Conspiracy Theory Book of the Month #6: Behold a Pale Horse

It is arguably the most popular conspiracy theory book of the late 20^th century. Yet Behold a Pale Horse is barely an actual book. It has no overarching narrative, no particular subject matter it focuses on, little prose to speak of, and is clearly plagiarized at points.

Long revealed as a mashup of fake documents and conspiracy theories, the influence of William “Bill” Cooper’s seminal text is undeniable. Published in 1991, the book became, over time, inexorably linked to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, to QAnon and the antivax community, and to a slew of bogus theories about the “Deep State” and globalism. It became an instruction manual for all manner of cults, esoteric movements, new age scammers, conspiracy grifters, and social media influencers crafting their own “Mystery Babylon.” It is easy to find online for free. Still, the book is a perennial bestseller on Amazon, and currently sits in the top 4,000 of all books on the commerce juggernaut.

Behold a Pale Horse veers from subject to subject, bouncing between UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the ”secret world government,” and US intelligence-led plots to kill virtually everyone and enslave the survivors. Several of its “chapters” have been revealed as fake, and others are little more than transcripts of phone calls, personal recollections, or documents of questionable veracity. It is cluttered, chaotic, difficult to follow, and often based on little substantiation other than “this definitely happened, trust me.”

At times it is deeply paranoid, absurdly melodramatic at others, and nakedly antisemitic in multiple long stretches. It is virtually impossible to follow or understand.

In short, it is the very essence of the conspiratorial mind. And because of these “qualities,” Behold a Pale Horse has become one of the most influential and beloved texts of the modern western fringe movement. Since Cooper its release on a tiny New Age press, Pale Horse has sold well over 300,000 copies officially, with likely many more copies have been photocopied or bootlegged and passed around. If there is one conspiracy theory book that a believer has read, it’s likely this one.

So how did such a crazy quilt of conspiracy theories, speculation, paranoia, and incoherence become so popular? Who was the Arizona militia figure Cooper, shot dead in 2001 by law enforcement after he shot a sheriff’s deputy trying to arrest him? And where does the book fit on the ladder of other paranoid texts? The answers aren’t really in Pale Horse itself, but much more in the cultish following it has built up – one that has taken Cooper’s grab bag of ideas and spun it off into countless directions.

Pale Horse Rider

Born in 1943, little in Bill Cooper’s background suggests he would become a critical figure in the 1990’s explosion of conspiracy theory belief into the mainstream. Much of his biography is murky, based primarily on his own writings and scant public records. But he definitely served in the US Navy during the Vietnam War, briefly worked in naval intelligence, wound up in San Francisco in the mid 1970s, and lived a quiet life as a school administrator until 1988. Sometime that year, he went on an early UFO dial-up message board and claimed that while serving aboard a submarine in 1966 and sailing from Pearl Harbor to Seattle, he saw a massive UFO repeatedly dive upwards and downwards in and out of the water – an event other sailors witnessed as well, and were immediately told to never speak of.

Cooper’s post caught the attention of John Lear, the son of business jet pioneer Bill Lear. John had become a celebrity in the growing UFO community by making claims of having access to secret government documents related to human-alien hybrids, secret treaties with gray aliens, and horrific experiments carried out at underground bases. The two began collaborating on a series of increasingly incoherent theories and accusations, and Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse followed in 1991. In it, Cooper took the ideas he and Lear dreamed up, of a vast government conspiracy to suppress UFO knowledge and enslave humanity, and turned them into a battle cry for extremists – though by that point Lear and Cooper had fallen out, accusing each other of being CIA plants.

But Pale Horse is far from just another book about UFOs and alien hijinks. It’s the reader’s introduction into what Cooper calls “a grand game of chess being played at a level that we can barely imagine.” Despite his belief that the nightmare world being conjured for us by the powerful people at the top is “impossible to change,” if enough “sheeple” wake up to the forbidden truths being dispensed in the book, humanity might have a chance.

And there are a lot of hidden truths that Cooper purports to reveal. Pale Horse is a primer on the inner workings of the devious cabal running the world and planning to cull humanity – a vast super-conspiracy Cooper would later dub “Mystery Babylon.” If true, it might be the most important book in the English language. But it is also incoherent and aimless, deeply personal and confrontational, utterly dismissing any sort of criticism or questioning, and offers no proof for its bombshell allegations. Long stretches are about people who have wronged him, UFO celebrities who “are not operating in our best interests,” and multiple attacks on former friend John Lear.

The book opens with Cooper’s own biography, going from almost painfully frank details about his father beating him as a child to a massively expanded version of the submarine/UFO story that he’d told three years earlier online. But it’s when he joins Naval Intelligence and is read into the deepest, darkest secrets of the US military that the scales fall from his eyes and, or at least he claims, he starts the journey down a path that would eventually consume him, make him a celebrity, and lead to his death.

