Part One: Bill Cooper: The Man Who Killed Truth

what a narrative is. But speaking of narratives, the subject of our episode today was was the master of creating narratives? Um? Also, Jamie Loftus, you're the guest. Sorry, I got so caught up in saying the words satomy quietly that today you really gave your all to it. And I know you're not feeling well, so that that took a lot to it. That kind of Are we talking about Aaron Sorkin, No, we're talking about kind of. I mean, okay, so Chris Carter was the X Files guy, right, were possible? Maybe

I think it was Chris Carter. We're talking about the guy who inspired a lot of the X Files, also talking about the guy who inspired Alex. It is Chris Carter. Okay, I mean as long as as long as he inspired Alex Jones. I think you're gonna say Alex Mack. No, no, not Alex mac. But he also inspired the Wu Tang Clan. Wow, Okay, well you got a hand it to him? What a life. Yeah, we're talking about a real, a real influential piece of

ship today. Um. Some people, I think when I when I mentioned the Wu Tang Clan, the folks who know this guy recognized who it is. But we're talking about Bill Cooper. Have you ever heard of Bill Cooper? I have, but I don't know in which of these contexts I've heard of them. Was he like a conspiracy got like a conspiracy he was? He was a radio show host who was kind of the first Alex Jones in a

lot of ways. Man. He also was a very successful author of a conspiracy book that um went on to become one of like the foundational documents of American gangster rapp Um. The first paragraph of his Wikipedia page, I'm excited. Yeah, he's quite a character. I like the first paragraph is just a full journey. Holy sh it. His real name is not even Bill, isn't it isn't his real name, It's William. It's William. But isn't that also not even

in his real name? UK William Milton Williams my grandfather's name. So we're gonna take that Bill. He's Bill. Yes, I've decided that already. Don't. Like, Yeah, I have a long I have a long and it hasn't really failed me yet. I have like a long distrust of someone that insists on going by three names, and um, I have a feeling that this is no different. No, No, he was pretty consistent about just Bill. But yeah, you still shouldn't have trusted him because he was a famous liar. Um. Okay.

So kind of the reason I think this is important to talk about today is that um AT at the present moment, Jamie eleven Q and on believers are currently have uh like active congressional candidates have they have either won primaries or runoffs. Um, and we'll be on the ballot in November. Yeah. And if if you're if you're just joining us from the year two thousand fifteen, um, some ship has gone down First off, you might want to now yeah, yeah, should just turn your car and angle.

Yeah so uh. Q and On the qua on conspiracy theory basically states that the whole Democratic Party and and all global political leadership is part of a satanic cult that drinks the blood of children. Um. Donald Trump was chosen by our military and also Jesus to take power and root out this cabal of devil worshippers. And we talk about at the barbecues I have at my house. Yeah, as as you should. Um. In some versions of the conspiracy,

JFK Jr. Is a crucial part of it. Um. But that's very much a contentious issue within within this community. So there's even I mean there's at least one of the Q and On candidates is also hot, which I found to be. Yes, there's some hot ones. Yes, I know the hot people were in Q and On that did you know. I was just like, okay, so they know skincare at very least Yeah, okay, I mean you can you can give a shit about you know, your pores.

And also believe that the Luciferian Cabal has been orchestrating global politics in order to harvest to dream of chrome from the blood of children child Yes, well, I mean actually yeah, but that's something some of us just learned by accidents. So uh yeah, Q and On, it's pretty silly,

pretty silly stuff. And it's so silly that all credible media kind of ignored it for three years and pretended it wasn't happening until there were hundreds of thousands of Americans who believed it, and eleven of them who might wind up in Congress. Michaels, one person that you went to high school with, deeply powerfully would die for Q

and On, would die for this conspiracy. Yeah. Michael Flynn, a lifetime military intelligence man, a general, and a former member of President Trump's staff, recently had his whole family swear an oath of allegiance. Uh like the mysterious que and his cause. So, um, it's a problem. It's become an issue. It's a real issue, and it's not like there's the only thing to do about it is kind of laugh because of how how much of a problem it is. But it really is not a laughing matter.

It's a very serious issue. Um, it's it's and and it's worth noting. Like Q and On, for a long time, people would talk about it as a conspiracy theory, and one of the researchers I follow, Sarah high Tower, UM, has kind of been making the point for quite a while that like calling it a conspiracy theory really misses the point. It's a cult. Um, it's and like it's

a religious movement. And I think at this point you could probably make a pretty good case that Q and On is the USA's fastest growing new religious movement UM, which is again a real problem. So the question, one of the questions we should all be asking ourselves is we we try to deal with this thing that's happening, is how did we get here? Um? Like, well, the question I've been asking myself is who is Q? I've been asking myself this for many years. See, I think

that's the least important thing in the world. Actually, uh, but yeah, I I at this point, the belief system has gone so far beyond whatever the individual or individuals who are like posting the Q drops actually have been pushing people to do that. It's like, I think, kind

of almost immaterial who Q is? UM. So the broader question when we look at like Q and on, and we look at just the fact that we're in a place right now where like the guy who got elected president is a famous conspiracy theorist who has like repeated conspiracy theories about the active pandemic killing people during his administration while delivering like like news to the nation about the pandemic. Like the fact that that's where we are right now, um like kind of begs the question how

the fund did we get here? Um? And there's a number of theories about like how conspiracism um became what it is in American culture. Uh. And it it kind of starts in the nineteen seventies with the work of a British sociologist named Campbell, who coined the term cultic milieu to refer to the kinds of supportive cultural environments

that allow cults to form. So prior to Campbell's work, most experts had kind of seen cults as freak phenomenon, strange and terrible, like things that just sort of happened, Like some charismatic guy would come along and he would enthrall the brains of a certain group of people, and then you'd have a cult, and it was just sort of like this thing that happened, um, as sort of

like a freak curiosity um. But Campbell's argument was that cults didn't come out of nowhere, and they weren't primarily the product of whatever individual or individuals were behind them. They kind of grew mushroom like from a fertile cultural substrate. You had to have like a culture that could support the growth of cults, and certain things in a culture, certain like um trends within a culture would make it much a much more fertile ground for cults to sort

of like form and thrive in. So that's like what a cultic milieu is. Uh. In the book A Culture of Conspiracy, scholar Mike Barkun notes, quote, the cultic milieu is by nature hostile to authority, both because it rejects the authority of such normative institutions as churches and universities, and because no single institution within the milieu has the authority to prescribe beliefs and practices for those within it. As diverse as the cultic milieu is, however, Campbell finds

in it unifying tendencies. One such tendency is its opposition to dominant cultural orthodoxes. This is also a major characteristic of the culture of conspiracy, within which the reigning presumption is that any widely accepted belief must necessarily be false. Okay, so that that sounds a little familiar. It definitely does. I feel like the like conspiracy. Uh, like the conspiracy label is used to be dismissive too often of like, oh, it's kind of a fun tabloid story. More more so.

And then when you start calling it a religion which has much of the same properties, it's suddenly become serious. And all of a sudden, there's hot people running for public office. Yeah yeah, or or you know, compounds outside of Waco getting burnt down by the FBI, a number of things. Do you just bring Waco in here? I'm this, we're gonna talk so much about Waco today, getting into Waco today. Oh yeah, we're gonna be wake up ready for Waco today. Nobody wakes up ready for Waco except

for David Koresh briefly but not more. Yeah. So, uh, we live in a culture of conspiracy now, and and I think a lot of Americans are kind of waking up to the extent to which that is happening and continuing to happen. And what a problem it is, um And it wasn't this kind of cultic milieu that that has overtaken a lot of even mainstream culture now, like

didn't didn't happen by accident. It was formed kind of intentionally by individual human beings who tended it like a good farmer tends to soil, and made basically made our culture into one in which a famous conspiracy theorist could not just get to become president, but could could get to like shout out his nonsense um to like, could get to like shout out conspiracy theories about an active plague while it was going on, and have millions of

Americans say, well, like, surely that guy's right. Like the fact that we're there now isn't an accident. It was it was like the yeah, I don't know, this is this is a bad way to introduce this. There's a lot of that. I'm trying to like kind of even wrap my head around here because the problem is so extensive, and there's a number of individuals who were sort of behind bringing us to this point because this wasn't always the case. You know, there used to be you can't

really what we're looking at. What we're looking at as the root cause of of why we are where we are culturally right now and politically right now. Is the

death of any kind of shared conception of truth. It's not possible to have that because a huge chunk of the country, whenever somebody claims to be hims to be like trying to tell them facts about the world UM now kind of automatically will reject those facts if they're in opposition to you know, whatever belief structure that person has UM and will form the fact that like some professional person is telling them that that that their beliefs

are wrong, will kind of graph that automatically onto this conspiratorial belief about the nature of of of the world at the moment, like the fact only accepted truths exactly exactly. And today we're going to talk about probably the man who's most responsible with kind of setting off that domino

chain reaction that led to the death of truth. I'm not going to say that that that this guy killed truth on his own, UM, but Bill Cooper probably deserves more credit for building our cultic milieu UM than any other single person. And only again, like two kinds of people really recognize Bill's name today. The first kinder folks who like study conspiracy and the history of right wing extremism, the militia movement. Those folks will have heard of Bill Cooper.

