Behind the Bastards - Part One: Bill Cooper: The Man Who Killed Truth

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss conspiracy theorist Bill Cooper.FOOTNOTES: https://www.wired.com/2017/03/internet-protocols-elders-zion/ https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Conspiracy-Apocalyptic-Contemporary-Comparative/dp/0520248120 https://www.amazon.com/Pale-Horse-Rider-William-Conspiracy/dp/0399169954 https://books.google.com/books?id=_-oRyJF9t3cC&q=born#v=onepage&q&f=false https://medium.com/@lennyflatley/alex-jones-the-death-of-bill-cooper-and-the-rise-of-the-conspiracy-creeps-494d8646cf23 https://newrepublic.com/article/150922/pioneer-paranoia https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/stricter-parents-turning-children-effective-liars/ https://www.vulture.com/2018/08/how-behold-a-pale-horse-influenced-hip-hop.html Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sodomy. Shit. Fuck. God damn it. No. That's not the way to introduce a podcast. I'm so sorry. That was just the word Sodomy. That's not an introduction of any sort. I'm terribly sorry. I'm so sorry. This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about bad people and I've ruined it. I've ruined our discussion of genocide by mentioning the word Sodomy. And I apologize for that.

You're just kind of subverting the narrative and I do appreciate that. I don't know what a narrative is, but speaking of narratives, the subject of our episode today was the master of creating narratives. Also, Jamie Loftus, you're the guest. Sorry, I got so caught up in saying the word Sodomy quietly. Today you really gave your all to it. But I know you're not feeling well, so that took a lot to get that kind of performance. It did. Are we talking about Aaron Sorkin? No, we're talking about... Kind of. I mean, you could...

Thank you for that, Jamie. Okay, so Chris Carter was the ex-files guy, right? Possible. Maybe. I think it was Chris Carter. We're talking about the guy who inspired a lot of the ex-files. We're also talking about the guy who inspired Alex Jones. I mean, as long as he inspired Alex Jones, I thought you were going to say Alex Mack. No, no, not Alex Mack, but he also inspired the Wu-Tang Clan. Wow, okay, well, you got to hand it to him what a life.

Yeah, we're talking about a real influential piece of shit today. Some people, I think, when I mentioned the Wu-Tang Clan, the folks who know this guy recognize 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 guy? Yes, I have heard of him. He was a radio show host who was kind of the first Alex Jones in a lot of ways.

And he also was a very successful author of a conspiracy book that went on to become one of the foundational documents of American gangster rap. The first paragraph of his Wikipedia page, I'm excited. He's quite a character. The first paragraph is just a full journey. His real name is not even Bill, isn't it? It's William. No, but isn't that also not even in his real name?

Milton William Cooper. Well, Milton's my grandfather's name, so we're going to take that. He's Bill. He's Bill. Yes, I've decided that already. I have a long distrust of someone that insists on going by three names. I have a feeling that this is no different. No, no, he was pretty consistent about just Bill, but yeah.

Okay. You still shouldn't have trusted him because he was a famous liar. Okay, so kind of the reason I think this is important to talk about today is that at the present moment, Jamie, 11 QAnon believers are currently have like active congressional candidates. Have they've either won primaries or runoffs and will be on the ballot in November? Good. Yeah. And if you're just joining us from the year 2015, some shit has gone down first off.

You might want to. First of all, end it now. Yeah. Yeah. Just turn your car and angle. No. Yeah. So QAnon, the QAnon conspiracy theory basically states that the whole Democratic Party and

all global political leadership is part of a satanic cult that drinks the blood of children. Right. Donald Trump was chosen by our military and also Jesus to take power and root out this cabal of devil worshipers. This is all stuff we talk about at the barbecues I have at my house. Yeah. As you should. Yeah.

In some versions of the conspiracy JFK Junior is a crucial part of it. But that's very much a contentious issue within this community. There's even, I mean, there's at least one of the QAnon candidates is also hot, which I found to be wild. Yes. There's some hot ones. Yes. I didn't know that hot people were in QAnon that did, you know, I was just like, okay,

so they know skincare at very least. Yeah. Okay. I mean, 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 adrenochrome from the blood of children. Child's blood is great to shape the pores. Yes.

Well, I mean, actually, yeah, but that's something some of us just learned by accident. So yeah, QAnon, 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 11 of them who might wind up in Congress, Michael Flynn. At least one person that you went to high school with deeply powerfully believes in it. Yeah. Would die for QAnon.

