Milton William Cooper - Theories

Theories

Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, writes that Cooper was well known within the militia movement for his book, Behold a Pale Horse and his anti-government shortwave radio program that reportedly included Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh as a fan.

Political scientist Michael Barkun characterized Behold a Pale Horse as "among the most complex superconspiracy theories" and also among the most influential, being much read in militia circles as well as widely sold in mainstream bookstores.

According to Cooper, he served in the US Air Force and the US Navy and was discharged in 1975. He caused a sensation in UFOlogy circles when in 1988 he claimed to have seen secret documents while in the US Navy that referred to government knowledge and involvement with extraterrestrials.

Cooper linked the Illuminati with his beliefs that extraterrestrials were secretly involved with the US government, but later rejected these claims. According to Cooper, Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated a treaty with extraterrestrials in 1954 and established an inner circle of Illuminati to manage relations with the aliens and keep their presence a secret from the general public. Cooper believed the aliens actually "manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult" and that even the Illuminati had become unknowingly manipulated by the aliens.

Cooper wrote of the Illuminati as a secret international organization controlled by the Bilderberg Group that conspired with other individual organizations such as the Knights of Columbus, the Masons, and Skull and Bones, and whose ultimate goal was the establishment of a New World Order. According to Cooper, the Illuminati conspirators not only invented alien threats for their own gain, but actively conspired with extraterrestrials to take over the world. Cooper believed that James Forrestal's fatal fall from a window on the sixteenth floor of Bethesda Hospital was connected to the alleged secret committee, Majestic-12, and that JASON advisory group scientists reported to an elite group of Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations executive committee members who were high-ranking members of the Illuminati.

Cooper claimed the document Protocols of Zion was actually an Illuminati work and instructed readers to substitute the word "Sion" for "Zion", "Jews" for "Illuminati", and "Goyim" for "cattle".

As Cooper moved away from the UFOlogy community in the late 1990s and towards the militia and anti-government group subculture, he became convinced he'd been personally targeted by President Bill Clinton as well as the IRS. In July 1998 he was charged with tax evasion and an arrest warrant was issued but not executed, resulting in his being named a "major fugitive" by the US Marshals Service in 2000.