The second kind of people who know Bill Cooper today are are fans of nineteen nineties gangster rap. Yeah. Yeah, it is the Wu Tang clan. I'm thrilled that we have found this intersection at Long Last. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Bill left a really big influence on both worlds. And it's kind of fascinating as to why. Um So, Milton William Cooper um So, Yeah, that's the name, Jamie. He is a Milton um It's really unfortunate. Was born on

May six, nineteen forty three, in Long Beach, California. His father, Milton Vance Cooper, was an Air Force pilot who got his start flying for the US military before the Air Force even existed. Milton wisely went by the name Jack, which is a much better name for a pilot, Jack Cooper. That's a good that's a good pilot name. Yeah, that's

just a good old fashioned MGM renamed. Yeah, and you'll note that like neither Milton William nor Milton Vance ever went by the name Milton, because it's a it's an objectively bad name. Well, I mean, just you know say which you will about his life choices, but he did make at least one solid Yeah. No, no, he made the right call there. Um and yeah, as a little kid, Bill went by little Jackie um, which is is Yeah. I don't like that's perverted. I don't like that. Yeah.

So Bill's ancestors had come from all over the British Isles, which you shouldn't call the British Isles because it wipes out the existence of Scotland and Ireland, two nations that were kind of oppressed by the British for centuries. But I want to challenge the British and the Irish to unite and finally wipe out the English, and I feel

like goading them this way might work. So just as a note in the future, when I call something the British Isles, it's because I'm trying to orchestrate the destruction of the English people. Yeah, you're just trying to people to radicalize and get some done. Yeah. Yeah, so like you know, I'll I'll refer to them properly Scotland and Ireland when you in Wale, when you do something about the English. Um. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Bill uh, Bill's family came from all over the aisles, and they wound

up in the United States. Uh, and kind of all over the United States. He had family that fought on both sides of the Civil War. Um, there were a lot of frontiersman in the Cooper family. As a boy, Bill was particularly taken by stories of his great grandfather, who he would later call a real cowboy. Uh. He wrote later that as a child, he saw photos of

his great grandpa. Yeah. He would later write that as a child, he saw photos of his great grandpa quote standing in front of a saloon with a six gun in his belt. Now, Bill was a famous liar. And this is probably a lot of just wret A lot of those guys really like as as a rule, it was like a fake that was a constructed image in the first place. That's fun fun. Yeah. Yeah, So anyway, and yeah, but this is what Bill, This is what Bill at least thought it was important for people to

think about his family background. They were cowboys. Yeah, this is a very mature cowboys and horse thieves. He was also like, oh, yeah, and one of them got hung as a horse thief. Yeah it was Yeah. So the Cooper family moved constantly to accommodate Jack's military career. And this was not a low stress period to be the family member of somebody doing what Jack was doing in the military. The Cold War was at its coolest level.

Nuclear annihilation was a constant threat, and young Bill grew up knowing that at any moment his father might be sent off to die in a war that would almost certainly kill his family in nuclear hell fire as well. Um, it was a stressful way to be a kid. Um. I I know that particularly well because my dad and Bill had very similar childhoods. Actually, my dad was about about a decade younger, UM, But his dad, I don't. I don't even know what my grandpa on that side

of the family actually did. He was a civilian employee of the Department of the Defense, and he was constantly in Southeast Asia, and we don't know, like nobody really knows anything else about what Grandpa was doing. I think he was probably posing like a cowboy in front of

a saloon. If I probably posing like a cowboy. But like my dad has these memories of like when the when the there were stateside, when the Cuban missile crisis hit, and he was just like he and I think his mom like drove him and his sister out to like family who lived away from a city, and they just stayed there for days without really knowing anything, just knowing that like something had happened, and dad says, like, you

guys shouldn't be in the city. Yeah. Yeah, it was like in a lot of there were a lot of kids who grew up, uh, Like my whole family in this period of time were military brats, and there was a lot of like it was a stressful thing to be like, you know, because you're always you're always worried that nuclear annihilation is around the damn corner. And so Bill grows up with this kind of apocalyptic expectation is just a constant part of his reality. Is like a

little kid. Um, so that's not great. Um yeah, the bioy Yeah, and it's yeah. The biography Pale Horse Writer by Mark Jacobson, which is a biography of William Cooper, notes quote, once while his father was assigned to Lajah's Field on ter Sierra Island and the hisurs uh, the young Cooper was sitting in the base reck room watching a movie when the projector ground to a halt. The lights came on and a plea was made for blood donors.

I knew immediately something terrible. It happened. Running outside, Cooper saw that a B twenty nine super Fortress had crashed. I saw men on fire running through the night. Cooper wrote in Behold a Pale Horse, I was only nine years old, but felt much older. That's not great. Yeah, yeah, that's not great. Ye's the problem at the beginning, all of these stories start out with like just a traumatized,

broken little boy. There, we need to start well, no, this is probably, but they're like, there needs to be some sort of muppet babies for for the bastards. Yeah, bustard babies there, and then they can just all go to a child therapist and really talk ship through and saving a lot of trouble. Yeah, except for Saddam, who would have absolutely smuggled in a gun and shot that therapist, like shot that therapist immediately. Was Yeah he was, he was, you know, are born that way? He was, he was.

He was a hardened gangster by thirteen. Yeah, but also had the heart of a poet, you know. Yeah, well of course, yeah, like al Capone, right right. So in his own book Behold a Pale Horse, Bill which is a great name for a book. It is a great name for a book. Bill. One thing you'll learn about Bill is that he was a fantastic marketer. And that's an objectively incredible title. Like I'm it's a memoir, no, no, no, no,

it just includes a section on his background. We'll talk about what Behold a Pale Horse is because very influential, Like, it's kind of it's a very appealing title. Well it's but it's from that book that uh, that line in the Book of Revelations. But again we'll talk about that

in a little bit. So, yeah, it is a great title, and I'm kind of frustrated that he took it because it would be a great title for a book right now about Yeah, So anyway, um, Bill would later write himself right a his upbringing that quote, I didn't always love my father. He was a strict disciplinarian. My dad did not believe in spare the rod, and his belt

was put to use frequently in our family. And like most children who grew up in such families, Bill grew was like Bill grew up with a like basically focusing all the time on how to avoid getting in trouble, like right, That's the thing you learn as a kid with authoritarian parents who punish you, um physically particularly, is how to not get in trouble. Um. And he was regularly the focus of his dad's anger, which kind of yeah, his his whole life was his whole life as a

kid was revolved around hiding from his dad's anger. Um. And yeah, he grew up with the feeling that quote, rules didn't mean much until I got caught breaking them. And discipline like this has the effect of kind of training children to be exceptional liars. Um. It teaches them to always have a story, a really believable story, in order to not get in trouble. And there's actually research

to back this up. In two thousand and sixteen, Victoria talwar an expert on children's social cognitive develop a minute, McGill University published a study on this. I f L Science reported quote tal Warren and her colleagues developed a test to identify effective young liars called the Peeping Game. Taking her test to West African schools, one with relaxed rules and one with harsh disciplinary regimes, the peoples were asked to guests, without looking at it, which object is

making the noise behind them. Importantly, the last object made a noise that was different from any sound it could actually produce. For example, a baseball would make a squawking noise. If any children knew what this final object was, they were clearly taking a peek at it while unsupervised. During the experiment, the supervising adult leaves the room and upon returning asked the child two questions what the object was

and if they peaked at it. Talwar discovered that the more relaxed school showed a distribution of liars and truth tellers similar to that found in many Western schools. However, in the strict school, the children proved to be extremely rapid and effective liars. Um So that's going to become very relevant as we talk about every single thing Bill says about his life. Uh so, much of the information we have on Bill's filthood comes from Bill himself. And again,

he's a he's a liar. So yeah, okay, this is difficult, This is tough with him, but that's because he wants to and that's because he's a good liar. That's because he's a good liar. That also doesn't mean that he's lying about everything, and in fact, there's a lot. He's definitely telling the truth about um, including the fact that his dad. I have new trouble believing his dad was an authoritarian, you know, parent, because he was a military man,

and that's real fucking common. I have no trouble believing that he was constantly stressed out as a kid about nuclear war, because that's what it was like growing up in the fifties on a military base. Yeah. So that said, though, we're going to we're going to enter into a lot of areas where we have Bill's version of the of what happened and what's more likely to have happened, and

they diverge quite rapidly. So uh. Bill's relationship with his mother was a little more positive than his relationship with his father. He describes her as the kind of woman who used to be called a Southern bell, the type of women that men like to dream about when they're lonely. She's the kindlest, gentlest woman I've ever known. Once she likes you, she cannot be driven away. She is loyal to a fault. Um that that will become a little

