Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, How the End Always Is, we hitched derived with the Gulf Breeze Six, six US Army intelligence analysts who became convinced they had uncovered evidence that the world was about to end.
The group, who in nineteen ninety went a war from their listening post in Auksburg, Germany, were eventually captured a week later in Golf Breeze, Florida. Some reports suggested the group had traveled to Florida intending to either kill the Antichrist or to rendezvous with a spaceship that would help
them escape the apocalypse. The official explanation later offered by the group, however, was that the only plan to make a brief stop in Florida before heading in land to find somewhere safe and remote to await the end of the world and prepare for the arrival of the Second
Coming of Jesus. Little is known publicly about what happened to the Gulf Brief Six after their release with the exception of Vans Davis, who published a book in nineteen ninety five titled Unbroken Promises, which details the entire escapade
and gives a little more insight into their thinking. For all the groups alleged brushes with psyops training, they're communicating with spirits through a wig aboard to the not only being warned of an apparent intergalactic plot to destroy human kind, but then also actually acting on what they've been told. What stands out most of all for me is how
reminiscent it all is of modern conspiracy theory. It's been speculated that before heading off to the hills to hide themselves away, the group had hoped to meet up with a man named Bill Cooper. In the nineteen eighties, Cooper, who'd served in the US Navy, developed a reputation among UFO enthusiasts after he claimed to have witnessed documents showing
the United States government were communicating with aliens. A year after the Gulf Breeze six went a War, Cooper, also known as Milton William Cooper, published a book titled Behold a Pale Horse. The book, which is said to have established Cooper as the godfather of modern conspiracy theory was a treasure trove of conspiracy and paranoia, covering everything from the supposed truth about UFOs to secret population control programs,
and of course, the Illuminati. Ten years later, he was dead, killed by local law enforcement after drunkenly initiating a shootout on his property, or, as many of his followers might tell you, at least that's what they want you to believe. Milton William Cooper was born in Long Beach, California, in nineteen forty three. Not much is known about his early life, other than the fact he claimed to have served in the United States Navy, Air Force, and Naval Intelligence until
being discharged in nineteen seventy five. Public records, however, show only that he served in the Navy, during which he completed two tours in Vietnam as a riverboat captain. It was sometime in nineteen seventy two, surrounded by the chaos of the American Vietnam War, the Cooper developed the distinct feeling that, as his biographer Mark Jacobson would put it,
something wasn't right. Cooper would later claim that it was around this time that he came across a series of top secret documents that apparently contained details of an agreement between the United States government and a sinister alien race intent on enslaving entire sections of humanity and creating a new world order. In nineteen seventy five, after his discharge, Cooper claimed he tried to leak the story to a journalist, only to find himself being run off the road by
a black limousine while outriding his motorbike one afternoon. A month later, having miraculously survived this first assault, the mysterious Limaux appeared again, only this time Cooper wasn't so lucky, the resulting crash leaving him with only one leg. Having seemingly got the message, Cooper wouldn't resurface again until nineteen eighty four, when he sent an essay to write Gray Barker for publication in a newsletter he was putting together
at the time. The essay, outlining the secret alien plot Cooper claimed to have uncovered, cemented his reputation among UFO enthusiasts and enabled him to begin hitting the lecture circuit. As noted by Richard Ruellis and Rob O'Dell for the Arizona Republic, it was after conducting a lecture in Sedona in nineteen eighty nine that Cooper, now touting himself as a former US Naval intelligence member, was introduced to local
publisher Melody O'Rion Swanson. Having been impressed by Cooper's talk, Swanson offered him the opportunity to collate all his research and ideas into a book. The result was Beyond a
Pale Horse, which was published in nineteen ninety one. Comprised of almost five hundred pages of official looking documents mixed with Cooper's own thoughts and interpretations, the book painted a sinister and to many compelling picture of secret powers and shadow organizations intent on controlling the world and everyone in it, and, as is all too often the case with such conspiracist thinking,
antisemitism was never far away. One passage highlighting the Rothschide family as seemingly the only people ever to have run a bank or to have done so for profit, is especially jarring. A little less subtle, however, was the inclusion of a text known as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in nineteen o three. The text purports to describe a Jewish plan for global
domination except the entire thing is a hoax. Once described as probably the most influential work of antisemitism ever written, Cooper would later claim the text's inherent antisemitism was merely a smoke screen used to hide its true meaning, which is only revealed if you substitute Jews with the Illuminati. Taking a rather different view, publisher Melody O'Ryan Swanson elected to remove the chapter in the most recent edition. Do
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unexplained that Athletic Greens dot com. Slash unexplained sales of Cooper's book and the scrawl of ideas laid out within It was slow initially, but before long it started to take off, having appeared to have struck a chord in short, because there was nothing else quite like it, with its mix of sincere rhetoric and reams of supposed evidence suggesting
genuine research had been conducted. For anybody with even an inkling that not all was as it seemed in the corridors of power, it was at the very least intriguing, even if some of the ideas were a little more
far fetched than others. That Cooper had opened the book with the assertion that some of the conclusions he drew from his work may be wrong only seemed to bolster its sense of authenticity, and as with critics of conspiracy theories in general, the problem for the book's detractors was that occasionally who was more than a little truth to
what Cooper was saying. The US government, for example, may not have fabricated the moon landings in partnership with the Hollywood Studio, but they really did have a secret program to investigate and master the use of psychic warfare, despite
denying it for years. And though the US government is not concocting a plan with Bill Gates to use a COVID nineteen vaccination drive to secretly implant everyone with a microchip, US doctors did secretly infect around seven hundred people in Guatemala with syphilis in the nineteen forties in order to study the effects of penicillin, none of which is documented in Cooper's book, but is just to say that military organizations, governments,
and public officials lie and obfuscate frequently for all sorts of reasons, some benign and some far less so, and for all its antisemitism and promoting of thoroughly debunked nonsense
like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Buried within Cooper's text, you might also find proclamation such as how cash quote will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer, and if you attempt to stay out of the system, you will not be allowed to buy, sell work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.