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 to the mysterious Q and his cause. So it's a problem. It's become an issue. It's a real issue.

And it's not like, the only thing to do about it is kind of laugh because of how much of a problem it is, but it really is not a laughing matter. It's a very serious issue. And it's worth noting, QAnon, for a long time, people would talk about it as a conspiracy theory. And one of the researchers I follow, Sarah Hightower, has kind of been making the point for quite a while that calling it a conspiracy theory really misses the point. It's a cult.

It's a religious movement. And I think at this point, you could probably make a pretty good case that QAnon is the USA's fastest growing new religious movement, which is, again, a real problem. So the question, one of the questions we should all be asking ourselves as we try to deal with this thing that's happening is, how did we get here? 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.

But yeah, 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. So the broader question, when we look at like QAnon, we look at just the fact that we're in a place right now where the guy who got elected president is a famous conspiracy theorist who has repeated conspiracy theories about the active pandemic killing people during his administration while delivering news to the nation about the pandemic.

The fact that that's where we are right now kind of begs the question, how the fuck did we get here? And there's a number of theories about like how conspiracism became what it is in American culture. And it kind of starts in the 1970s 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 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 as sort of like a freak curiosity. 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 trends within a culture would make it a much more fertile ground for cults to sort of like form and thrive in. So that's like what a cultic milieu is. In the book, A Culture of Conspiracy, scholar Michael 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 orthodoxies. 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 sounds a little familiar. It definitely does. I feel like the like conspiracy, like the conspiracy label is used to be dismissive too often of like, oh, it's kind of a fun tabloid story more so. And then when you start calling it a religion, which has much of the same properties, it

suddenly becomes serious and all of a sudden there's hot people running for public office. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, compounds outside of Waco getting burnt down by the FBI, a number of things can occur. Did you just bring Waco in here? I'm this we're going to talk so much about Waco today. We're going into Waco today.

Oh, yeah. We're going to be ready for Waco today. All right. Nobody wakes up ready for Waco, except for David Koresh briefly, but not anymore. Yeah. So we live in a culture of conspiracy now, 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.

And it wasn't this kind of cultic milieu that has overtaken a lot of even mainstream culture now, like 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 get to like shout out his nonsense 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 like, yeah, I don't know. 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. There used to be really what we're looking at, what we're looking at as the root cause 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 claims to be like trying to tell them facts about the world now kind of automatically will reject those facts if they're in opposition to, you know, whatever belief structure that person has and will form the fact that like some professional person is telling them that their beliefs are wrong will kind of graph that automatically onto this conspiratorial belief about the nature of the world at the moment. Like the fact that commonly 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 this guy killed truth on his own, but Bill Cooper probably deserves more credit for building our cultic milieu than any other single person. And only again, like two kinds of people really recognize Bill's name today. The first kind are 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 our fans of 1990s gangster rap.

As I was saying, the others are rap fans. Yeah. Yeah. It's 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. So Milton William Cooper. So yeah, that's the name, Jamie. He is a Milton. Milton. Yeah. He was born on May 6, 1943 in Long Beach, California. His father, Milton Vance Cooper, was an Air Force pilot who got his start flying for the

U.S. 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 rename. Yeah. And you'll note that like neither Milton William nor Milton Vance ever went by the name Milton because it's an objectively bad name.

Well, I mean, just, you know, say what you will about his life choices, but he did make at least one solid decision. Yeah. No, no. He made the right call there. And yeah, as a little kid, Bill went by little Jackie, which is. Okay. I do hate that.

Yeah. I don't like that. No, 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 remind people to radicalize and get some shit done. Yeah. Yeah.

So like, you know, I'll, I'll refer to them properly, Scotland and Ireland when you, and Wales, when you do something about the English. Yeah. Scotland Throne. Yeah. So anyway, Bill, Bill's family came from all over the Isles and they wound up in the United States and kind of all over the United States. He had family that fought on both sides of the Civil War.

There were a lot of frontiersmen 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. 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 lie because that there's just a lot of those

guys really like as a rule that was like a fake that was a constructed image in the first place. That's fun. Fun lie. 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, 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 hellfire as well. It was a stressful way to be a kid. I know that particularly well because my dad and Bill had very similar child codes actually. My dad was about a decade younger, but his dad, 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. So nobody really knows anything else about what grandpa was doing. I bet he was probably posing like a cowboy in front of a saloon if I were just to give a lot of gas. Probably posing like a cowboy. Yeah.