bit more relevant later too. So Yeah, Bill was a high spirited, sensitive mama's boy who moved around too often to build strong ties, and one of the few constants in his youth was Armed Forces radio. Bill was obsessed with the emerging popular music of the day, particularly Sam Cook. Moreover, he fell in love with the idea of being a DJ, which at the time was the guardian and arbiter of

popular youth culture. Yeah, and again, all of a sudden, it's kind of weird the extent to which Bill and my dad had the same childhood because my dad also grew up on military bases wanting to be a DJ and like doing that in high school and ship, Um, it was like the cool thing. Like it's not now, but at the time, like being a DJ was the coolest thing you could fucking be. Uh, Proberties, you are just saying it's not, curl the coolest thing you could be,

because it still is. Asking the coolest thing you can be is a white guy who does a podcast about politics. That's that's that's what this is. The conspiracy theories are that's actually a popular Q and on belief is that having a podcast is cool. You know what, who definitely actually does think that having a podcast is cool? Who the products and services to support this show? They'd fucking better. Uh, Lord in Heaven, we're back. Uh. And I just I

have some good news for everybody. We have a new face mask that will be selling in the behind the Bastard store. Uh. It just says f d A approved to prevent all diseases. Um, so you know when we're as we're talking about colts, Jamie, I just want everyone to know I am, in act doing everything I can to to to get us violently rated by the Food

and Drug Administration. That that is the goal. So grab your kids, uh, take them to my compound in the mountains, put them in a basement, and we'll wait for the f DAY to come firebomb us. Um yep. But a beautiful image. What a beautiful image. Yeah, we're gonna make them do it. We're gonna we're gonna radicalize the f d A, Jamie. That's my goal. That would be kind of fun. It would be neat fun, radicalized with good outfits. Yeah yeah, yeah, Well I don't know. Well, but the

FDA and crop tops see what happens. So okay, fine, as long as as long as you know they're still like unaccountably violent. That's my my dream for the f d A. Oh, they're extremely violent. I'm just saying like a cult that it like a Heaven's gate. You know, it's like there, you know they have they have no morals, but also you know they look nice. They match. Okay, okay, okay, well we'll we'll talk about this more. So. Bill was

a Yeah. Bill Bill as a as a kid on the military based like falls in Love with the idea of being a dj um in an age sixteen, while he was living on Tachikawa Air Base near Tokyo, he got his very first radio show on the Armed Forces Networks Radio teen program Radio teen. Bill would later write quote, I was called the Mad Lad and my theme song

was Quiet Village by Martin Denny. And this is, Yeah, he's a huge dork, And it's the fact that he picks Quiet Village is really interesting because it is it is not the kind of song you might expect a seventeen or a sixteen year old to make his like

introduction music when he comes on the fucking radio. It's like it's a mournful ballad about lost love that starts with the lyrics alone in my quiet Village, I pray you will be returning one day to me returned to me alone, living with the memory of you promising you'd always be true to me, be true to me. So that's a little weird for sixteen year old Billy just right eye energy to it. There's equivalents of this. It's really unsettled, like like you can you can kind of

tell Bill is not going to go good places. Yeah, this isn't this isn't going to end well, Okay, it's intense very to Yeah. So, as a young DJ, Bill finally felt the acceptance that had been cruelly denied to him by his father's constant travel. He would later recall being elated that quote, hundreds of teenagers all over Japan were dancing to the music I spun on my little machines.

He managed to convince himself that millions of Chinese teens were also listening into his radio program, which could not have been true um, and that the communists said had jammed his signal to stop it. Which, okay, this isn't like your DJ energy is like not just that people don't have access to it. There if in communism, if they can listen to my sad songs about quiet like villages and girls not liking me, enough. Oh my god.

Uh yeah, even at age sixteen, Bill was convinced that he had somehow become the target of a global communist movement, um of the global communist movement, which is is funny and again he's probably just inventing this decades later. But also I wouldn't be surprised if at the time young Bill Cooper convinced himself the Communes were trying to stop his terrible radio show. So teenaged Bill was convinced that rock and roll music was the very best advertisement for

capitalism possible. And to be honest, he was probably right about that. It's actually something too that's actually at that time. Yeah, I think a lot of teenagers in Cuba got a really unfairly rosy idea of American culture by listening to the Stones and Ship. I don't like that. I don't like the feeling of agreeing with him, but yeah, I'm on board for that one. Yeah, No, he's probably right about that. Nowto the rock and roll listen, I think I'm very skeptical of this rock and roll music that

the kids are listening to. I think it might be dangerous as an adult. Bill Witho mourn in his writing that Chuck Berry was thrown in jail for two years rather than being made Secretary of State, quote like he should have been. So he believed Chuck Berry should have been the Secretary of State. And it's probably here that I do you know much about Chuck Berry, Jamie not really know the right side of who he is. His music sounded like, yeah, I mean, father of rock and roll,

incredible musician, historically an important musician. He was also thrown in jail for transporting a fourteen year old across state lines for a moral purposes India. Okay, well, yeah, like it wasn't a mild It wasn't like a like, it wasn't that they weren't just going after him to like shut down this rock and roller he was. He was sexually trafficking a teenage girl. I mean, to continue on my anti rock and roll tirade, which rock artists of this arrow was not doing that. It was that is

that is very fair. We had some ship but no one, but no one wants to talk about it. No, I mean, Billy Joel didn't. But but that's the only one. I bet that it was just that, not that he didn't that he couldn't because he would have been terrible at sex trafficking. Really, he would have been horrible at it. So can't be a good liar. No, no, he can't. He's an innocent man. So in nineteen eighty eight, Chuck Barry was arrested again and charged for punching a woman

in the face so hard she required stitches. He was also accused by multiple women and girls of filming them in the bathroom of his restaurant. So, I don't know, maybe not the best pick for Secretary of State, although even with that resume, he would have been better than kissing Jerry I was supposed to say. I'm like, there have been worse people as secretary of state. Oh, that's

so depressed. There's truly not one rock legend that isn't the most horrifying person though there they were all monsters. It turns out when you like elevate mostly young teenage in twenties something men to like effectively living gods. Uh, they do horrible, horrible things repeatedly. Really have been known to take advantage of it. Yeah, yeah, it turns out to be a bad call. So in nineteen sixty learn from it, though, Yeah, we don't do that anymore. It

doesn't happen anymore. No, and it never will again. Yeah. In nineteen sixty two, nineteen year old Bill Cooper joined the Air Force. The Navy was his first choice, but he got sea sick easily, and he didn't think he'd be able to handle a career on a boat. Um, this will be slightly ironic. Later, uh, young Bill chose to enlist rather than joining as an officer, which surprised his family because his family, you know, his military tradition

had been officers. Um. He wound up going to a technical school outside of Amarillo, Texas, where he later claimed to have seen real atomic bombs. Quote. I worked around them on a daily basis. Because of that, I had to wear a dosimeter just in case I was exposed to radiation. Bill's first gig was in the field maintenance squadron, watching after everyone's quarters and basically keeping their work area police.

It was a job that kept him alone a great deal of the time, and so he was sitting on his own and the barracks watching TV on the day that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot by Bernard Montgomery Sanders. As Bill later wrote, quote at that point, huge tears began to stream down my face. Waves of emotion rushed through my body. I felt that I had to do something, so I picked up the direct line to the command center.

I choked back tears. When the command duty officer answered, I told him that the president had just been shot in Dallas. There was a pause and he asked me, how do you know he has been shot. I told him that I had watched it on television and then hung up the phone. I was numb all over. You know, people, you know, it's just so what President Kenny got shot? Get over it by Bernie Sanders. Yes, absolutely to it. I think I have actually brought this up on this

show before. But it's my favorite fact, my favorite fun fact about the assassination of JFK, which is that meat Off was there. Yes, you did bring it up. I would think to bring it up. Meat Loaf is like thirteen or fourteen years old, and he was like I guess he lived in that area and he went like with his family to see that he was. He was there. So would we have bad out of Hell had JFK lived? We may not know. That's a shame that we have

bad out of Hell. I love, Okay, I know that I famously hate rock and roll, but I do kind of like that Out of Hell me Love's a terrible person, but you know he was fine in fight Club and bad out of Hell is pretty good. Yeah, and he'd probably I don't know, I had something to do with the jfk assassination anyway, I think yeah, he was pro of the Youth the youth plot, Yeah he was. He

was spotting for Bernie Sanders a sniper scope. Um So, now Jamie, uh So, you can kind of see in that little paragraph like and this is this is again from something that Bill writes decades later. But he's kind of like he's kind of like sprinkling into his life story these little bitty elements of conspiracy. Like obviously he calls the duty officer and the guys like how did

you know he'd been shot? And like nothing else happens, but there's this little insinuation that like, you know, Bill had kind of stumbled onto something a little bit and like that will happen repeatedly. That happens repeatedly in his

narrative of his early life that he later publishes. Um, He'll he'll drop these little like if it like he kind of he kind of frames it almost like a movie, right, where like he drops these little bit of hints about the vast conspiracy and his his childhood like stories of his early life. Um. And he does it really well like it's it's it's it's good good storytelling. Um. Which is something that like Bill has a real talent for is is telling stories because he's a great liar. Um. Yeah.

