“BEHOLD A PALE HORSE”, by Milton William Cooper, was published by Light Technology of Sedona, Arizona in 1991. It runs to 500 pages, has no index, but is illustrated in black and white with many photographs and documents.

Much of the book is gibberish, it is disjointed and I can’t quite make out what is the point of it. Cooper publishes his military record alongside other documents, some of them declassified. Assuming that his record is genuine and has not been tampered with, all it proves is that even fairly senior intelligence officers can go round the twist. I am not sure exactly what the documents are supposed to prove. Britain is notorious for state secrecy, but in the United States where a freedom of information act has long replaced official secrets legislation, a great deal of, at one time, highly embarrassing information, has been placed in the public domain. This information includes COINTELPRO papers and the like, but you can bet your last dollar that all the really embarrassing stuff will either never be released or has been quietly consigned to the memory hole.

Cooper’s book contains not a single footnote but does list some references to source material. On page 237, four of these sources are identified as Robert D. Schulzinger’s The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs; two books by Whitley Strieber: Communion and Majestic; and a book called We Discovered Alien Bases on the Moon. We will deal with Strieber shortly, but first, let’s look very briefly at the subject of Schulzinger’s book.

The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs is an official history of the Council on Foreign Relations. (5) It was commissioned from a compliant and spineless academic to whitewash the machinations of this “elitist” think tank. The Council on Foreign Relations, otherwise known as the CFR, or simply “the Establishment”, is a semi-official body which was established as the American arm of the conspiracy we all know doesn’t really exist, better known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), which was founded in 1919 as an offshoot of the Round Table groups. The machinations of these self-styled think tanks on formulating government ‐ and particularly international ‐ policy, on both sides of the Atlantic, has been largely written out of history, but since the publication in 1966 of Professor Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy And Hope, they have come increasingly to the attention of conspiracy buffs. (6)

Cooper’s claim on page 85 that the CFR is, to some extent, a secret society, is fair comment, but there is a very wide chasm indeed between fair comment and the sort of nonsense he peddles here. One is certainly entitled to pose the question: if these men of foreign affairs are so wise, how come they didn’t stop America being dragged into the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War...? Cooper asks the right questions, but unfortunately his answers are way off beam.

On pages 20-1, Cooper claims to have seen a UFO while in the Navy, along with others. This may be true, bearing in mind that a UFO is exactly that: unidentified. His claim that there was a cover-up is less convincing, and his further claim that he was threatened with 10 years in gaol for talking about it is, well...

On page 25, Cooper tells his readers that he served in Vietnam. Okay Bill, we believe you, but who killed JFK? On page 27 we learn that he learned that the Office of Naval Intelligence had participated in the Kennedy assassination. Ah, so it wasn’t Oswald after all? Tell us something we don’t know. (7) Like: the agent driving the President’s limo shot him in the head?

Also on page 27, Cooper informs his readers that: “...I have found evidence that the secret societies were planning as far back as 1917 to invent an artificial threat from outer space in order to bring humanity together in a one-world government which they call the New World Order.” Having read this far, my formerly high opinion of Cooper had already gone out of the window, but there was far, far worse to come. For the record, although this claim that the “artificial threat from outer space” dating back to 1917 may be baloney, it is not total baloney. The first reference I have found to this is in a novel called Wild Card, which was first published in 1974. I was fortunate enough to read it at the time. (8) In this novel, the United States government hatches a plot to fake a flying saucer crash to convince a strife torn world that planet Earth is under attack from hostile aliens. The idea is that this will promote world unity: everybody will bury their differences and gang up against the common enemy.

It is extremely unlikely that such a plot would have been hatched as early as 1917; certainly Cooper provides no documentation for such a claim. (9)

On page 28, Cooper refers to the MJ-12 saucer crash documents; they are fakes, he says, as indeed they are, but he claims that the people who forged them: William Moore and Stanton Friedman, were government agents rather than kooks. (10) Believe it or not, Friedman is a nuclear physicist. A particularly stupid looking photograph of this conspiracy crank appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle in November 1995. (11)

According to Cooper, he decided to expose the fraud, but “First it was necessary to convince the known agents that I was just a kook...” That was obviously the easy part. On page 226, Cooper goes further and claims that Moore and Friedman along with Moore’s friend Jamie Shandera (12) are agents of the Illuminati. Moore is said to have admitted that he was a government agent and had released disinformation to researchers. And that he had forged documents. Are we to presume from this that the US government is working hand in hand with the Illuminati?