Cooper writes of learning that Naval Intelligence participated in the Kennedy assassination, which had been carried out by Kennedy’s driver using alien tech. He also learns of a coming ice age, a secret world government, detailed depopulation “Alternative” plans involving aliens and nuclear weapons, and other dark secrets – and as he tells it, immediately goes AWOL from the Navy, never to return. Instead, he threw himself into research about the deadly link between the US government and aliens, and turned himself into a celebrity in a vary narrow niche.

That biographical sketch, which eventually devolves into a slew of Cooper’s grievances, is the only real narrative part of Pale Horse. Other than a long ramble about UFOs and alien plots, much of which he adapted from his own previous writing, the rest is a patchwork of texts from other sources. There are supposedly secret documents, “a proposed Constitutional model for the Newstates of America,” the texts of various congressional bills and executive orders (all of which are public), newspaper clippings, and transcripts of phone calls with fellow paranoiacs.

The New World Order, according to Cooper, was dominated by occult secret societies who were making final preparations to imprison dissenters in FEMA camps, crush all opposition using secret alien technology, reduce individual liberty to a mere memory, and permanently suspend the Constitution in favor of martial law. And only he knew about it, with uncountable obstacles being thrown at him to suppress the “truth.”

A Deeper Dive

One of the issues that dogs Behold a Pale Horse, or at least theoretically should, is that a large amount of it was either plagiarized or based on documents that have no substantiation. The “Newstates Constitution” was lifted from a 1974 book by economist Rexford Tugwell, while many of the other documents Cooper includes as “evidence” are anonymous letters, copied pages from books, and the text of a bill that never became law. Maybe the most famous fake in the book is the first chapter, what Cooper claims is a secret government plot revealed in a document written in 1979 that was “found on July 7, 1986, in an IBM copier that had been purchased at a surplus sale.”

Entitled “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” the “plan” claims to be the inner workings of a vast computing system that can instantly analyze millions of socioeconomic interactions, and control or punish individual people based on those interactions, acting as a monetary electrical grid. But rather than being a secret document that Bill Cooper just found lying around, “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” was likely written by a sovereign citizen named Hartford Van Dyke, who claimed in a 2003 letter to the editor of Paranoia magazine that he wrote it in 1979, inspired by None Dare Call it Conspiracy. Van Dyke wrote this letter from prison, where he was serving time for trying to pay his taxes with fake currency.

Far more troubling than Cooper’s reliance on either unfalsifiable personal recollection or hoaxes is the antisemitism that runs through the book. That “vast computing system” in “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars” is supposedly based on the theory of “economic inductance” that Cooper (or Van Dyke) claims was concocted by Mayer Amschel Rothschild, patriarch of the legendary banking family, as a means to control the masses. Except Rothschild died in 1815, long before any such theories existed. Ultimately, the document is just another example of Jewish power myths taking hold among the far right. Cooper infamously devoted an entire chapter of the first edition of Pale Horse to printing what he called The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, calling it a “plan to subjugate the world.” But as if trying to prove he wasn’t antisemitic, Cooper includes an “author’s note” that any sort of anti-Jewish sentiment in the document “was written to deceive” and that any references to “Jews” should simply be replaced with “Illuminati.” The Protocols were removed from the book’s future printings.

And there were many future printings – most of which Cooper didn’t live to see.

Behold a Pale Horse was a massive hit, deeply penetrating circles of fringe belief like the New Age world and UFO-ology, and infecting them with antisemitic paranoia and anti-government hysteria. The book’s success prompted Cooper to launch his own shortwave radio show The Hour of the Time. Every day for nearly a decade, Cooper would spend an hour ranting about the issues of the day, adding new strands to his “Mystery Babylon” plot, reading from Pale Horse, and frequently getting drunk on the air. Among the groups that would embrace Cooper and his paranoia were the US militia movement, anti-government sovereign citizens, AIDS denialists, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and his comrades, the incarcerated, and maybe most surprisingly, the Black community in the US, with numerous rappers name-checking Cooper and his “revelations.”

As the 2000s dawned, Cooper’s position as the godfather of paranoia was being usurped by a new generation, including Alex Jones – whom Cooper loathed. He was also facing arrest for failure to pay his taxes, and rarely left his compound in rural Arizona, with federal agents fearful of trying to take him and cause another Waco or Ruby Ridge type of shootout. Finally after years of claims that he would be killed for what he was revealing, Cooper was indeed shot dead by Eager County sheriff’s deputies during a fire fight that left one deputy dead. A deputy on the scene claimed Cooper declared he wouldn’t be taken alive.

Every strand of today’s “conspiracy theory of everything,” combing disparate events and strands into a vast plot carried out at the highest levels, traces back to Bill Cooper and Behold a Pale Horse. That much of it turned out to be nonsense has no effect on those who want to be true – or who have made careers out of making up their own version of it.