So uh. He also brought aliens into the mix in his his his biography, but not in a way, not in a way that was super cookie. Um. This is this this part, this is the way he does this I actually think is really effective as a storytelling tool. Um. Quote. It was during this time when he was he was working um in the Air Force, that a couple of sergeants kind of adopted me. We went out to clubs together and usually ended up chasing women and drinking a

lot of beer. They told me several stories about being attached to a special unit that recovered crashed flying saucers. Sergeant MIAs told me that he had been on one operation that transported a saucer so large that a special team went before them, lowering all telephone poles and fence posts. Another team followed and replaced them. They moved it only at night. It was kept parked and covered somewhere off the road during the day, since we were always half tanked.

When these stories came out, I never believed them. Sergeants were known to tell some tall tales to younger guys like me. So that's a good that's a good way to kind of start sprinkling this ship into your narrative. That's really that's really smart. I feel like that doesn't come out come up enough of like, well, I wasn't totally sure at first. It sounded a little weird. It sounded a little bit. But the more I listened, there,

that's that. That is effective storytelling. Yeah, that's good storytelling. Yeah. The assassination of President Kennedy brought several more days of apocalyptic stress to young Bill Cooper. The nation went to the brink of war with Russia because nobody knew what the funk was going on, and Bill spent his nights sleeping under a B fifty two loaded with nuclear munitions,

waiting for the order to go. So again, to understand Bill Cooper's mindset, you have to understand this kid spent like the first several decades of his life, sometimes literally sitting next to nuclear weapons, knowing that, like all human life could end in moments. It's like there's no moment of his life that he is not deeply stressed out. Yeah, deeply stressed out and just waiting for the apocalypse to him like that. Yeah, it's a it's a tough it's

a tough way to grow into being an adult. Sure, sure, yeah. So thankfully the order to end all human life via nuclear annihilation never came. In the nineteen sixty six Bill got an honorable discharge from the Air Force. He immediately decided to join the Navy next since his seasickness had apparently improved. And Bill was, you know, shipped over to serve on a submarine in Hawaii that because apparently his

C six C sickness improved. As A yeah, the way he describes it as like, after four years in the Air Force, he was like, I've always wanted to be in the Navy. Like I'm not gonna let I'm gonna I'm gonna get over this this problem and do I don't Yeah, so Bill or something and was like it sounds like he he bought a drug store supplement. Yeah.

Probably so. Bill claims he got along famously with all of his new comrades in Hawaii, including his best friend, who Bill takes great pains to inform us, was a black sailor named Lincoln Loving. Um, which I had. There are actual people named Lincoln Loving, so he might not have been making that name up. It does kind of sound like the name a white guy would make up for a black sailor to be his best friend. In

the narrative of his life. Uh, Bill's other best friend was an American Indian who he doesn't give us the guy's real name, but informs us that he was nicknamed Geronimo. Um. So I don't I can't say that Bill's lying about this, but maybe I can. I can say that I'm pretty sure he's lying about this. The sounds yeah, fake as hell. Yeah. Anyway, while Bill was stationed in Hawaii, he poisoned one of his shipmates. Uh. In fact, the guy who was the

ship's cook. Now. Bill claims that this is because, for no reason at all, the cook banned him from eating in the mess, and he also insists that the cook was a drunk and Bill was nobly worried he might endanger the other crew members. While underway, Bill wrote quote, I won't tell you what I laced his vodka with, but it wasn't anything you'd ever want to drink. Believe me. I kept that chief so sick he was transferred off

the boat for medical reasons. I didn't want to hurt him, but it was either get rid of him or starved to death. I made up my mind that chief or no chief, I wasn't going to see on a boat that wouldn't feed me. Um so real willing to poison his fellow sailors, which is I feel like this? It seems like maybe he had a real problem with this guy. I feel like most most most people would have found a way to do that that didn't involve poisoning a man.

But I don't know. I mean, listen, desperate times, desperate test sometimes you got a poison a guy. Um. Anyway, the Navy was only ever supposed to be a stepping stone on Bill's way to achieving a bizarre, and in my opinion, pointless dream. He wanted to be the first member of his family to serve in all four branches of the armed forces, which is a weird dream, isn't that like kind of a like that's just like what if I went to four high schools? Like what is

the point that is in that? It's like the egot, but you've always are doing shitty jobs. Uh and it's not at all like the egot because they'll take anyone pretty much. Um okay, interesting irrational goal. But anyway, he never got to do this because by the time he was near the end of his four years in the Navy, the Vietnam conflict had really started to heat up, and Bill requested deployment to a combat zone and the Department of Defense was like, absolutely, we keep getting all these

guys killed. So yeah, like you you, You're more than welcome to go to Vietnam Bill, Okay, cool? Um. So Bill was sent to a naval support unit in the Quaviat River Quang Tree Province, and this was a really dangerous posting. Bill's job was to captain a river boat. Um, motoring up and down the river. Sounds like he's been

alive for a hundred years already. Yeah, he's in his twenties. Um. Yeah, and he's do If you watched Apocalypse now, yes, you know the you know, the like a huge chunk of it there on that boat with the machine guns that get shot at repeatedly. Yes, that's Bill's job, Like Bill does that for real, Um, And it's it's a really it's one of the most dangerous gigs you could have in Vietnam, like because you're on these like fiberglass boats that are basically big moving targets that have no armor

on them. So it's it's it's a bad it's a dangerous gig vibe. Okay, yeah, yeah, whatever else you can say about him, and well we're gonna say mostly bad things about him. Bill Cooper saw some ship. Um. His best friend during training was a guy named Bob Baron, and both men made a pact to drink at of Scotch and the other man's memory if they died in battle. Uh. Bob shipped out first, and he was killed almost immediately UM treat for Bill Um. Bill Cooper felt that now

Vietnam was quote a personal war. They had killed a part of me. UM. He claims that once he reached the river, his boat engaged the enemy more times than any other boat that ever patrolled that river. We kept the enemy off the river and I never lost another man. I can't tell you if that's true, he's almost certainly exaggerating. But he won awards and stuff for gallantry under fire,

He had a really he did some ship in Vietnam. Um, And it's it's probably fair to say that Bill's service in Vietnam was the only time where his like imagination of who he was as a person came close to being the real thing. Um. So, you know, Vietnam is in some ways a really positive experience for Bill, but

he also walks away from it horribly, horribly traumatized. And obviously he's a man who grew up in the fifties to a father who was incapable of having emotional conversations, and Bill grows into an adult with combat trauma and no no capacity to deal with it in any in any way. Um. But his service earned him a promotion to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Hawaii, where he worked on the briefing team for Admiral Bernard Clary, commander

of the U. S. Specific Fleet UH. In order to do this job, bill security clearance was upgraded to top secret Q sensitive Compartmentalized information Q. Yeah Q I hear yeah, yeah, that's where and that's where Q and on comes from is like Q was a level of military intelligence classification. I thought it was just a spicy continent. No, Bill Cooper is clearly cute. No he's not because spoilers, he

dies violently. But um yeah, so giving Bill Cooper any kind of security clearance would prove to be one of the worst mistakes the US Navy ever made, a second only to its continued failure to finally destroy the city

of Boston. Bill Cooper was a competency, but giving him access to top secret information was a really bad decision, because not because Bill was a spy or because he would in any way reveal actual secret information, but because he was exactly the sort of guy who knew how to dine out for the rest of his life on the lies that his position with Admiral Clary allowed him to tell. He later trying to not act on the fact that you said competent Seman, I'm sorry I stopped listening.

I thought you were going to defend the city of Boston, because I know you're from that whole eastern chunk of the country. Listen, there is no defending the city of Boston. Glad we agree on this, ja There's no I mean by all means watch Patriots Day on Netflix. It's in the top ten right now. And um, I can't watch it because it will give me PTSD PTSB. He will give me. It's just Mark Wahlberg. I'm kidding. Um, there's no defending the city of Oka full You know what?

Do you want to get beat up by my uncle? So she I don't take what kind of my uncle will will kick? And I'm kidding. My uncle is a grifter. He's pretending to be on disability, but he's not. Well, what's that that's my rochette that I'm holding can take? I'm in a challenge. Are salutes at home? To figure out who Jamie's uncle is? A report him to? I mean, talk about it, guys. We're talking about good liars. Someone talk to my uncle. He's it's not Jamie's uncle. Oh

is it time for that already? Transition I've ever done? I'm so sorry, but also fun the Boston Salt. You know you want to know who won't tell on you for committing disability fraud? The products and services that support this podcast? Oh thank god. My family really can't handle another situation like this. We're back. We're back, my family. The last time my family went to court, we all had to testify that my grandma had thrown a TV at my grandpa. So don't talk about the city of Boston.