For the benefit of the uninitiated, the Order of the Illuminati did exist. It was founded by Adam Weishaupt and others on May 1, 1776. (13) It was believed to have been broken up by the Bavarian authorities in 1786, but according to some sources ‐ in particular certain conspiracy buffs (and cranks) ‐ it simply went underground, (14) and plays a major part in the creation of world unrest to this day. (15) In reality, Weishaupt believed that the priests and monks were “the adversaries of all progress”. (16)

Cooper though, has very different ideas about Adam Weishaupt as well as about the IIluminati, for on page 76 he finds great symbolic significance in the linking of three events to the year 1776, the year he tells us that Weishaupt not only founded the Order of the Illuminati but published The Wealth Of Nations! Oh boy. This classic study of free market economics was of course penned by the great British economist Adam Smith (17) but, says Cooper, it is no accident that the Declaration of Independence was written in the same year. One wonders how significant future mystics may find the fact that Cooper alluded to this nonsense on page 76. (18) On the very same page he speaks very highly of a book he refers to as Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

The title of this book is actually THE HOLY BLOOD AND THE HOLY GRAIL. It was written by Michael Baigent, (19) Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln and first published by Jonathan Cape in 1982. The book was a minor bestseller, and if it had been published as honest fiction it would have deserved to be. The book’s authors are probably honest, but their reasoning and conclusions ‐ like Cooper’s ‐ leave much to be desired.

One of the themes of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s book is that the notorious Protocols Of Zion is really the Protocols Of Sion, and that, rather than an anti-Semitic fabrication, it was a genuine document of Masonic origin. This view is far from original, but Cooper’s interpretation of the Protocols certainly is. Chapter 15 runs from pages 267-332 and is called PROTOCOLS OF THE WISE MEN OF ZION. Here the entire text is reproduced verbatim. (20)

On the first page of the chapter, Cooper says the Protocols were first referred to in the late 1700s ‐ indeed! ‐ and that the first public copy was distributed in the early 1890s. Zion should be Sion, and Jews should be Illuminati; goyim = cattle. “This has been written intentionally to deceive people.” This is about the only intelligent thing he says in the entire book; the Protocols Of Zion is a document that was indeed written with the intention of deceiving people, and by all accounts it has been spectacularly successful. Be that as it may, its history has been fairly extensively documented. The first public copy was certainly not distributed in the early 1890s because the 10^th protocol contains a clear reference to the French Panama Canal scandal of 1899. (21)

On pages 80-1, Cooper enters into much speculation about the roles of the Bilderberg Group and the CFR, and on page 82 the Trilateral Commission is said to have been the brainchild of American mega-banker David Rockefeller. There can be no doubt whatsoever that some sort of “conspiracy” has been afoot here for decades if only by virtue of the fact that these groups meet ‐ or used to meet ‐ in total or virtually total secrecy prior to their exposure by the likes of Dan Smoot, Gary Allen and A.K. Chesterton. Even today they are barely reported in the mainstream media. Obviously something has been going on here: why so much secrecy if there is nothing to hide? Clearly somebody somewhere told the media “Don’t report Bilderberg meetings. Don’t mention the CFR.” And the media dutifully complied. Be that as it may, there is a vast cavern between a media black-out on such groups and their controlling the world. (22) Cooper’s speculation, nonsense and uncritical endorsement of absurd forgeries proves clearly that he has gone over the edge.

On pages 35-65 he covers Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, a supposedly secret document dated May 1979. It is said to have been “found” July 7, 1986 in an IBM computer purchased at a surplus sale. It just happened to be lying there! On page 36, Cooper claims that this document espouses the policy adopted at the 1954 Bilderberg meeting; this is the Illuminati’s declaration of war, he says.