But my dad has these memories of when the, they were stateside when the Cuban Missile Crisis hit and he was just like, he and I think his mom drove him and his sister out to family who lived away from a city and they just stayed there for days without really knowing anything, just knowing that something had happened and dad says, you guys shouldn't be in a city. Does it get out of town? Yeah. Jesus Christ.

That is terrifying. Yeah. It was like in a lot of, there were a lot of kids who grew up, like my whole family in this period of time were military brats and there was a lot of, it was a stressful thing to be because you're always worried that nuclear annihilation is around the damn corner. And so Bill grows up with this kind of apocalyptic expectation as just a constant part of his reality is like a little kid. So that's not great.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's, yeah. The biography Pale Horse Rider by Mark Jacobson, which is a biography of William Cooper, notes quote, once while his father was assigned to Lages Field on Terciera Island in the Azores, the young Cooper was sitting in the base rec 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 had happened. Looking outside, Cooper saw that a B29 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. Oh boy. So that's not great. Yeah. Yeah.

That's not great. Yeah. There's the problem at the beginning. All of these stories start out with like just a traumatized, a little cutie pie. Yeah. Just a 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. Yeah. Just bastard babies. And then they can just all go to a child therapist and really talk shit through 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. Saddam was, yeah, he was, he was, uh, you know, some people are born that way. He was, he was, he was a hardened gangster by 13. But also had the heart of a poet, you know, it's complicated. Well, of course. Yeah. Like Al Capone. Right.

Right. So in his own book, Behold a Pale Horse, Bill Cooper himself. 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. Is it 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 it's very influential. It kind of sounds like soft porn. Like it's kind of, it's a very appealing title. Well, it's, 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.

Yeah. So anyway, um, Bill would later write himself right of 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 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 at the field. 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 2016, Victoria Tauwar, an expert on children's social cognitive development at McGill University, published a study on this. IFL science reported quote, Tauwar and her colleagues developed a test to identify collective

young liars called the peeping game, taking her test to two West African schools, one with relaxed rules and one with harsh disciplinary regimes. The people's were asked to guess 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, Tauwar 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. So that's going to become very relevant as we talk about every single thing Bill says

about his life. So much of the information we have on Bill's childhood comes from Bill himself. And again, he's a, he's a liar, so it's very, okay, this is difficult. It's tough because he lies about absolutely everything with him, but that's because he wants you 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, including the fact that his dad, I have no trouble believing his dad was an authoritarian 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 50s on a military base. Right. 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 Bill's relationship with his mother was a little more positive than his relationship with his father. Bill describes her as the kind of woman who used to be called a Southern Belle, the type of woman that men like to dream about when they're lonely. She's the kindest, gentlest woman I have ever known.

Once she likes you, she cannot be driven away. She is loyal to a fault. That that'll 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 Cooke. 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. Wow. 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 shit. 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. Robert, are you suggesting it's not currently the coolest thing you could be because it still is. Ask anyone that I know that's excellent. The coolest thing you can be is a white guy who does a podcast about politics. Bad. This is propaganda. This is the conspiracy theories are running around like this at all.

It'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 that support this show, they'd fucking better Lord in heaven. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your

podcast. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. We're back and I just I have some good news for everybody. We have a new face mask that we'll be selling in the behind the bastard store.

It just says FDA approved to prevent all diseases. So as we're talking about Colts, Jamie, I just want everyone to know I am, in fact, doing everything I can to get us violently raided by the Food and Drug Administration. That is the goal. So grab your kids, take them to my compound in the mountains, put them in a basement and we'll wait for the FDA to come fire bomb us. Wow. Yep.

What a beautiful image. What a beautiful image. Yeah, we're we're we're going to make them do it. We're going to we're going to radicalize the FDA, Jamie. That's my goal. That would be kind of fun. It would be neat. We're going to radicalize with good outfits.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. Well, put the FDA in crop tops. See what happens. Yeah. Okay.

Fine. As long as as long as you know, they're still like unaccountably violent. That's my my my dream for the FDA. Oh, they're extremely violent. I'm just saying like a cult that it like a heavens gate. You know, it's like they're you know, they have they have no morals, but also, you know, they look nice. They match.

Okay. Okay. Okay. We'll we'll we'll we'll talk about this more workshop this. So Bill was a yeah, Bill as a as a kid on the military base, like falls in love with the idea of being a DJ and at age 16, 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 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 dork. 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 17 or 16 year old to make his like introduction music when he comes on the fucking radio.

It's like this time 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. Oh, good. That's a little weird for 16 year old Bill. Yeah.