Or how quote the sharp increase of prescriptions of psychoactic drugs like Prozac and Rittelin to younger and younger children will inevitably lead to a rash of horrific school shootings, and that these incidents will be used by elements of the federal government as an excuse to infringe upon the citizen reads Second Amendment rights. It isn't exactly how things might be, but when held up against a certain kind of light, it can begin to look to some like
maybe he was on to something. To pick just the last quote apart, it seems prescient in light of school shootings such as the Columbine High School shooting of nineteen ninety nine. And yet, although children are far too often and too easily prescribed strong psychoactive drugs, it would be by no means the sole reason why a school shooting
might occur. Furthermore, where Cooper says that such a school shooting would be used as an excuse for the federal government to infringe on Second Amendment rights, you might just as easily say that such a shooting provides a completely legitimate reason for a federal government to want to question the benefits of Second Amendment rights. There is, as ever, some truth in there, but whatsm you view it through will determine exactly just what you believe that truth to be.
Not long after the publication of Behold a Pale Horse, Cooper moved to the quiet town of Edgar, Arizona, where he began a radio show called Hour of the Time. Cooper was a natural behind the microphone and gained many more fans with his innate confidence and authority and lack
of any specific political agenda. In nineteen ninety five, however, Cooper's peddling of conspiracy would have a decidedly real world impact when in April that year, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols parked a bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, resulting in the deaths of one hundred and sixty eight people. McVeigh, who was a fan of Cooper's, had committed the attack in retaliation for what he saw as a gradual, unending erosion of citizens' rights by the US government. Then, in
two thousand and one, something startling occurred. During the June twenty eighth broadcast of his The Hour of the Time show. That year, Cooper remarked on an old CNN broadcast he'd seen earlier that day, conducted by journalist Peter Arnett in March nineteen ninety seven. It has since become infamous as the first interview in which Asama bin Laden openly declared
war on the United States. What had drawn Cooper's eyre, however, was how easily it seemed for Arnett to locate bin Laden when the US government claimed not to be able to find him at the time. It could only mean one thing he thought the government wanted him to be seen, or in other words, they allowed the interview to go ahead so that a new Bogie Man could be beamed into the collective conscious of the Western world. As Cooper would remark later in that day's show, something terrible is
going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen, they're going to blame it on a Psama bin Laden. Don't you even believe it? The rest is history. Cooper's foreshadowing of the September eleventh attack on the twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York cemented
his reputation in conspiracist circles forever. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, Cooper took to the airways once more, commenting as the two towers collapsed that might they in fact have been brought down by controlled demolition orchestrated by the US government. This wild speculation would form the flimsy bedrock from which the nine to eleven Truth Or Movement would spring up. In July two thousand and one, Cooper got into an altercation with the local resident of Edgar
after accusing him of spying on him. At the time, the man, Scott Hamblin, had merely parked up with his wife and kids to enjoy the view from a hill close to Cooper's house. Cooper had pulled a gun on him, pointed it at his head, and told him to stay away from his property. When Hamblin told the local sheriff's office,
a warrant was issued for Cooper's arrest. At the time, Cooper was under investigation for tax of asion and had become increasingly paranoid and erratic, Convinced the government had a vendetta against him. Drinking more and more, he had effectively become a recluse, telling friends and listeners that had been forced to send his wife and kids abroad for their own protection. In truth, they'd simply left him and relocated
to California. One night in November two thousand and one, a group of local OF's deputies staged a fake party at the end of Cooper's drive, using loud music, in the hope that it might force him to leave his house, enabling them to arrest him without getting into a standoff. As planned, Cooper duly appeared at the front door, scrambled into his truck, and sped off down the hill to confront the apparent revelers, but Cooper failed to get out
of his truck. Realizing it was a trap, he sped off back to the house as the deputies gave chase. In a chaotic scramble to get inside. Cooper had almost made it to the front door when he spun around and opened fire. As a hail of bullets shot out, one deputy took a hit to the head, needing no further invitation. Another deputy returned fire, hitting Cooper in the
heart and the head, killing him instantly. When the manner of Cooper's death hit the news, one commentator, more and any other provided the most in depth coverage, a twenty seven year old small time broadcaster from Austin, Texas called
Alex Jones. Many years later, a message sent by Q, the supposed originator of the Q and Non Conspiracy movement, or at the very least an iteration of who Q purports to be, tacitly endorsed Cooper's book, sending it immediately to the top of Amazon's best sellers lists, today, having sold well over three hundred thousand copies and often topping the lists of the most shoplifted book in the Usa,
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