More Aliens: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 421-441

 Quick correction: last week should have ended on page 420.

Appendix B would make more sense if we learned about the government coverup of extra-terrestrials and UFOs in any significant manner during this book. We just haven’t and it makes this extra-long part just an add-on. Cooper is like, “hey look, alien stuff, it’s all true.” It would even make sense if it had a place in the narrative, but this stuff does not. I sincerely wonder if Cooper had an idea for a UFO book but abandoned the project and this is the stuff that’s left over.

This week begins with a letter from Col. L. Gordon Cooper (USAF) to Ambassador Griffith of Grenada. Cooper is legitimate astronaut, he flew in the Mercury and Gemini missions, and just missed out on being the commander of Apollo 13. The story that Col. Cooper tells is that he saw some UFOs over West Germany in the 50s, and that even other Air Force and Astronauts are reluctant to share their stories. That’s it. It’s a lot of nothing, and because this is the Cold War it would be normal to see things over West Germany coming from the East; things were a little tense for a bit. Astronaut Cooper will later claim that he took a photograph of a UFO using a special camera that was used to capture aircraft landings but that the USAF took the negatives. That’s not in this book, but this Cooper is definitely a believer.

The point of this is to appeal to the Grenadan ambassador to speak about this at the UN. I do not think that anything came of this.

The next document is a letter from a Robert Swan to a Linda Howe of Littleton Colorado. Robert is responding to and inquiry by Linda of Bill Cooper. Robert claims that he was given documents from Cooper about a moon base. The puzzling thing is that if this is a true story, then Cooper should just include those documents.

Our next document is titled, “Part 1121—Extraterrestrial Exposure.” This document is playing what I call the “Bewilder Gambit.” This is an official NASA document that provides guidelines for dealing with exposure of an astronaut to outer space. It’s very technical and pretty boring. The concern is that the Moon or outer space could harbor some kind of microbe, and that Astronauts ought to be quarantined when they return. But the title makes it seem like it’s a document that concerns itself with exposure to extraterrestrial intelligence. Cooper is gambling that the reader will just skim over it, or, also likely, that’s what he did. Either is very likely. He’s got a section at the end of this which is underlined, I think by him (?), which details that the activity is classified. I think this is supposed to add a layer of nefariousness to the document; but I’m not quite sure. Cooper needs to be telling us what the interpretation of these documents is supposed to be.

The next document is a Press Note, which means it’s public, from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service a branch of the CIA (which Cooper writes on the page). This press release is about a series of UFO sightings in the USSR. Funny enough, a concurrent story from the Skeptic.org.uk covers some of the same stories. For Cooper the CIA puts out nothing but lies, so we should not believe any of this. Secondly, this is information that the CIA gleaned through Soviet News agencies; that makes me double suspicious of anything I’m reading here.

The next document is odd. It’s a letter from one of his fans, actually the rest of this appendix is populated by letters from his fans. This one starts off thanking Cooper for his work, agreeing with his positions, etc. but then the author talks about how me met a woman. This woman was everything the man wanted but then, suddenly, after six months; she left him. This means she must have been an NSA spy who was working him for information. That’s the conclusion the writer of the letter gives. What makes no sense about this is that this person isn’t a UFO researcher, he’s just a fan of Cooper who reads the same publicly available materials. As a “honeypot” operation this feels excessive. It reminds me of the sexy assassin that was sent to kill the Lone Gunmen, “they” are going to much more elaborate traps than is necessary.

The next three letters are rather uneventful. Just fans agreeing and asking if he’s seen blah blah blah’s report. The last letter in Appendix B captured my interest because amongst the usual persecution complex of the conspiracy theorist is a story that the unnamed author tells about meeting a woman named “Vicki.” Vicki and the writer grew close but then after they exchanged some information she began to grow distant. Then she introduced him to her boyfriend who thought all of the UFO stuff was secretly a Soviet Plot. Of course, this means that she just dumped him to hop in bed with the CIA. It’s nearly the same story, apparently these guys only meet women secret agents who betray them for the company.

It’s just so sad.

That wraps up Appendix B. What did we learn? Well, nothing really. I have to be fair though, if you were reading this book in the mid 90s, this might be the first time you read about Area 51. Cooper is writing for the militia crowd and this is “conspiratorial creep.” All of this UFO stuff is new to them, but old and tired to us thirty years later. He’s not the first person to jump in here, but he’s probably one of the first to combine anti-government militia New World Order conspiracy theories with this kind of alien theory. I wonder if some Michigan militia “private” actually walked through the woods with a modified AK-47 thinking about the JASON project.