Just like a bright eyes energy to it, you know, I think there's equivalence of this. It's really unsettling. Like you can you can kind of tell Bill's not going to go good places. Yeah. This isn't this isn't going to end well. Okay, so it's intense. Very to it. 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. And that the communists had jammed his signal to stop it, which, okay, this didn't happen. Yeah.

Major DJ energy is like, no, it's just the people don't have access to it. If I could just get it out there, I can in communism, if they can listen to my sad songs about quiet like villages and girls not liking me enough. Oh my God. Yeah. Even at age 16, Bill was convinced that he had somehow become the target of a global communist movement of the global communist movement, which 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 commies were trying to stop his terrible radio show. So Teenage 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. I was going to say that. There's actually something to that. Yeah.

That time, yeah. I think a lot of like teenagers in Cuba got a really unfairly rosy idea of American culture by listening to the stones and shit. I don't like the feeling of agreeing with him, but I'm on board for that one. Yeah. No, he's probably right about that. Yeah. You're into the rock and roll.

Listen, 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 would 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 had. Do you know much about Chuck Berry, Jamie? Not really.

No. Outside of who he is. Yeah. 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 14-year-old across state lines for a moral purpose and violation of the mandate.

Oh, that kind of in jail. Okay. Well. Yeah. Like it wasn't a mild. It wasn't like a, like it wasn't, 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 artist of this era was not doing that? It was. That is, that is very fair. Well, we had some shit like, 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'll defend. That we know of.

I bet that it was just that, not that he didn't, that he couldn't. He would have been terrible at sex trafficking. He would have been really bad. He would have been horrible at it. So. Billy Joel can't be a good liar. No, no, he can't. He's an innocent man.

So in 1988, Chuck Berry 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 Kissinger. I was about to say, I'm like, there's been worse people who have served as secretary

of state. Oh, that's so depressed. There's truly not one rock legend that isn't the most horrifying person. No, they were, they were all monsters. It turns out when you like elevate mostly young teenage and 20 something men to like effectively live in gods, they do horrible, horrible things repeatedly. They really have been known to take advantage of it. Yeah.

Yeah. It turns out to be a bad call. So in 1962. We've learned from it though. Yeah. We don't do that anymore. It doesn't happen anymore. No.

And it never will again. Yeah. In 1962, 19 year old Bill Cooper joined the Air Force. The Navy was his first choice, but he got seasick easily and he didn't think he'd be able to handle a career on a boat. This will be slightly ironic later. 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.

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 policed. It was a job that kept him alone a great deal of the time. And so he was sitting on his own in 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'd watched it on television and then hung up the phone. I was numb all over. Okay. Yeah. You know, people, you know, so what? President Kennedy got shot. Get over it.

Yeah, by Bernie Sanders. Yes. That's my hot. Yes, absolutely. Bernie Sanders did do it. I've 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 Meatloaf was there. Yes, you did bring it up on the show.

I love to bring it up. Meatloaf was like 13 or 14 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. It's a shame that we have bad out of hell. I know. Okay.

I know that I famously hate rock and roll, but I do kind of like bad out of hell. Meatloaf's a terrible person, but you know what? He was fine in Fight Club and bad out of hell is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. And he probably, I don't know, had something to do with the JFK assassination. Anyway. I think, yeah, he was part of the youth, the youth plot.

Yeah. He was, he was spotting for Bernie Sanders's sniper scope. So now Jamie, 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 guy's 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'll happen repeatedly. What happens repeatedly in his narrative of his early life that he later publishes. He'll drop these little, like he kind of, he kind of frames it almost like a movie, right? Where like he drops these little bitty hints about the vast conspiracy and his, his childhood like stories of his early life. And he does it really well. Like it's, it's, it's, it's good, good storytelling, which is something that like Bill has a real

talent for is, is telling stories because he's a great liar. Yeah, so he also brought aliens into the mix in his, his, his biography, but not in a way, not in a way that was super kooky. This is, this part, this is the way he does this, I actually think is really effective as a storytelling tool. Quote, it was during this time when he was, he was working 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. The police told me that he'd 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.

Sargents 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 shit in to your narrative about yourself. That's really, that's really smart. I don't think 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 fuck was going on. And Bill spent his nights sleeping under a B-52 loaded with nuclear munitions waiting

for the order to go. So again, to understand Bill Cooper's mind state, 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 hit. Never had a moment's peace this Milton.