This document is also mentioned in a June 1995 issue of the New Statesman which identifies it as a fake. (23) On page 41, Cooper cites the founder of the House of Rothschild thus: “Give me control over a nation’s currency, and I care not who makes its laws.” Many conspiracy buffs will be familiar with this famous quote. Unfortunately, it appears to be one of those quotes famous for the wrong reason: namely, the person to whom it has long been attributed never actually said it! According to American scholars Laird Wilcox and John George, this phrase has been adapted from a certain Andrew Fletcher, a Scotsman who said something far less sinister like: “I care not who makes a country’s laws, so long as I can write its songs.” (24) We can forgive Cooper this though.

Not everything Cooper says about conspiracies is nonsense. For example, on page 70 he makes some good points about “secret societies”, ie that an ideology or organisation that is suppressed by the state ‐ but not only by the state ‐ can exist only as a conspiracy. On page 72 he makes a meaningful falsifiable prediction: in December 1999, when the Galileo spacecraft delivers its payload, including 49.7lb of plutonium, to Jupiter, the resulting explosion will lead to the creation of a new star called Lucifer. If you say so, Milton.

Unfortunately, even if this prediction comes true it will not be Cooper who deserves the credit because it was actually made ‐ though obviously not as a prediction ‐ by Arthur C. Clarke in his novel 2010, which was first published in the UK as long ago 1982! This book is a sequel ‐ and in my humble opinion a very pitiful one ‐ to Clarke’s excellent 2001: A Space Odyssey.

At one time I used to read quite a lot of fiction, including science fiction. I read many of Clarke’s books including 2010 many years ago. I remembered the theme of the book, that the planet Jupiter (a failed sun according to astronomers) was to be converted into a sun by some extraterrestial entity, but not the fact that it was renamed. When I looked it up, presto, there it was: Cooper has even stolen the name, which means that he is a plagiarist as well as mad. It is possible of course that somebody has been feeding barmy Bill all this baloney, but there is so much of it from so many disparate sources that I doubt it. In any case, Cooper’s book doesn’t reveal any of his sources, so he and he alone must take the credit ‐ and the blame ‐ for all the dross contained herein.

On page 83, he boasts that while working for Naval Intelligence he had access to top secret documents relating to much of the nonsense in this book. He may indeed have had access to top secret documents, but to those of the Illuminati?

Although, as stated, Cooper publishes the complete text of the Protocols Of Zion, Jewish readers will be pleased to learn that Cooper is not an anti-Semite. (25) They might also take some comfort from the fact that he is not a Holocaust Revisionist either. Catholic readers will not though, because, on page 89, according to our intrepid former Naval Intelligencer: in the early 1940s, the I.G. Farben Chemical Company employed a Polish salesman who sold cyanide to the Nazis for use in Auschwitz. Yes, Cooper believes in the gas chambers, but what was the name of this Polish salesman? Here’s a clue: he joined the Catholic Church and was ordained in 1946. Yes, this salesman did indeed go on to become Pope John Paul II.

On page 90, one of the Pope’s closest friends is said to be a certain Dr Wolf Szmuness, who was responsible for the advent of AIDS. Pope John Paul II’s predecessor was assassinated, we are told. Having already accused the Pope of selling the Nazis the gas with which to dispose of the Jews, both this claim and the claim, or implication, that he is also behind the New World Order, seems rather tame.

Cooper’s book is self-published. As someone who is also, largely, self-published, I can state with total conviction that a self-published book is not necessarily inferior to one published by a mainstream or “reputable” publisher. Cooper’s ravings though ‐ which could obviously never be substantiated ‐ place him far beyond the pale, and it is little wonder that no bookshop or distributor worthy of the name would touch him with a barge pole.