A very Boston story. Watch your grandma throw roku at your grandpa. See how you like it, Oh, Jesus. So Bill gets this job working for the admiral, and he gets top secret security clearance about it, and he uses the fact that he had this gig for the rest of his life to kind of make the lies that he will later tell about the US government, um to give them like an air of truth um. As he later wrote, quote, I began to see things at first

that made no sense to me. President Nixon was on television giving a speech, an incredible speech, saying that we were conducting no bombing raids in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Lao. Five minutes later, intelligence came into the office with k a figures of sorties over exactly the targets. Nixon said, the Americans weren't bombing. I would shake my head and wonder what in the world was going on here? That wasn't right. I never said anything at time, most of

us never did. I never imagined the people in charge of the country would light of the people like that. I was raised to think that this was impossible. Now that part may or may not have been true. The bombing raids he's talking about happened, but it was also common knowledge by the time he actually wrote about them. His biographer Mark Jacobson seems to believe in this part and think that it was kind of a turning moment for Bill where he starts to distrust the government in

a real way. Um. But once his career is a conspiracy theorist got going, Bill started focusing on other things he'd seen in the Admiral's file cabinet. First and foremost was evidence that President Kennedy had been assassinated by his own Secret Service agent, William Greer. This was a remarkable feat. Yeah, yeah, because number one it was Bernie Sanders and number two Greer was driving JFK's Limo at the point the president

was shot. And Bill hand this like weird conspiracy theory of like a shellfish tox and pellet gun that was built into the body if I think an umbrella. Um. But for the rest of his life, when Bill would be like talking about government conspiracies, he'd say like I saw the evidence of it and the Admiral's fire in cabinet, and like he would say that about fucking everything sounds

like a game of clue. So this job is very fortunate for Bill Cooper because he did have a security clearance at one point, and he basically it would allow him to lie for the rest of his life about having seen evidence of like evil government plots. That kind of reminds me of like when I guess, I guess in context to my life, when someone like works on a TV show that's good, but they do nothing but that, then they associate themselves with that TV show for the

rest of their lives. Yeah. So yeah, Bill Cooper like kind of for for uh, sort of an example of the way Bill would later frame his relatively brief period of time working as basically the Admiral Secretary. Um, I'm gonna quote from a speech he gave at Hollywood High School in nineteen nine. Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that that got to happen. Huh every time it sounds like a fake place. Right away, I knew I was seeing what I was not supposed to see. Material never intended

for my eyes. The grits were there what had been covered up the trees in this betrayal, I looked right into the heart of it. Everything about the war was in there, the story behind the alleged attack by the Vietnamese navy, and the gulf of talking, the death counts, the Americans dealing with corrupt South Vietnamese government. That's what

I learned in Vietnam. I thought I was fighting for my country, and I found it I was really fighting for big business, the coming one world government, Cooper told the audience. It was a devastating realization. This is from his biography Pale Horse Writer. So Bill continued to do his job in the Navy, but when the time came up to either sign up for four more years or leave, he opted to quit this time. Soon Bill was back in the mainland United States without a job for the

first time in his adult life. And he'd kind of grown up obsessed with the idea of like living you know, like kind of a stereotypical Americana life, you know, living in like a small town with like a close knit community. Um, and that was when he gets back to the US. He winds up and like the California, like big cities in California, like the fucking Bay Area and stuff, and he's like, this is so different than like what life is supposed to be like in America. Something must have

gone horribly wrong. And people who knew Bill as a kid will point out, like, Bill never knew the like quote unquote like real America that he would spend the rest of his life obsessed with living he like lived on military basis. He never knew. It was just like a projection of like the media he was consuming, exactly exactly, like he grew up having this kind of miserable childhood and longing for, you know, the kind of America he

saw on the television, which never really existed anywhere. Um yeah, so uh yeah. Bill winds up in the Bay Area. He gets a job as a diving instructor, He buys a motorcycle, and he attempts to lead a normal life. Um but, as Bill would later claim, his sense of guilt and outrage over the things he'd learned to overpower would overpower him. So he like he later claims that basically he's he leaves the military with the knowledge of all these horrible secrets, you know, these these evil programs

that the government is instituting to a filing. Yeah, yeah, this evil filing cabinet full of secret government plans to suborn the liberty of the American people and destroy freedom. Um. And so he decides to start like going after he claims, um that he goes to a reporter and like starts giving him the information that he's gotten. Um. And he's trying to like basically do what Woodward and Bernstein you know, did, and be like a deep throat to them to like

reveal all these horrible government conspiracies. Um. And when he's midway through this process, he's tracked down and he's almost murdered by government men. Now. Bill claims that this happened while he was on his motorcycle driving on Skyline Boulevard. A black Cadillac limousine pulled up behind him and ran him off the road. Bill would later write, quote, two men got out and climbed down to where I lay, covered in blood. One bent down and felt for my

carotid pulse. The other asked if I was dead. The nearest man said no, but he will be. The other applied good. Then we don't have to do anything. Now. I felt that lie could have used a second draft. Yeah, I think he to use an editor on that one. Um so. Bill claims he recovered, only to be run down a month later by the same Cadillac, and this time the assassination was closer to his success. They damaged his right leg badly enough that it had to be

amputated above the knee. Car yeah, same car, same limousine. Yeah yeah. And while he was in the hospital recuperating, Bill claims the same government men came to visit him again. They only wanted to know if I would shut up or if the next time should be final. I told them that I would be a very good little boy and that they needn't worry about me anymore. Obviously, these are all lies. Bill's motorcycle accident had a completely mundane explanation.

He lost control of his bike and almost died horribly as a result of the fact that he was a bad motorcycle driver. Um yeah. And this is like what his family like. His dad when this got brought up to him, his dad was like, what the funk is he talking about? It wasn't the government, like he was. He fucked up and crashed his motorcycle, and like I had to pay for his medical bills because he would

have been bankrupted otherwise. Um. And this was part of why Bill light about this was because his relationship with his dad was strained and he couldn't like admit that he needed his family's money for a medical issue, especially when he'd caused himself. So it was the government. Yeah, um, yeah, I love I love his little soft core line about I'm going to be a good little boy. What you do? Yeah, that is that is sexy, objectively sexy. Yeah, little Jackie

in I'll be a good little boy. Jamie for blowing your mind with my amazing ideas. I think you need to get off this skype call right now and start writing. Yes, I'm sorry, I have a final draft filed to take And that was That was the last time any of us ever talked to Jamie. She was too big a star after making her Bill Cooper pornography video of brain failure four pages into I'll be uh So. The mid nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties were a real rough

period for Bill. Um. He had a fucking shipload of PTSD. He was missing most of a leg, like he's in a bad place. The seventies aren't a good time for Bill. Um and medical science didn't really formally recognize post traumatic stress disorder is the thing until it was added to the d s M in like nineteen eighty. Um So for most of the time that Bill was struggling with it, um, the term was used as post Vietnam syndrome when like

doctors believed it was a problem at all. Um And in the US in the nineteen seventies, it wasn't like a very welcome place to admit you were struggling with mental health issues related to your military services. Like Bill wasn't didn't talk about this ship to anyone for quite a while. Um, he's just burying his trauma with the what's certainly even more PTSD from a horrible motorcycle accident.

He he's he's a damaged boy. Um And I I'm saying that in the colledge that that should not at all, um mitigate what comes next, because we're going to talk about his incredibly long history of profound spousal abuse. Uh. So, we don't know how many women that Bill Cooper married in the seventies. Um. What, Yeah, we have no idea. It's a lot. It's too many women. So how can that be true? How can you? Yeah, because he was

a famous liar. Oh yeah, maybe making up what well? No, no, no, no, no, no, he we we know he had a number of them. It's just that we don't know how many of them there were because he lied about to all of them about the others and wouldn't acknowledge them. And yeah, we'll talk about it'll this will make more sense than a little bit um, his biographer writes, quote and his voluminous FBI file. Cooper's father, Jack, is quoted as saying that his son had been married or engaged at least nine times.

According to Jack, Bill was still in high school when he got engaged to a seventeen year old Japanese girl. The elder Cooper had to break it up. A year later, living on Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City, Cooper again got engaged to another young Asian woman. Now Bill's marriages weren't kept secret to protect his exes or whatever kind of super cool spy explanation he probably would have

preferred people believe. The ugly reality is that, especially as an adult after his military service, Bill was wildly unstable and violent, and living with him was a waking nightmare for most of the women that he married. UM. He kept his prior relationships hidden because nobody would want to marry a guy with Bill's history. UM. In nineteen seventy six, he got hitched to Jenny's Pell Um, who told Bill's biographer later that I was number four. I think so again.

Nobody has a real clear idea, even his wives, of like how many people he married. UM, but he gets married a shipload uh quote. I had no idea what I was getting into. One minute he'd be the sweetest, warmest guy. Then he'd changed start yelling at me for no reason. It was like living with Dr Jacklin Mr. Hyde. We were living in Union City, near Hayward. Bill was working in Oakland at the diving school. He'd get up at six to drive to work. I tried so hard to be a good wife. Every day. I had clean,

make dinner for him. I said a nice table waiting for him to come home. In the beginning, he'd rush home and give me a kiss, bring flowers. It was great. Then he got home later and later it could be after ten or midnight. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. I be beside myself, trying to figure out if he was all right. It was really awful. I'd sit there at the dinner table, looking at the cold food and crying my eyes out. When he did come back, he'd say he was tired and go straight to bed. I

didn't understand what was happening. I thought it was all my fault. And then there's a number of possibilities about like what Bill was doing at the time. He very well may have been cheating. Probably was cheating because he was constantly had a carousel of women kind of going um. He also had like a bunch of really unsuccessful business ventures. He had an art gallery that failed, So maybe his fucked up career was on his mind. Yeah, terrible, it's bad.