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. And in 1966, Bill got an honorable discharge from the Air Force. He immediately decided to join the Navy next since his sea sickness had apparently improved

and Bill was, you know, shipped over to serve on a submarine in Hawaii. I mean, because apparently his sea sickness improved is a very funny thing to say. Yeah. The way he describes it is like after four years in the Air Force, he was like, I've always wanted to be in the Navy. Like I'm not going to let, I'm going to, I'm going to get over this, this problem and do it. Fuck it.

Yeah. Okay. So Bill, Bill joined the Navy. He like bought phoning or something and was like this is it. I was going to say it sounds like he bought a drugstore 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, which I have, 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. Bill's other best friend was an American Indian who he, he doesn't give us the guy's real name, but informs us that he was nicknamed Geronimo. 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. This sounds fake as hell. Yeah. Anyway, while Bill was stationed in Hawaii, he poisoned one of his shipmates. 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 starve 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. Wow.

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 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 times. Sometimes you got to poison a guy.

And 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? Four high schools? Like, what is the point of that? Is there any honor in that?

It's like the EGOT, but you've always are doing shitty jobs. And it's not at all like the EGOT because they'll take anyone pretty much. Okay. Yeah. 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're more than welcome to go to Vietnam, Bill. Okay. Cool. So Bill was sent to a naval support unit in the Khoa Viet River, Quang Tri Province. And this was a really dangerous posting. Bill's job was to captain a riverboat motoring up and down the river. How old was he at this time?

He's in his 20s. It sounds like he's been alive for a hundred years already. Yeah. He's in his 20s. Okay. Yeah. And he's, do you have watched Apocalypse now? Yes.

So, you know, the, like a huge chunk of it, they're on that boat with the machine guns that get shot at repeatedly. Yes. That's Bill's job. Like Bill does that for real. Okay. And it's, it's a really, it's one of the most dangerous gigs you could have in Vietnam. Like cause 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. It's a bad vibe. That's a bad vibe. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to say mostly bad things about him.

Bill Cooper saw some shit. His best friend during training was a guy named Bob Barron and both men made a pact to drink a bottle of Scotch and the other man's memory if they died in battle. Bob shipped out first and he was killed almost immediately. Oh, well, treat for Bill. Treat for Bill. Bill Cooper felt that now Vietnam was quote, a personal war. They had killed a part of me.

He claims that once he reached the river, his boat engaged the enemy more times than any boat, 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 shit in Vietnam 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.

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. 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. Pacific Fleet.

In order to do this job, Bill's security clearance was upgraded to top secret Q sensitive compartmentalized information. Q? Yeah, yeah. Is that Q I hear? Yeah, yeah. That's where, and that's where QAnon comes from is like Q was the level of military intelligence classification.

I thought it was just a spicy consonant. I love to learn. No, no, no. Bill Cooper is clearly cute. No, he's not because spoilers, he dies violently. But yeah, so giving Bill Cooper any kind of security clearance would prove to be one of the worst mistakes that U.S. Navy ever made. Second only to its continued failure to finally destroy the city of Boston. Bill Cooper was a competent seaman, but giving him access to top secret information was a

really bad decision, 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 wrote, quote, Really trying to not act on the fact that you said competent seaman. 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. I'm glad we agree on this, Jamie. There's no, I mean, by all means, watch Patriots Day on Netflix. It's in the top 10 right now. And I can't watch it because it will give me PTSD, but PTSD, it'll give me just Mark Wahlberg.

Really. No, I'm kidding. There's no defending the city of Boston. I stopped trying. Real quick. Just fuck. Okay. Fuck this out.

You know what? Just throwing it out. Do you want to get beat up by my uncle? So I don't know what kind of my uncle will will kick all and I'm kidding. My uncle's a grifter. He's pretending to be on disability, but he's not. Oh, what's that? That's my machete that I'm holding because nobody can take me.

Oh, there's your machete. I'm going to challenge our sleuths at home to figure out who Jamie's uncle is and report him to me. Every disability fraud. I mean, talk about it. We're talking about good liars. Someone talk to my uncle. Do you want to know who's not Jamie's uncle?

Oh, is it time for that already? This is the worst guy transition I've ever done. I'm so sorry, but also fuck the boss and solve this. 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. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns.

