Let's Go Luna: Behold a Pale Horse...pp. 222-239

 When we last left off, a proper post that is, we discussed the weird aside that Cooper takes on the JFK assassination. It appears, almost out of nowhere, in a chapter about aliens. The very gossamer connective tissue is that Cooper claims Kennedy took the presidency, found out about the aliens, then threatened to reveal everything in a year. This was not acceptable to the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) nor the JASON Project, so they had the president assassinated. 

Cooper is going to jump around time more than he usually does. The first thing he brings up is Moonbase Luna. This is a stupid name for it. "Moonbase Moon" is how that translates. Cooper claims he has pictures, but he never shows them to us (I'm willing to leave room for the possibility that they do appear in the print version of the book). Luna is run by the world conspirators, who meet "on a nuclear submarine beneath the polar icecap." 

Ok, I'll give him a point for this one. If you want to hold a secret meeting without the possibility of anyone dropping in, this is a good place to do it. The trouble is that within Cooper's own conspiracy theory, this is dumb. Earlier, in the same paragraph, he claims that the people who make up the governance committee are the 39 delegates of the executive committee of the Bilderberg Group. The Bilderberg group meets once a year and is invite-only; why not just have the meet there? The same people are in attendance. 

At this point, we know why Cooper is over-complicating the conspiracy theory: because the more layers he can put between the claim and the proof makes it nearly impossible to fact-check it. People who attend Bilderberg are public. Concrete claims about them can be easily refuted. This wouldn't work, because of course people like Henry Kissinger would deny the existence of a moon base. Yet the attendees all denying that there was a talk of a moonbase would seem a little too coincidental. So even in the ultra-secret conspiracy cabal meeting of the Bilderberg Group--they have to ship out to submarine and dive under the arctic ice to speak about Luna. 

The rest of this page (we still haven't left page 222) is technobabble about imaginary space vehicles held in Nevada. This is where Cooper begins making claims from two different times simultaneously. He discusses both Eisenhower and the 80s. If we remember, Eisenhower was the one who started Majestic 12 and provided all of the funding. Cooper isn't adding anything new to this story, he's just rehashing the stuff we already know. He makes some reference to Executive Orders and their number system because there is an alleged EO 92447 forming Majestic 12, which is absurd. After all, Biden just signed EO 14114 five days ago (12-22-23). This means that MJ-12 is a fraud...but wait, he's been saying that it's real this whole time. So what gives? 

Well, this is where the jumping begins to make sense. I've mentioned it before and the excellent biography of Cooper "Pale Horse Rider" stresses the point that Cooper was an asshole to work with. Cooper has to leverage a discrediting of the UFOlogy claims because they essentially kicked him out of the club. Cooper's eye turns to UFOlogy expert Stanton Friedman. Friedman's biggest claim to fame in skeptic circles is that he threw doubts on the liar Robert Lazar's claim that he worked at Area 51 and the super duper secret base underneath Area 51. Cooper also throws shade on John Lear and Bruce Maccabee; two other big names in the UFO community. 

In this, I am aligned with Cooper against the common enemy of wishful thinking by UFO people. However, we are not allies, the enemy of my enemy is not my friend usually. Stanton Friedman was grounded enough to call obvious bullshit when it conflicted too much with the established UFO lore. Cooper's claims for each person, along with some others that I had not heard of, is that they are all government agents. Philip Klass, a UFO debunker, was a CIA plant, and Cooper knows this because he saw the documents in 1970 and 1973 when Cooper was in the Navy. The others, privately admitted to Cooper that they worked for the government. 

I'm covering a lot of pages this week. Much more than usual, but that's because this chapter is so petty. From 225-233, the majority of the content is Cooper taking petty shots at everyone in the UFO community. Interspersed are a variety of conspiracy claims concerning drugs, AIDS, Prozac, and some other mind-control devices. These conspiracy claims are interesting, but they are very short asides that are definitely the product of stream-of-consciousness writing and an author who is too attached to a perception of his own brilliance to delete anything. I almost feel bad, but I don't know how to cover his attacks on fellow UFO researchers without it degenerating into gossip, and the varied conspiracy claims are too brief to warrant any attention. An editor would have done wonders for this book. 

Cooper returns to coherence at the conclusion. There are five points: 

1) is that the Earth is going to self-destruct and that is why MJ-12 exists. They believe they are doing the right thing. 

2) The power structure really in charge of the world is a joint operation between humans and aliens. I'm guessing this is all in pursuit of point 1. 

3) The government has been totally deceived and we are being manipulated by an alien power, which will result in the total enslavement and/or destruction of the human race. We must use any and every means available to prevent this from happening. I quote this in full because it runs in opposition to 1 and 2. Aren't the aliens helping us? 

4) Or none of this is happening and what truly is, is so advanced that we cannot comprehend it. We're not educated enough to understand it.

5) Or this is all bullshit and Cooper is being used. The claim here is that MJ-12 and all of it is a distraction so that people look for it while the one world government takes over. The weird thing is that Cooper claims he has proof of this, he's included it in the appendix. In the appendix, there isn't such evidence. The appendix is Cooper's service record from the Navy, some photos of UFOs (very bad ones), and some long documents about UFOs. Nothing that would constitute evidence that Cooper is being used to discredit the conspiracy movement or distract people from the one-world government. 

The chapter ends with a quote from Reagan where he tells Gorbachev "we'd forget all the little local differences that we have between our two countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings on this Earth."

I would have agreed with us, but people like Cooper couldn't set aside their bullshit during the pandemic so even if the saucer people invaded. I don't think we would suddenly get along.