And he was also he was also an alcoholic and increasingly like an increasingly like vicious drunk during this period of time. So he was up probably out drinking a lot of the time. And Janice described him as a monster when he was drinking. Quote, he'd get a use of mentally and after a while physically. I tried to make excuses for him. The war, his leg. He always told me the men in the car would come back to finish the job. One day he hit me gave

me a bloody nose, knocked me out. I called the hotline. They told me to get out of there. Tony was just a little baby. Then the next day we drove built to work and just kept going. We moved in with my parents in Los Altos. I only saw him one more time after that, when he drove up to get his stuff. I thought he might stay a moment talk to his son, but he just got the things

and left. And Bill we don't actually know many kids Bill had, either, but they all kind of have the same story as this one, where like he he'll have a couple of kids or a kid with one of these women and then he will be a violent monster and she will flee with the kid and Bill never tries to reach out again. Um. God, miserable. It's not good, it's not great. It's not a good way to be

a person. Um. And it is like you look at Bill's history and again, not to mitigate the profound spousal abuse, but it's like, yeah, hard to imagine how this guy grows up good at being in a relation ship. Yeah, impossible for him to be good in relationships. I just, oh God, I hate that. I hate that there's so many victims of that cheese. Yeah, a ton of victims. Janice's story is probably very similar to a number of bills,

unknown number of wives. Uh. It's important to note that the monster Bill could take quite a while to come out, and he was very good at charming women um in the meantime, As the story of his ex wife Sally illustrates. Bill and I started talking. I liked him, but he was smoking. I told him, smoke really bothered me. I'm allergic. He looked me right in the eyes, said all right,

and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. He said he'd been smoking since he was fourteen, a couple of packs a day, But for me, he was going to quit. I asked him when he pointed to the cigarette in the tray and said, I already did. He never smoked another cigarette as long as I knew him. We started dancing. He had this kind of old world formality about him, that military thing. I suppose. He was a very graceful dancer,

very light on his feet for a big guy. It wasn't until later that I realized he had an artificial leg. You would never have guessed it. Plus he made me laugh. He was Zany, always acting out these incredible stories. He did these funny impressions. I love to hear him talk. It didn't make a difference what the topic was. He knew everything about it. He had this tone in his voice. It just draws you in. You can hear it on the radio. He was perfect for that. We got married

on Catalina on the steps of the Wriggly Mansion. The party was at l Galleon. Bill planned the whole thing, told the band what to play. It was great, but then he started drinking and picking fights. I guess that should have been a sign. My girlfriend said I was crazy to marry him, but I really loved him. So yeah, yeah, it's not great. It's not and it's I'm trying it just in kind of trying to classify Bill. I don't

know that. I don't know that he's what you'd call a predator because I don't think I don't think he had a whole lot of control over what he was doing. I think he was a pretty broken person. But he also didn't go to like extreme measures to win back the women who left him, like when he when he violently chased them away. He would just kind of pretend they never existed, move on to the next person. I mean that's still like pretty clear. I mean it's hard

a ball. Yeah, yeah, definitely an abuser. But I don't he's not like I don't think he's like seeking women out and like trying to psychologically fuck them out. Like, I don't think there's any kind of like planning in it. I think Bill is one of these people who has like violent mood swings and no control over them and no desire to really control them. Yes, deeply selfish, Yes, yes, yes, absolutely, and just yeah that's that's that's the feeling you get

from him. His mood swings seemed to come more or less at random, um, and probably was a mix of a number of things. Um. He was also like working a pretty unsatisfying life at this time, a lot series of horrible dead end jobs, repeated failed business games, and you get the feeling he was taking that out on his family as well. Um, But he also took it

out on everyone around him. And one of these dead end jobs, Bill got into an argument with his boss and punched through a plate glass window to try and strangle him. Um. So he is not a not a not a planner. That this point, he really is just by the seat of his pants at every turn. Yeah, punching through a plate glass window is not something you do if you're thinking a lot about your violence. So

he was let go from that job. And obviously money was always tight because Bill repeatedly got fired from jobs for being a violent piece of shit. Um. Yeah. And also he couldn't stop from getting the women that he was with pregnant. So we got Sally pregnant, like, you know, pretty much as soon as they get married, their daughter, Yeah, competent salmon um their daughter Jessica again, like, we don't know how many kids he had um. Yeah. Sally later

recalled quote, he was the most loving, attentive dad. He'd play with Jessica for hours. He seemed so happy, but then just like that, he'd go off start yelling. I blamed it on the drinking, but it was more than that. It was like he became possessed, not in control of himself. I tins up every time he came into the room. One night, when Jessica was little, we went to chuck e cheeses. Bill was drinking. He got abusive, calling me. I mean, that is something that happens at Chucky Cheese.

I mean, no, no, what no one's going to be sober? I would I would be more worried about No. Wait, I don't want to make that reference. Um, that's bad. Still, how's birthday carries at Chuck E Cheese? Is no one is sober and no one is getting along? Yeah? No, no one should get along. I don't know. I don't want to. This story goes in a bad place, so I don't want to make the drinking jokes about Chuck E Cheese. Is that normally? Like are a real positive part of my life. I loved I love talking about

what a bad place Chuck E Cheeses is. But this, this story is real dark. This is one of the worst Chuck E Cheese stories I've ever heard. And that's saying something. Yeah, Bill was drinking. He got really abusive, calling me names. I told him I'd had enough to stop the car, let us out. I was holding Jess in my lap. We didn't deal with seatbelts like today. I opened the door to go when Bill turned and pushed me and Jess out of the car with his artificial leg. It was like getting hit by a four

by four. We went flying. I was okay, but then I looked in Jess's tiny face was all cut up. So he keeps a wife and infant daughter out of a moving vehicle after getting drunk at Chuck E Cheese? Is um, Jesus Christ, why they have a to drink cap now? First of its Bill Cooper. That's the Bill Cooper rule of Chuck E Cheesus. That is so that is very upsetting and very It's not the first time that has happened at a Chuck E Cheese, not the

fiftieth time that's happened at a Chuck E Cheese. No, for reasons that are probably too depressing to think about. Sally didn't leave for good after that. She set up a meeting between her Bill and their pastor to try to talk things out, and the subject of the conversation quickly turned to Vietnam and Bill. As soon as like, the pastor kind of started asking him questions about his service,

Bill got violently angry. He started screaming and became so incensed that Sally's pastor had to call the v A to come and pick him up. Um, So the couple splits in like nineteen eighty two, and during this time Bill is going to Long Beach College and trying to make use of his g I bill, and he spends a lot of time. They're like, this is kind of the first time in the early eighties after his his this marriage X breaks apart where he starts to kind of deal with his PTSD UM by writing about it.

So he does like essays and stuff about um what like he and other veterans are kind of experiencing one of his essays, and most people were doing at that time. He does to an extent try to process his trauma. He writes an essay titled Vietnam Are we still suffering Casualties? Ten years later? Um? And in it he wrote quote on the campus of Long Beach City College. Aspector reaps its harvest ghastly. It stalks the future of those who know it's past, any of us who have stood against

it and survived. The demon strikes down dreams, educations, and even minds. It is insidious in nature and rides upon an undercurrent of memories, ignorance, and fear. It is not dead as many believe, nor is it a figment of the imagination. It is as real, as real as the

earth we walk upon. He's writing about his PTSD, and he's writing pretty well about it actually, like Bill's not a bad writer, um and he uh no, and he One of the interesting things that happens during this time is he meets a young Vietnamese refugee at Long Beach College and gets to like interview her, and he has this realization that like when he was the way he later described as like he realized that if he'd encountered this woman when she was a young girl in Vietnam,

he probably would have shot her. And this like really fucks, like Bills, you can't over exaggerate how much Vietnam fox this man up. Yeah, which is which is you know, like a story ful lot of people, Yeah, it's yeah, and you know, to be fair, a lot of people who don't kick their wife and infant child out of a moving car, so like certainty that you will then do that. Um yeah, but yeah, it's a rough like Bill is. And this will become really appropriate because of

the man he grows into. Bill is like the fucking poster child for how badly American imperialism fox up young men, the young men who are two of like, how American imperialism sucks you up? How like PTSD fucks you up? How like the expectation based on like media and like expectations versus reality fuck you up. There's no there's no limit on ways that this guy's fucked up. Case study a lot of lessons in the story of Bill Cooper. So Bill gets married again in nineteen eighties six, and