He's a shark. And on the good and bad ass way, nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Send Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Send to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're back. 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, all right? Bill Cooper, that's a very Boston story. Watch your grandma throw a 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 to give them like an air of truth. 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 Laos. Five minutes later, intelligence came into the office with KAA 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 the time. Most of us never did. I never imagined the people in charge of the country would lie to 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. But once his career as 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. Oh, he knows that. True, 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 had this weird conspiracy theory of a shellfish toxin pellet gun that was built into the body of, I think, an umbrella. But for the rest of his life, when Bill would be talking about government conspiracies, he'd say, like, I saw the evidence of it in the Admiral's filing cabinet, and 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, yeah, it would allow him to lie for the rest of his life about having seen evidence of evil government plots. That kind of reminds me of when, I guess, in context to my life, when someone works on a TV show that's good, but they do nothing, but then they associate themselves with that TV show for the rest of their lives.

Yeah. So yeah, Bill Cooper, for sort of an example of the way Bill would later frame his relatively brief period of time working as basically the Admiral's secretary, I'm going to quote from a speech he gave at Hollywood High School in 1989. Wow. Yeah. No. It's weird that that got to happen, huh?

Every time it sounds like a fake place, but is there a place? Right away, I knew I was seeing what I was not supposed to see. Material never intended for my eyes. The secrets were there. What had been covered up? The treasonous 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 Taken. 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 out 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. He'd grown up obsessed with the idea of living a stereotypical Americana life, living in a small town with a close-knit community. When he gets back to the U.S., he winds up in the California, big cities in California,

the fucking Bay Area and stuff. This is so different than what life is supposed to be like in America. Something must have gone horribly wrong. People who knew Bill as a kid will point out, Bill never knew the quote-unquote real America that he would spend the rest of his life obsessed with living. He lived on military bases. He never knew small town America or any of that shit. It was just like a projection of the media he was consuming as a kid.

Yes, exactly. He grew up having this kind of miserable childhood and longing for the kind of America he saw on the television, which never really existed anywhere. 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. But as Bill would later claim, his sense of guilt and outrage over the things he'd learned would overpower him.

He later claims that basically he leaves the military with the knowledge of all these horrible secrets, these evil programs that the government is instituting to- The filing cabinet. Yes. This evil filing cabinet full of secret government plans to suborn the liberty of the American people and destroy freedom. He decides to start going after- he claims that he goes to a reporter and starts giving him the information that he's gotten.

He's trying to basically do what Woodward and Bernstein did and be a deep throat to them to reveal all these horrible government conspiracies. 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 replied, good, then we don't have to do anything. Now- I feel like that lie could have used a second draft. Yeah, I think he could have used an editor on that one. 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 a success. They damaged his right leg badly enough that it had to be amputated above the knee in the same car. Yeah. Same car, same limousine. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

Sure. 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. Kinky. 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. Yeah. And this is like what his family, like his dad, when this got brought up to him, his dad was like, what the fuck 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. Oh my God. And this was part of why Bill lied about this was because his relationship with his dad was strained and he couldn't like admit that he'd needed his family's money for a medical issue, especially one he'd caused himself. So it was the government. Yeah. Oh, buddy.

I love his little soft core line about I'm going to be a good little boy no matter what you do. Yeah. That is, that is sexy. That is sexy. Objectively sexy. Yeah. Little Jackie in, I'll be a good little boy.

Jamie. What? Oh, sorry for blowing your mind with my amazing ideas. I think you need to get off the Skype call right now and start writing. Yes. I'm sorry. I have a final draft file to take care of. 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. Jamie died of brain failure. More pages into, I'll be good. So the mid 1970s and early 1980s were a real rough period for Bill. He had a fucking shitload of PTSD. He was missing most of a leg. Like he's at a bad place. The 70s aren't a good time for Bill.

And medical science didn't really formally recognize post-traumatic stress disorder is the thing until it was added to the DSM in like 1980. So for most of the time that Bill was struggling with it, the term was used as post Vietnam syndrome when like doctors believed it was a problem at all. And in the US in the 1970s, it wasn't like a very welcome place to admit you were struggling with mental health issues related to your military service. It's like Bill wasn't, didn't talk about this shit to anyone for quite a while. He's just burying his trauma with the, what's certainly even more PTSD from a horrible motorcycle

accident. He's a damaged boy. And I'm saying that in the knowledge that that should not at all mitigate what comes next cause we're going to talk about his incredibly long history of profound spousal abuse. So we don't know how many women that Bill Cooper married in the 70s. What? Yeah. We have no idea.

It's a lot. It's too many women. How can that be true? How can you not know? Yeah. Because he was a famous liar. Oh. Oh.

Yeah. Maybe making up what? Well, no, no, no, no, no. No. We know he had a number of them. It's just that we don't know how many of them there were cause he lied to all of them about the others and wouldn't acknowledge them. Yeah.

