Appendix B: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 397-403

 The appendix in a written work (not that horrible little organ that put me in the hospital a few months back) is supposed to be where we add things to the work. This is either reference materials printed in full that didn’t make sense to include in the main body, like letters or in modern times social media posts. It’s also where some authors will make a commentary in a second edition to their work. For Cooper, it makes sense to include his military record. He spent way too long in the beginning of the work informing us about it, but placing his military record is an thing for an appendix.

The section titled “Appendix B: UFOS and Area 51,” is an addition that makes little sense. The first document is just someone’s letter to some people (it’s addressed in the plural), the Cooper has just reprinted here. Given how disjointed the book has turned out to be, it’s not the inclusion of the letter that vexes me it’s the inclusion of the letter in the appendix that confuses me. Why not just stick this letter anywhere else in the book? Putting it in the Appendix does only one thing: it tells us that Cooper didn’t know what an Appendix was and confirms my hypothesis that conspiracy theorists are emulating what they think the “smart books” do. Cooper could have just made a chapter, because that is what this is—a chapter of documents related to a UFO conspiracy.

It makes sense that Cooper would talk about this, because he came out of the UFOlogy circuit of the 80s and 90s. By all accounts, and you can read this in the fabulous biography of him titled “Pale Horse Rider,” he was very difficult to get along with and was prone to starting fights with other people. There is another issue here with this appendix—it’s out of place in the book. He’s mentioned aliens in chapter 12, he’s talked about ET stuff in chapter 2, and in his introduction he claims that he saw a UFO while stationed aboard a Naval ship. It’s not out of place in a conspiracy book but most of this book has been about the coming New World Order.

Let’s get into the letter.

The first thing we notice is that the font is strange in both appearance and size. I learned to type on a computer, I’m not that old, and this looks like the type of output you would get from a dot-matrix printer. Secondly, that Cooper has copied this from someone else, because the margins are blurred just as they would be when someone is using a copy machine.

The letter claims to be from a “fifty year of age engineer that has worked in the private sector, as well as with the government.”

That is an odd phrasing, and I want to see that it’s the product of someone learning English, but even then, I’m not sure. He comments without context that, “I am still very much surprised that Project Pluto and results have not surfaced yet.”

Again, there is a stunted phrasing that confuses me, more importantly that we have no idea what Project Pluto is. I’ll assume that it is what the author is going to describe, but we can’t be sure. So, this 50-year-old Engineer, is called to upstate Pennsylvania to build prefab warehouses around, what he thinks is a plane crash. He describes the scene as being blocked off by security personnel under the guise of building a power station in the area. Now, I don’t want to criticize the conspirator’s plan, but this is a bad cover story. If you’re covering up a UFO crash, don’t claim that the people are building something permanent, just claim that it was a plane crash. If someone asks why there was so much security for a plane crash, the cover story then is either “secret plane” or “plane carrying nuclear bomb.” In fact, the latter will probably stop people from trying to take a look. They get the buildings up and he goes home. Three months later, he’s hired to come back and tear down the buildings.

The person is hired again for a crash of a “top-secret aircraft” in upstate New York in 1976, and then again in a lake in upstate Pennsylvania. Apparently, these craft love slamming into the unpopulated areas of New York and Pennsylvania. The letter describes them as “cigar shaped” and made of a metal that was lighter than anything he had experienced before, and but was extremely durable. If we are taking this letter as true and given the time period that he’s talking about (1975-1980) he could be describing a crashed Lockheed SR-71. It has a strange shape and describing the rear engines as cigar shaped wouldn’t be that odd if they were separated from the rest of the plane. That’s just my speculation and it’s weak, I know, but it makes about as much sense as anything else that he says.

In all three cases he never saw the complete craft. He did play with a piece of metal which he described as lighter than anything he encountered before, so light that he feared it would blow away if the wind picked up. If the security was as tight as he claims then it’s odd, he’d be able to do this, but also, I’m assuming that his description of the metal is hyperbolic, he could be holding titanium which is far lighter than one would expect. This would lend itself again to the SR-71 which was 90% titanium.

I’ll say this for the letter, the engineer never claims that it was definitely of extra-terrestrial origin. The engineer assumes this, and is honest about that which is nice. The basis of his argument is that no government could keep such technology a secret. However, he’s got no evidence of any technology all he has is a possibly crashed UFO. The technology to crash a plane is pretty easy to build.

The strangest part of the story is that each site has a weird magnetic field, which isn’t explained. It’s implied that the field is because of the alien engine on the crashed vehicle but there is no basis for it.

The most interesting part is the engineer’s monologue about what it would be like to meet an alien, “And for a short time I had wondered what I would do if suddenly a door opened and some form of life came out. What the heck! If it didn’t look too bad I may have walked up and said hello just as I would to anyone else who may visit me.”

I love that. This person is like, “Ok, Original series Klingon fine, TNG era Klingon, err maybe. Discovery era Klingons, absolutely not.” It’s honest, at least, Bajorans are cool but Cardassians are not. I’m not going to lie, I’m on board with this position. The author goes on to say that he’s more concerned, “of picking up some unknown form of bacteria than I would be of the life form itself.”

That’s pretty smart, but even smarter is, “What I fear more than any visitor is that some farmer is going to get them with a shot gun and do more damage than we can or want to handle.”

This would be an interesting story: a UFO lands in Arizona and the peaceful aliens pop out to say hi and are met with gunfire from some Az Maga militia type. In response the aliens either declare war on the Earth or set up a quarantine trapping us on the planet.

The letter after this ends. The author says that he heard about “your group” and wonders if a branch was going to be opened in the Philadelphia area. Then there are two pictures that are of such terrible quality that I have no clue what to make of them. The caption claims that they are photographs of UFOs over Mt. Rainer; which to be fair I cannot identify what is happening in them.

In closing, this unsigned letter proves nothing, and I have no idea what the point of it is supposed to be. We’ll finish off Appendix B next week.