that worked out about as well as you'd expect. By the tail end of the Reagan years, he had nearly two basketball teams have failed marriages in their rear window, a head full of bad memories and no real prospect for worked. The future looked bleak. Yeah, um, so the future looked bleak for Bill. But then in nineteen Jamie there came a single shaft of brilliant sunlight. Bill Cooper discovered the Internet. No, I know, I know, the worst thing that could have happened to this confirmation of the

whole thought he's ever had in his life. Yeah, it's it's it's unfortunate that things about that way. Yeah he was. Bill Cooper was one of the very first people on the Internet. Yeah, like, one of the very first human beings to really get into it. Um, and the late nineteen eighties Internet was a real different beast than the modern one. There was nothing that really worked like social media, but there were b b s s, which were essentially forums. So if you remember what forums were, you can if

you can think back to a time before Facebook. Bill's kind of into that sort of thing, um, and he quickly discovers parannet, which was dedicated to the paranormal, particularly UFOs And yeah, so Bill gets super fucking into UFOs um and into this community of like UFO nerds and like really the first online community of UFO nerds that exists. Yeah, this is such early Internet ship. It's like every annoying couple in their forties met on an Internet forum. Yeah,

just exactly. Yeah, though legally as well, um, that's in the constitution. So Mark Jacobson suggests that flying saucers and sort of like belief in UFOs was quote the first populist truth or issue, the first time the authorities denied something that a large percentage of the population believed to

be true. And this is probably accurate in a culture of conspiracy, scholar Michael Barkon notes, quote, within a few months of the first modern claim of a flying saucers siting in nineteen forty seven poles showed that of the population had heard of them. By nineteen sixty six, that figure had risen to ninety six percent, and more importantly, forty six percent of all Americans believed UFOs actually existed. More than a decade later, in nineteen seventy eight, thirty

percent of college graduates believe they existed. At that time, the number of Americans who believed UFOs were real reached its highest level fifty seven percent. Now Wow, by nineteen ninety the number of UFO true believers had actually fallen to about forty seven percent, and it was still at

around that level six years later. And this suggests that the Internet so much allow for the spread of a belief in UFOs, as it did help to make those beliefs kind of more durable by building communities for people like build to explore and expand on existing theories. And this allowed for very different kinds of conspiracy theories to merge.

For example, there's always been stories about an alien crash landing in Roswell since like nineteen seven UM, and there'd also been conspiracy theories theorists who believe that JFK had been murdered by someone besides the widely accepted culprit, who is,

of course Bernard Sanders accomplished me yeah. Um. And then starting in the mid nineteen eighties, there was Majestic twelve, and in brief, Majestic twelve conspiracy theory purported to be a set of briefing documents for the incoming newly elected president and forming him of the existence of a secret

organization of the world's dozen most powerful people. M J twelve is like the first hidden global government conspiracy theory um, and it was formed in the wake of the Roswell land Like this, this hidden global government was supposedly had been formed in the wake of the Roswell landings to deal with the newfound existence of aliens. Now, the initial claims of the m J twelve conspiracy theory were rather basic, because this document actually was only like, I think, a

dozen pages or something. But once m J twelve hit the Internet in the late nineteen eighties, a funny thing started to happen. Conspiracy theorists began grafting their pet conspiracy theories onto m J twelve. Writing in the jfk assassination and the Tonk and Gulf incident, which you know was the spark behind the Vietnam War and a bunch of other shady stuff into the machinations of the Majestic Twelve. Now.

The most successful of these conspiracy fan fiction authors was a fellow named John Lear, the son of a guy of the guy who created the Leir Jet. Lear's theory was that the leaders of the US had made a devil's bargain with aliens back in the nineteen sixties to hand over American citizens and cattle to them for mutilation

and experimentation in exchange for technology. But the aliens, yeah, yeah, this is this is the X files, right, like this is actually like is literally what the like John Lear, And then the work that Bill Cooper does with Lear is the inspiration for all of the X Files. Clearwater Revival playing in the background of this Devil's deal with

the Aliens is good. I feel like I'm there. Yeah yeah, so you know, Lear, Lear in Cooper, once they got together, would kind of argue that actually, the Majestic twelve um were had we're kind of getting like grifted by the aliens, that like the technology they were getting wasn't very good and the aliens were way more brutal with their abductions than they were supposed to be um, and so like the conspiracy evolves under Lear into like claiming that the

Allies in the military had balked at this this like agreement with the Aliens, and that was what led to the creation of the Strategic Defension Initiative Reagan's Star Wars

Missile program. Is. What's happening is the Internet is making conspiracy theories had largely been sort of spread by kind of you know, there'd be some underground newsletters and stuff, but also people just kind of spread these these fake documents that we're purporting to be like the and this is like throughout the eighties, these documents that were claimed to be like, you know, evidence of one conspiracy or another.

And the Internet brings all starts to bring all this ship together, so like we can take your take your cork and take it from your corkboard and really start to compare some ideas. Yeah, yeah, um, I'm gonna quote from the book A Culture of Conspiracy on sort of what happened like the impact of of John Lear's uh, what's called the Leer statement, which is like his personal theory about MJ twelve. The Leer Statement is brief, only

seven printed pages, but dizzying in its claims. It elevates m J twelve to a conspiratorial position nowhere hinted at in the original papers themselves, and implies a web of subsidiary conspiracies to silence the news media with that in the academic community, and to must lead the UFL community as well. According to leer upologist William Moore, the figure most identified with the MJL twelve papers was probably himself

a disinformation agent in the higher of MJ twelve. So you also start to see like what's essentially like this big over conspiracy that's being created. Like it's not just it's not just aliens exist, It's not just there's a secret world government. It's not just JFK was killed, you know, um by the CIA or whoever. It's like all of these things are part of this massive, branching, impossibly influential conspiracy.

What you're seeing is the precursor for the kind of conspiracy that qan On is right, Like this is when that first starts happening, and Bill Cooper is one of the guys on the ground making it happen. He's one of the most influential people in this early little online community. UM. And you know, Bill had kind of just started by sharing tales of of aliens and stuff in paranet um, but he very quickly graduated into like writing about Lear's

work and adding conspiracies to it. And Lear and Cooper soon like become friends and start talking and start working together on like expanding kind of people's idea of what a conspiracy could be. UM. And here's how it'll be less so in just a second. Cooper's biographer actually interviewed Lear um pretty recently. Uh, and Lear was very old at the time. But here's how Leir described the two men's early friendship. I heard there was this guy on

parannet who was supporting what I said, Bill Cooper. He was writing into the bulletin board saying he'd worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence and see this incredible amount of top secret material. And he could vouch for word for word fifty percent of what I said. Lear and Cooper spent a lot of time together through nineteen and nineteen ninety. I liked him from the beginning. Lear recalled he was smart, and he had a good sense of

humor and amazing memory. He also could drink me under the table, which wasn't so easy to do back then. When I saw him put away a fifth of Scotch before lunchtime, I knew he was my kind of guy. Then he'd be off on something else, that was Bill. One minute, he'd be wrapping himself in the flag, standing up and reciting parts of the Constitution verbatim. Then he'd be like a beat nick at a jazz club. Hey daddy, oh, hey daddy Oh. He might have pulled a gun on

me three or four times. Then again I pulled a gun on him too. Okay, So just to summarize, he's like, I knew this guy. We were going to be friends when I found out he was very sick in his head, that there was a little hope that he was going to seek out help or get any support from someone in his life. I was all about this, and I thought it was really cool because I shared these same issues, because I have the same problem. We both had violent

mood swings and pulled firearms on each other regularly. That's what we have interested in addressing this. No, therefore, were going to be good friends soon. Bill Cooper developed his own hypothesis based off of Lear's theory about global elites trading human souls for alien technology and excited online rants.

Bill would claim to have access to top secret information that at least sixteen alien craft had crashed and been found by the US government UH aliens had been recovered dead, and one had been recovered alive, but was always very specific in these kind of posts. According to Mark Jacobson quote, Cooper's rewrite of Lear's hypothesis added new items like a particle beam weapon and machinery for cloning and synthetic genetic duplication of humans to the shopping list of Lear's and

holy tech for flesh deal. He also tweaked the timeline of government alien interaction. Now there were three separate meetings, the most significant being the signing of the formal agreement, which took place on February tenth, nineteen fifty four, and Murrock now Edwards Air Force Base near Lancaster, California. The historic event had been planned in advance and the details of the treaty had been agreed upon Cooper rights in

the secret government. President Eisenhower had been vacationing nearby Palm Springs when he was spirited away to the base on the pretext that he had an appointment with his dentist who happened to be Dr tim tote Leary, father of the LSD guru Timothy Leary, which of course would make it into later conspiracy theories, but is true. Uh yeah, yeah. So it's not hard to see why Bill's alternate version of history played well with very online people. It's fun,

um yeah. And and Bill wasn't content with just being a giant among the very first and the very saddest conspiracy nerds and the internet kind of fun. Everything is connected vibe to it that people a yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and he get he starts to get kind of famous within this community for that, and he's soon he's speaking at like conventions and stuff, UFO conventions all around, like he's kind of in demand by later angel Fire fan sites. Yeah.