On page 92, he informs us that the Jesuits are responsible for conflicts in Central America; it’s all part of the Illuminati’s plan of population control. Perhaps he’s been reading an update of the Monita Secreta. (26) It isn’t simply the Jesuits though but the Bilderberg Group and others who are in on this plot, for on page 169 the reader is informed that Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger ‐ acting on orders from their Bilderberg masters ‐ are planning to reduce the world’s population by 2 billion. On page 170 we learn that President Marcos was overthrown for failing to keep down the population, as was the Shah of Iran. No doubt the late Ayatollah Khomeini ‐ and his extant followers ‐ had/have different views on this subject. The war in El Salvador was caused for the same reason: too many people.

It may be that Haig and Kissinger plotted to overthrow the Shah with the aid of Eskimo Nell, for on page 94 Cooper tells us that once a year at least, two nuclear submarines meet under the North Pole and the Bilderbergers brief the Soviets! On page 168 we are told that Africa was infected with smallpox, wilfully, in 1977. So where is the evidence, Milton? Dr Robert Strecker is said to have predicted that without a cure, the entire black population of the continent would be dead within 15 years. Well, it is now 1996, and although Africa ‐ and many other places ‐ have serious problems with AIDS and other diseases, there is still, fortunately, no sign of the desolation that we in the West have been warned that AIDS will, indeed must, cause. Let’s take a closer look at the above nonsense though.

It is one of the crazier conspiracy “theories” that AIDS was created by man ‐ usually the US military ‐ and that its raison d’être is the genocide of the black man, specifically in America. Heaven knows where such nonsense comes from, but in this case the current writer believes he has part of the answer.

In July 1992, the (now thankfully defunct) anti-male hate sheet Spare Rib published a report by one Marcel Fakhry which made this claim in all earnest. It even has a name: the King Alfred Plan, and is traceable to a secret document called Memorandum 48. The purpose of the King Alfred Plan is to eliminate African-Americans by the year 2000. According to the same article, the report of the deliberate creation of AIDS originated from a 1984 report in an Indian daily called the Patriot which quoted a well-known (and anonymous!) US scientist and anthropologist, who is alleged to have attributed it to a virus created by the US germ warfare department at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (27)

Here the trail runs cold; undoubtedly this was also where it started, a scurrilous, long forgotten article in an obscure Asian newspaper. The Lyndon LaRouche organisation has been plugging such nonsense for years. Because it is the US government that stands accused of this obscene plan to exterminate perhaps the greater part of mankind, nobody bats an eyelid. However, such allegations were first made long before the United States was founded or even thought of, but because they scream so much louder than anybody else, only either the very brave or the very stupid will suggest that these people might just be playing the same game today. I mean the Jews, of course.

In Mediaeval times, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, and of many other things. The most notorious of these “other things” was the Blood Libel, by which it was said that Jews would kidnap and ritually sacrifice a young Christian boy at Passover. The Blood Libel was updated in 1955 by an article in a small circulation anti-Semitic magazine called Women’s Voice. In June of that year an article therein called Jews Mass Poison American Children referred to the polio vaccine ‐ which was developed by the Jewish doctor Jonas Salk ‐ as a poison “because it contains live polio germs.” (28) This is technically correct, but the author of this article ‐ a certain Eustace Mullins ‐ wasn’t interested in technicalities. In his later book MULLINS’ NEW HISTORY OF THE JEWS, after waxing lyrical about Jewish ritual murder in contemporary America, Mullins reports that “It therefore behooves American parents to avoid leaving their children unguarded in the presence of a Jewish physician or placing the child in a hospital run by Jews.” For the record, this 1968 “study” was “DEDICATED TO MRS. LYRL CLARK VAN HYNING who has kept the light burning for so many of us”. Mrs Van Hyning was the publisher and editor of Women’s Voice.

After all the above it is hardly worth mentioning Cooper’s claim on pages 213-4 that AIDS was not only developed deliberately but that it is used against Hispanics and homosexuals as well as blacks. The truth about AIDS is of course that it is primarily a disease of homosexual-related filth. It may be that there are more black homosexuals in America than most blacks would like us to believe, but American blacks are plagued more with drug problems than with sexual perversions, and it is largely through the channel of intravenous drug abuse that black Americans have become infected with HIV and AIDS.

