Who is Bill Cooper?
William Cooper, in a sentence, is the OG of all conspiracy theorists. He was talking about secret societies, government corruption, black helicopters, and all of the other conspiracy fanfare before anyone else.
One thing that seems to tie many of these conspiracy theorists together is that they are from military families. Bill is no different. He was born May 6, 1943 in Long Beach, California to an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.
Bill enlisted in the Navy and achieved the rank of Petty Office Second Class before being honorably discharged in December of 1975.
In 1988, Bill began talking about conspiracy theories. His focus was on government involvement with extraterrestrials. By 1991, he had penned his famous book, Behold a Pale Horse.
Like Art Bell, Bill broadcast his radio show from his home beginning in 1992. The Hour of the Time was sent via various means including, but not limited to, cassette tape and satellite uplink to WWCR in Nashville, Tennessee. It was then broadcast by the station's 100,000-watt transmitter. Bill continued his show until his death in 2001.
Over time, Bill began to believe that he was being targeted by the U.S. government and the IRS. His beliefs were confirmed to him when he was charged with tax evasion in 1998.
Despite repeated attempts to serve an arrest warrant on Cooper, Bill eluded the sheriffs attempting to serve it. In 2000, he was considered a major fugitive by the United States Marshall's Service.
By November 5, 2001, things reached a fever pitch. Apache Country sheriffs attempted to arrest Cooper on multiple charges stemming from disputes with local residents. This confrontation resulted in a gunfight in which Bill shot one of the deputies in the head. He was fatally shot in the process, and that was it for Bill Cooper.
However, his legacy has endured. He is revered in the conspiracy community still and the information he shared has been assigned much value because a good bit of it has proven to be accurate over the years.
2009
Raider1's copy of Bill Cooper's Behold a Pale Horse.I was fresh from a 4.5-year stint in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'd just returned home to my native North Carolina and was working sporadically at a secondhand store.
I spent a lot of my time at work wandering the aisles, nooks, and crannies of the store. In the back, there was a small room with wall-to-wall shelving full of books. It was one of my favorite spots.
One Saturday, I pulled a water-damaged tome from the shelf: Behold a Pale Horse. The cover was mostly bright blue and the art was...eye-catching.
I knew the rider of the pale horse because I'd been raised in a Baptist church...it was DEATH! There it was on the first page of the book, Revelation 6:8, "And I looked and behold a pale horse: and his name that upon him was Death..."
As I'm thumbing through the book today, I'm fairly certain that I knew who Bill Cooper was then, but I'd only been reading about conspiracy theories for a short time. At 50 cents, the book was a bargain and I lucked out and got a copy before they removed the Protocols of Zion.
You can buy it via Amazon, but it was just published on there in May of 2021 and it's listed in the Action and Adventure Fiction category, so I'm not sure about what you might receive. You can also get it via AbeBooks, but all of the new copies are missing a chapter covering the Protocols of Zion for some reason.
Anyway, I've got no links for you, but I do have this! You can get a PDF copy when you subscribe to our mailing list as it's in our HUGE collection of PDFs.