and 1952 16 Majestic recovered 16 alien craft, 65 bodies, and 1 live specimen. Also, "an additional craft had exploded and nothing was recovered from that incident." 

That's bullshit. If it explodes there is debris, from an alien craft, which can be recovered. We should also focus on the complete incompetence of these UFOs and their pilots. Cooper says that some of the 16 were downed, meaning shot out of the sky by the US Army Air Corps. The best the US has to offer as an interceptor is a single prop fighter plane; maybe the P-36 Hawk, P-47 Thunderbolt, or the P-51 Mustang. Each of those three planes maxes their airspeed at 440mph, and they are all armed with machine guns. Guided missiles were introduced in the 1950s.

This means that a UFO, traveling across the vast void of space, comes to Earth and is knocked out of the sky by a WWII fighter plane. Even if the 16 UFOs represent a fraction of the visitors to our planet, they are still getting dusted by beings with technology that should make us look like ants compared to them. It's as if human beings landed on a new planet, facing an army of rodents, and the rodents somehow managed to inflict a series of casualties. 

The next few pages are a litany of abbreviations, project names, and references to government programs. I'm going to skip over them because, as we saw three chapters ago--Cooper doesn't know how to read government documents, or he's dishonestly misrepresenting them. If I give Cooper the benefit of the doubt it doesn't make a difference. All he's doing is listing the development of the American intelligence agencies and then inserting "aliens" every once in awhile. Nothing here is substantial until we get to James Forrestal.

Forrestal was the first Secretary of Defense and the last Secretary of the Navy (the cabinet positions were eliminated to only the one). Cooper claims that Forrestal objected to the Majestic program and wanted to inform the public. This caused him to be at odds with Truman who then forced him to resign after he expressed his fears to many people. Yet, none of Forrestal's fears are mentioned. In reality, Forrestal and Truman fought over many issues, but what caused Forrestal's resignation was that he secretly met with Thomas Dewey (of "Dewey defeats Truman" fame) to make arrangements for his position in Dewey's presidential administration. Afterward, he suffered a severe mental decline and died from injuries suffered during a suicide attempt on 22 May 1949. 

The suicide is a great tool for conspiracy theorists because they are loath to admit that mental health issues are anything more than government brainwashing. It allows people like Cooper to claim everything and anything about the individual's motives. Forrestal's diaries were then confiscated by the CIA and then sanitized of all UFO content. That is, until "Due to public demand the diaries were eventually rewritten and published in a sanitized version. The real diary information was later furnished by the CIA in book form to an agent who published the material as fiction. The name of the agent is Whitley Strieber and the book is Majestic. James Forrestal became one of the first victims of the cover-up."

Whitley Strieber was not a CIA agent, he was an advertising agent and then a horror novelist. Interestingly Strieber wrote a 1987 book "Communion" (which I owned but never read) where he describes being abducted by aliens, this was non-fiction. He then wrote a sequel, which his publisher described as fiction. Then he wrote "Majestic" which was about the Roswell crash. 

I think I'm going to call what happens here "the Cooper Gamble." This is where a conspiracy theorist throws out a reference or citation gambling that you are not familiar with it and will never be. In the preface to "Majestic" Strieber writes an acknowledgment where thanks UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, William Moore (author of "The Philadelphia Experiment), Jaime Shandera (the one who "released" the Majestic documents), Walter Haut (one of the people at the actual Roswell area--and whose role in it inflated with age), Dr. Jessie Marcel (a lt. Col. who investigated Roswell), and his wife Anne.  Nothing about Forrestal is in there. He also writes that "Majestic" is a work of fiction based on fact. 

Cooper has an odd job here: he's got to thread the line between the UFO stuff and the government takeover stuff. The people who believe in the latter are not necessarily those who believe in the former. UFO people always have a large hurdle of not looking like kooks to everyone else and while Cooper seems grounded because of his "evidence" this entire diversion to the UFO world seems like an unrelated distraction.