There are so many agendas at work in the anti-AIDS campaign that it is hardly surprising that the most bizarre conspiracy theories about it should circulate, but as with the Pope selling the gas to the Nazis, one shouldn’t make such scandalous allegations without the strongest evidence. Obviously Cooper hasn’t a simulacrum of evidence any more than he has a nanogramme of common sense. Earlier, on page 173, he makes another wild claim: tobacco causes lung cancer but not because people smoke it, rather because the fields in which it grows have been fertilised with radioactivity. Again, Cooper has not a shred of evidence; certainly he makes no mention of taking a Geiger counter out into America’s tobacco fields.

On pages 92-3, Cooper exhibits a strange passion for numerology, and performs some incredible numerological gymnastics. The USA, he says, was “born” on July 4, 1776; (29) add the dates and you get 1+7+7+6 = 21 = 3 X 7. The numbers 3, 7, 9, 11, 13, 39 are of special significance. So the date 1776 is also of special significance. “Coincidence, you say? I say, Baloney!”

You’re right, of course, Bill, but how about this: Mr Milton William Cooper = 21 letters! This guy is so far gone that he’s coming again, but you haven’t seen anything yet, dear reader, because the real significance of the Protocols Of Zion is about to be revealed to you. It isn’t the Jews who are behind the New World Order, it isn’t even the Illuminati; it is aliens. No, not non-indigenous aliens, but non-terrestrial aliens.

Chapter 12 runs from pages 195-238 and is called THE SECRET GOVERNMENT The Origin, Identity, and Purpose of MJ-12... Both Cooper and the current writer have already alluded to these spurious documents, but on page 196 the man tells us that “Between January 1947 and December 1952 at least 16 crashed or downed alien craft, 65 alien bodies, and 1 live alien were recovered.” On the following page we are told that thirteen of these were within the continental USA; he refers too to CIA/USAF collaboration.

On page 198, we are informed that James Forrestal was one of the first abductees; when he began to talk about this he was asked to resign. On the following page, Cooper tells us that Forrestal was said to have suffered a mental breakdown and was sent to a mental ward at the Bethesda Naval Hospital where he was murdered by the CIA on May 21, 1949.

The entry for this dude in the Encyclopedia Americana (Volume 11, page 604) tells us that James Vincent Forrestal (1892-1949) resigned as Secretary of Defense in March 1949. He was said to have been suffering from depression and was being treated for nervous exhaustion. Forrestal was also anti-Israel and pro-Arab, which may well have led to him being smeared as an anti-Semite, but as far as I know, no one has ever accused the Jewish conspiracy of his murder, so I think we can leave out the aliens as well.

Not for the first time, Cooper adduces not a shred of evidence for the most outrageous claims. As someone who has regularly bucked consensus I could have some sympathy with even a cretin like Cooper, but the first rule must surely be that you don’t formulate new “theories” without at least one or two facts. Cooper is telling us, implicitly, that we must trust him, that he discovered the truth about Forrestal and all this other dross, in the classified documents to which he had access during his years in Naval Intelligence. Anyone with half a brain will stick with the official version. If though, what Cooper said about Forrestal’s alleged abduction is true, then he may well have been asked to resign. Personally I have no doubt that if the President of the United States were to start talking about being abducted by aliens, he too would be asked to resign. Even in the post-Cold War world the very last thing the United States ‐ or any country ‐ needs is a man with those sort of ideas with his finger on the button. Surely the revelations concerning Nancy Reagan and her astrologer were shocking enough. (30)

Most readers will be familiar with the story of E.T., the fictional alien of Stephen Spielberg’s science fiction fantasy ‐ the one before Schindler’s List. E.T. we are told on page 199, was a real-life story, except that his name wasn’t E.T. but E.B. (actually written EBE). Well, it’s not a name actually but an acronym. The creature had been found wandering in the desert after the 1949 Roswell flying saucer crash. (Come off it Bill, everybody knows that Roswell was 1947). EBE stands for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. What else? Cooper claims to have seen photographs of EBE, who was chlorophyll-based!