We'll talk about it. This will make more sense than a little bit. His biographer writes, quote, in 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 17-year-old Japanese girl. The older 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. He kept his prior relationships hidden because nobody would want to marry a guy with Bill's history.

In 1976, he got hitched to Janice Pell, 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. Oh, Lord. Okay. But he gets married a shitload, quote, I had no idea what I was getting into. One minute he'd be the sweetest, warmest guy, then he'd change, start yelling at me for no reason.

It was like living with Dr. Jekyll and 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'd clean, make dinner for him. I set a nice table, waiting for him to come home. In the beginning, he'd rush home, give me a kiss, bring flowers.

It was great. Then he got home later and later. It could be after 10 or midnight. Sometimes he didn't come home at all. I'd 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 cry 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. Then there's a number of possibilities about 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. He also had a bunch of really unsuccessful business ventures. He had an art gallery that failed. Maybe his fucked up career was on his mind.

He sounds like fucking making a runy. Yeah. It was terrible. It's bad. He was also an alcoholic and increasingly vicious drunk during this period of time. He was probably out drinking a lot of the time. Janice described him as a monster when he was drinking. He'd get abusive 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 Bill 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. We don't actually know many kids Bill had either, but they all kind of have the same story as this one where 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. God, that is so fucking miserable. It's not good.

It's not great. It's not a good way to be a person. 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 relationship. I mean, 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. Jesus Christ.

Yeah, a ton of victims. This story is probably very similar to a number of Bill's unknown number of wives. 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 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 eye, said all right and crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. He said he'd been smoking since he was 14, 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 that 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 Wrigley Mansion. The party was at El 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 great. I hate him. But I'm trying 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'd never exist. Move on to the next person. I mean, that's still like pretty clear. I mean, it's horrible. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely an abuser. 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. Yeah.

It's a deeply selfish broken person. Yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. That's the feeling you get from him. His mood swings seem to come more or less at random and probably was a mix of a number

of things. He was also like working a pretty unsatisfying life at this time, a lot of 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. But he also took it out on everyone around him. At 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. So he is not a planner at this point in his life.

It sounds like he really is just flying 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. Oh, sure.

Yeah. And also, he couldn't stop from getting the women that he was with pregnant. So we got Sally pregnant pretty much as soon as they get married. Yeah, competent semen. Their daughter, Jessica, again, like we don't know how many kids he had, 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 tense up every time he came into the room. One night when Jessica was little, we went to truckie cheeses. Bill was drinking. He was not abusive, calling me name. I mean, that is something that happens at Chuckie Cheese.

I mean, no one's going to be sober. I would be more worried about, no, wait, I don't want to make that reference. That's bad. Listen, as someone who still has birthday parties at Chuckie Cheese is no one is sober and no one is getting along. Yeah, 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 Chuckie cheeses that normally are a real positive part of my life. I love talking about what a bad place Chuckie Cheese is, but this story's real dark. Cars are great. This is one of the worst Chuckie 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 on 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 and Jess's tiny face was all cut up. So he kicks his wife and infant daughter out of a moving vehicle after getting drunk at Chuckie Cheese's. Jesus Christ. Yeah. This is why they have a two-drink cap down. Yeah. First of all.

It's Bill Cooper. That's the Bill Cooper rule of Chuckie Cheese's. That is so, that is very upsetting and very horrible. Yeah, it's bad. It's real bad. And not the first time that has happened at a Chuckie Cheese. Not the 50th time that's happened at a Chuckie Cheese. No.

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 VA to

come and pick him up. So the couple splits in like 1982. And during this time, Bill's going to Long Beach College trying to make use of his GI Bill. And he spends a lot of time there. Like this is kind of the first time in the early 80s after his marriage X breaks apart where he starts to kind of deal with his PTSD by writing about it. So he does like essays and stuff about what he and other veterans are kind of experiencing.

One of his essays from this period. More than most people who we're 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 10 years later? And in it, he wrote, quote, on the campus of Long Beach City College, a specter reaps its harvest. Gasly, it stalks the future of those who know its 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. And he, 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 is 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, so like, Bill's, you can't over exaggerate how much Vietnam fucks this man up. How much PTSD. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is, you know, like a story for a lot of people. Oh God, it's just horrible. 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. No, it is not a certainty that you will then do that. Yeah.

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 fucks up young men, the young men who are asked to enforce it. There's like so many levels too of like how American imperialism fucks 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.