And in ninety nine, Bill decides he's going to take things a step further because he doesn't want to just be limited to the Internet. So he prints out five thirty five copies of all of his findings on extraterrestrials, and he sends out copies to every member of the U S House and Senate. UM. And he'd written so much like these documents he was sending everyone in Congress um were so extensive that the whole endeavor costs twenty seven thousand dollars. Yeah yeah, what yeah, he in like

nineteen eight nine money. Yeah, okay, Yeah, Bill's dedicated. His guides for Congress included a helpful taxonomic guide to all the different aliens species out in the galaxy, including two different kinds of gray aliens and the draco Moffman. Um. Yeah,

let's not let's not make fun of mothman here, okay, Okay. Now, Bill obviously hadn't seen anything like these creatures in person um, and but he was, you know, at this point claiming openly, you know, he'd been claiming for years to his friends of all the secret seed seen in that admiral's cabinet. And now he starts like justifying, like, this is how I learned about all these aliens from the cabinet. Um.

This is a very wise cabinet. Yeah, that that admiral really kept a lot of different ship just under his desk, And apparently Bill had a ton of time to really read it and take it in, and you know, well, you know, you know a lot of three Martini lunches happened happening in the Admiralty back then, you know. So uh yeah, So Bill sends all this off to Congress, along with an offer to undergo hypnotic regression to convince

Congress he was the real deal. Um. No one took him up on the author but could yeah, just let me hypnotize you. I can come into you. My ideas are good. No, you just have to. You have to hypnotize me and take me back to the past. Oh and then I will give you the Oh, I see what he's doing. Okay, watch like thirty different episodes of the X Files for more information on hypnotic regression. I

guess so. Yeah, and nobody at Congress ever gets back to Bill, but he later will write that at least sending all of this nonsense out to them had quote prevented the government from arresting or harming me, and he moved by them would be interpreted as total confirmation of everything that I had revealed. Um. A lot of faith to have in this evil government. So luckily for Bill, the late nineteen eighties saw the meteoric rise in popularity of the UFO movement, and Bill became one of its

first celebrities. He started to make money selling his different writings on extraterrestrials, and he was invited to speak at the Mutual uf Phone Network Moufon Symposium in nine now. The mouf On Symposium started with disaster when on Saturday evening, an m J twelve expert named William Moore admitted that he had colluded with an Air Force Office of Special Investigations employee to spread false information to UFO researchers, which is exactly what like Lear and Bill Cooper had been

claiming UM. But unfortunately, More admitted to that some of the disinformation he had spread UM was like one of the pieces of fake, you know, leaked government documents that Bill had used as a major source in his own work UM. Mark Jacobson writes quote. This was particularly troubling for the Lear Cooper contingent, since Lear had included a

fair amount of this work in his hypothesis. It brought the galling possibility that much of the MJ twelve story that revealed Washington malfeasance was itself part of a government directed disinformation program. Following more speech, Cooper ended up at Lear's home in a rage. He was roaring drunks, dreaming that he had been set up and demanding to know who I was really working for. Leir recalled, that was one of those times I thought he might kill me.

By the next day, Cooper had calmed down. Who cared what Millia William Moore said anyway, the man was a liar, a fake, less than upon in the larger game the original m J twelve papers, where Bogus Cooper said a pile of craft designed to lead you right through the rose Garden. The truth, the real truth, the one he learned while looking through Admiral Clary's cabinet, was still out there,

ready to be told. So after this all happens at his first really big speech at move Ons, Bill gets on stage and he delivers a captivating lecture that relied very heavily on his own experiences stumbling upon top secret information while working for the Navy. I'm gonna play you a little segment of that right now, Jamie. That's what

I sent you, Jamie over text. Yeah, and this will give you an idea of kind of where Bill is in terms of a pitch man, how he isn't delivering his information at kind of the start of his career because he's not really on the radio yet. Okay, so he's still he's still finding his voice. He's still finding his voice. And fine, hey, you know we've all in

there or accounts that there were four. I saw pictures of three of those dead alien bodies in a report called Project Grudge, which also included material from a report called Blue Book Report Humber thirteen. So I'm not sure whether there were three or four. I saw photographs of three of those bodies for sure. Really, it doesn't make any difference if there was one or fifty. The important thing is that it occurred and that there were dead

alien bodies that were not of this world. Okay, um, yeah, you know he does kind of have the energy of a Reddit user who is who is on stage for the first time. But it sounds like Key course corrects this later in his life. He sure does. But we'll hear a lot of thing thrown out. There's ideas being thrown out in a decent shirt. Yeah, in a decent shirt.

So yeah, one are shown that from that is that like what Bill saying is obviously absurd, but he's smart enough not to dwell on any like one piece of data for long a very matter of fact the way it's delivered. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that Bill really starts to do so like UFO conspiracy theories had for most of the time that existed just kind of been this theory that like there's aliens out there and the government doesn't want you to know about them.

Bill finds a way to really connect UFO conspiracy theories to people in a much more kind of emotional level, because you know, by this point the late nineteen eighties, everyone's pretty aware that things have started to go wrong since World War Two, Like most Americans are like, this doesn't seem like the path we were supposed to be on um And Bill kind of is the first guy to be like, what if we just blame it all on aliens? Like what if that's the reason things went wrong?

A shortcut? So I had to come up with a great one. It is interesting too, just even like listening to how he talks of how he seems to be kind of using this like military way of carrying himself to like have a level of authority. It's not really the same kind of conspiracy theorist carrying oneself that you see now. It's very it's not like a media personality. It's like a He sounds like a military person saying that weirdest should I've ever heard. Yeah, uh and and

he yeah. Another quote from that speech where he kind of goes into detail about how the aliens said fucked things up for America, I think is salient to end on for this episode. Quote Without the aliens, you can't make sense of anything that's happened in this country for the past forty four years. But the aliens in the middle, and you've got all the answers. Your own government is selling your children drugs and you don't seem to care. Your own government has given away the power of the people,

and you don't seem to care. There is an apathy that is running rampant in this country that is deadly. Whether or not there are aliens, where now truly a nation of sheep and ladies and gentlemen. I assure you sheep are always led to the slaughter. It's here I should note that Bill Cooper is probably the man who invented the words sheeple wow. Yeah. He's the sheep oh guy yeah, popularized. If you saw about any of what he said with a absurd devotion to capitalism. I agree

with it. Well, it's just about aliens. With devotion to capitalism, you're onto something. Because one of the things that I think separates Bill from guys like Alex Jones is I don't think Bill was primarily a grifter. I think Bill was a guy who, for all of his many, many horrific flaws, um like, recognized that things were really fucked up.

And he created this because he was a liar and a fabulous um he had, he created this, and because he was kind of like fundamentally mentally incapable of really admitting what had gone wrong. He creates this whole schema to justify or to to explain to people who don't want to admit what the actual problem is why things are fucked up in America. And that's really like the genesis. That's why conspiracy is so fucking popular today in large

parts because things are fucked up. Everybody knows it, and a lot of us are desperate to not stare the real problem in the face. And Bill Cooper was the first guy to really get good at providing people with something that would let them not stare the real problem in the face. Um And I don't know the extent to which we'll get into this a little tomorrow or in part two. I don't know the extent to which Bill knew what he was doing. Um, I don't know

the extent. There's definitely a part of him that was a pitchman and a con artist, and there's a part of him that I think was like a patriot who was legitimately traumatized by how fucked up he watched his country become. I don't really know, um, but it seems like both things are kind of going on. He truly is like suffering of a lot of definitely suffering. Yeah, he's definitely suffering. He's definitely has some mental illness issues,

and um, I can't wait to hear what he does next. Well, Jamie, first, you're gonna have to tell us where they can find you next so that you can Okay, well sure you can. Well you can follow me and Twitter. This never feels right, Uh, you can follow me on Twitter. You can listen to my podcast My Year in Mensa, which there will be I think there will be another episode of and some developments in in the near future. And you can listen to the Bechdel Cast every Thursday Feminist Movie podcast and yeah,

all right, and you can find me somewhere. No one, no one's, no one's ever learned how though? Um So you can follow him at I right, okay on Twitter. He doesn't believe in Instagram. I don't believe in Instagram now um or or the TikTok's what the kids are doing? All right? I think you would be really good at TikTok, Robbert, you would fucking love TikTok. It's a bunch of angry teenagers. You would say fuck the patriarchy. It's you would love it, and you would be good at it. I don't recommend it.

I don't know, absolutely not unless it makes me years old lawless skin TikTok. If you're looking for a teenager to tell you that your parents are racist, TikTok, that's my looking for Kelly and Conway's daughter. Yes, being on the right side of history, tiktok' looking for. If you're for teenagers that are trying to make it so that there's empty seats at Trump rallies, also, tiktoktok are your sponsor. No, I'm kidding, I'm I'm so tired even thinking about TikTok um.

I'm so tired thinking about young people in general. Um, alright, old alright, old guy. The podcast over, yep.