On the following page, Cooper tells us that the NSA was founded to communicate with extra-terrestrials rather than to spy on humans, while two pages later we are informed that another race of aliens landed at an Air Force base in Florida. Close Encounters, he tells us, is a re-enactment of real-life events. Perhaps Stephen Spielberg is in on the plot too. Certainly Whitley Streiber is: he works for the CIA! The facts about Strieber are very different, (we will deal with him shortly).

As with all conspiracy cranks, anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly endorse his particular brand of paranoia goes into the plot as well, so on page 226 we are told that “Philip Klass is an agent of the CIA. This was stated in documents I saw between 1970 and 1973. One of his jobs as an aviation expert was to debunk everything to do with UFOs”. Including CIA agent Whitley Strieber? So who is Philip Klass? Philip J. Klass is a technical journalist and long time editor on an American periodical, Aviation Week & Space Technology. He has done more than any man alive ‐ and probably more than any man in history ‐ to provide rational, prosaic explanations for UFOs. His two major works are UFOs: The Public Deceived, and UFO ABDUCTIONS: A Dangerous Game, both published by Prometheus, the world’s most prestigious publisher of skeptical books. (31)

Cooper is not the first person to accuse Klass of being in the pay of the US government’s dirty tricks network, and indeed, on pages 53-4 of his aforementioned UFOs: The Public Deceived, Klass himself relates how a UFOlogist named Paul Cerny had made similar allegations against him on two occasions, and how he, Klass, had put his money where his mouth is. Cerny failed to deliver. (32)

Of course, it is ultimately impossible to prove that Phil Klass ‐ or anyone else for that matter ‐ is not in the pay or under the influence of, the CIA, the KGB, or any other organisation, but anyone with an open mind and a critical faculty who reads either (or preferably both!) of Klass’s aforementioned books, will be impressed with his, in my humble opinion, irrefutable scholarship. This is a field that is full of wishful thinkers and outright nuts ‐ Cooper is living proof of that ‐ and when they are exposed so comprehensively for the charlatans they are, there is precious little they can do bar accuse their debunkers of being involved in some megalithic all-encompassing conspiracy against them.

Having said that, there is certainly dishonesty on both sides. On August Bank Holiday Monday, 1995, a documentary was about the so-called Roswell incident was screened by Channel 4. This documentary, which includes an autopsy on an ‐ obviously fake ‐ alien, has now been seen the world over, (33) but in spite of its utter worthlessness as proof of the existence of UFOs, it is certainly worth a few paragraphs here. Roswell, New Mexico, was a military base, but not just any military base: it was the home of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Obviously any government would sensitive about something like that; this was stressed in the documentary. A number of people who were around at the time of the alleged crash were interviewed by the film makers, including a woman named Frankie Rowe, who was then a young girl. She claimed that she and her family had been threatened by the military in no uncertain terms: she was told that unless they kept their mouths shut they coulddisappear in the desert and nobody would find them.

Jesse Marcel Junior, the son of one of the military men involved in the alleged cover-up, showed a photograph of the debris and said that this was not what his father had brought home with him at the time.

The owner of KGFL Radio station claimed that he had been threatened with losing his licence; Glenn Dennis, the local undertaker, also appeared in the documentary and claimed that he had been told by a nurse at the base that a number of bodies had been recovered and that one of the aliens was still alive. He was not the only one to testify so.

Frank Kaufmann, who claimed to have been part of a team which recovered the crashed saucer, struck the current writer as a very plausible liar. Yet in spite of the cover-up, according to the film the story about the crashed saucer had actually been put out by the military! (34)

Over the Internet, the current writer was sent a massive file on Roswell-ana by one of Britain’s leading skeptics. The article about the aforementioned Glenn Dennis from the Skeptics UFO Newsletter is particularly enlightening; here, Dennis is identified as the local mortician rather than an undertaker, (35) which may be a mere technicality, but the alleged inconsistencies in Mr Dennis’s tale are not mere technicalities. Interestingly, this so-important eyewitness first went public only in November 1989. (36)

Notwithstanding that the Roswell “incident” has now been explained in prosaic terms, (37) the US government has lied, and probably still is lying, about what actually happened there. However, the fact that the government lied ‐ and lies still ‐ hardly constitutes sufficient proof that we are being invaded by aliens. When the UFOnauts (or UFOnuts in Cooper’s case) are able to show us some material proof ‐ like an actual body ‐ then we can take start taking them seriously. Now let us return to Mr Strieber.

The following information is extracted largely from Phil Klass’s book UFO ABDUCTIONS: A Dangerous Game. (38) For most of the 70s, Whitley Strieber worked in a New York advertising agency, writing novels in his spare time. Like many aspiring bestselling authors, his literary talents were unnoticed for many years: his first nine books went unpublished! In 1977 though his persistence paid off and his horror novel The Wolfen was accepted for publication and became an instant bestseller. He hasn’t looked back since.

For the record, I have seen the film Wolfen, and if it is true to the book then Strieber is obviously a very talented author. For this genre. Two of Strieber’s next three books were about the invasion of the Earth by aliens. Strieber went on to publish a book called Communion, about an alien abduction, although this book was not written as fiction but as fact. The alien abduction was his own. Strieber has convinced very many people ‐ not all of them cranks ‐ that he was indeed abducted by aliens. He received a million dollar advance from his publisher, an advance that was certainly justified in commercial terms, if in no other.

Phil Klass reveals that Strieber’s alien abduction was not an entirely untypical event in his life. Strieber has claimed at various times to have held a conversation with a human voice which emanated from his record player after a record had finished playing, and many other things besides, some of which he admitted later to be totally false. In view of all this it would be logical to dismiss Strieber as a notorious liar ‐ like Cooper ‐ but the normally cynical and unsympathetic Klass concludes (rightly in my humble opinion) that Strieber is a highly intelligent, creative and otherwise sincere individual whose fantasies are due to temporal lobe epilepsy. It is only a pity that so many other people have been convinced neither of Strieber’s mental condition nor of his being a fraud (39) but of his being a genuine case of alien abduction. But only a total fruitcake like Cooper would claim he is a CIA agent. Back to Cooper’s narrative.

Page 209: “By 1955 it became obvious that the aliens had deceived Eisenhower and had broken the treaty.” On pages 221-2 he refers to the book Alternative 003, and says that it is at least 70% true. This book is actually a piss-take, but nobody appears to have told Cooper that. Alternative 3 was originally a TV “documentary” produced by Anglia TV; it was screened in June 1977 and shortly afterwards made its way into print. (40) In the winter of 1979, the book was reviewed by a computer scientist named Robert Sheaffer for the Washington-based magazine Second Look. He didn’t think much of it. (41) The reviews of the TV “documentary” weren’t very flattering either. (42)

Page 222: there was a battle between US and Russia on the Moon in 1969! Whose side were the aliens on?

Page 233: one of Cooper’s “inescapable conclusions” is that we are being manipulated by a joint human/alien power structure which will result in a one-world government and the partial enslavement of the human race. Why only partial? The biggest problem with this particular passage though ‐ aside from its general lack of credibility ‐ is that it hardly dovetails with Cooper’s earlier claim that he has found “evidence that the secret societies were planning as far back as 1917 to invent an artificial threat from outer space in order to bring humanity together in a one-world government...” In effect, Cooper is asking us to believe that a) the secret societies dreamed up a plot to convince us that the Earth is being invaded; b) that thirty years later the Earth was invaded; c) that the US Government\Illuminati ad nauseam not only know about this invasion but are deeply embroiled in a conspiracy with the invaders and d) they are doing their best to keep this invasion secret by, among other things, distributing forged documents a lá MJ-12, and hiring Whitley Strieber to claim that he was abducted by aliens and Philip Klass to debunk him. Am I missing something or does this sound ever so slightly implausible?

There is much more that I could write about this book, but if by now the reader hasn’t had enough, then I certainly have. I would though like to end this short study on a frightening note. However crazy Cooper may be, and however bizarre and fraudulent his “revelations”, the world according to Milton William Cooper is positively sane when one considers what some of these monsters have in store for us. And with the exponential advances in computer technology this world is not far beyond the year 2000, which is itself less than four years away as I write these words.