It's a case study. Lot of lessons in the story of Bill Cooper. So Bill gets married again in 1986 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 work. It's not an idea for a picture. Yeah. So the future looked bleak for Bill, but then in 1988, 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 man. That's the worst thing that could, oh no, confirmation of the horrible thought he's ever had in his life. Yeah.

It's unfortunate that things time out that way. Yeah. 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. And the late 1980s Internet was a real different beast in the modern one. There was nothing that really worked like social media, but there were BBSs, which were essentially forums.

So if you remember what forums were, if you can think back to a time before Facebook, Bill's kind of into that sort of thing, and he quickly discovers Paranet, which was dedicated to the paranormal, particularly UFOs. And yeah, so Bill gets super fucking into UFOs 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 shit. It's like every annoying couple in their 40s met on an Internet forum.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Absolutely. As well. Yeah. 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 Barkoon notes, quote, within a few months of the first modern claim of a flying saucer sighting in 1947, polls showed that 90 percent of the population had heard of them. By 1966, that figure had risen to 96 percent. And more importantly, 46 percent of all Americans believed UFOs actually existed.

More than a decade later in 1978, 30 percent of college graduates believe they existed. At that time, the number of Americans who believed UFOs were real reached its highest level, 57 percent. Now, wow. By 1990, the number of UFO true believers had actually fallen to about 47 percent. And it was still at around that level six years later. And this suggests that the internet didn't 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 Bill to explore and expand on existing theories. And this allowed for very different kinds of conspiracy theories to merge. For example, there had always been stories about an alien crash landing in Roswell since like 1947. 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. Bernard Sanders. Yeah.

With a complex meatloaf. Yeah. Yeah. And then starting in the mid-1980s, there was Majestic 12. And in brief, Majestic 12 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. And Mj 12 is like the first hidden global government conspiracy theory.

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 new found existence of aliens. Now, the initial claims of the Mj 12 conspiracy theory were rather basic because this document actually was only like, I think a dozen pages or something. But once Mj 12 hit the internet in the late 1980s, a funny thing started to happen. Conspiracy theorists began grafting their pet conspiracy theories onto Mj 12, writing in the JFK assassination and the Tonkin Gulf incident, which was the spark behind the Vietnam

War and a bunch of other shady stuff into the machinations of the Majestic 12. 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 Lear jet. Lear's theory was that the leaders of the US had made a devil's bargain with aliens back in the 1960s to hand over American citizens and cattle to them for mutilation and experimentation in exchange for technology. But the aliens, yeah, yeah, this is the X files, right? Like this is actually, like this 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. Credence Clearwater revival playing in the background of this devil's deal with the aliens. This is good. I feel like I'm there. Yeah. So, you know, Lear, Lear and Cooper, once they got together, would kind of argue that actually the Majestic 12 were 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. And so like the conspiracy evolves under Lear into like claiming that the allies in the military had balked at this agreement with the aliens and that was what led to the creation of the strategic defense initiative, Reagan's Star Wars missile program. Sure, I'm following this. This is all I can sense to me. 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 fake documents that were purporting to be like the, and this is like throughout the 80s. 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 shit together. So like, yeah, you can like take your, take your cork, take it from your corkboard and really start to compare some ideas. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote from the book, A Culture of Conspiracy on sort of what happened, like

the impact of, of John Lear's, what's called the Lear statement, which is like his personal theory about MJ 12. The Lear statement is brief, only seven printed pages, but dizzying in its claims. It elevates MJ 12 to a conspiratorial position nowhere hinted at in the original papers themselves. It implies a web of subsidiary conspiracies to silence the news media with that and the academic community and to mislead the UFL community as well. According to Lear, ufologist William Moore, the figure most identified with the MJ 12 papers was probably himself a disinformation agent in the hire of MJ 12.

So you, 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, by the CIA or whoever. It's like all of these things are part of this massive branching and possibly influential conspiracy. What you're seeing is the precursor for the kind of conspiracy that QAnon is, right?

Right. And 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. And you know, Bill had kind of just started by sharing tales of aliens and stuff in Peronet, 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. And here's how you take it away. It'll be less so in just a second. Cooper's biographer actually interviewed Lear pretty recently and Lear was very old at the time. But here's how Lear described the two men's early friendship. I heard there was this guy on Peronet 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 it could vouch for word for word 50% of what I said. Lear and Cooper spent a lot of time together through 1988 and 1990. 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 beatnik at a jazz club, hey daddy-o, hey daddy-o. 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, I knew this guy, we were going to be friends when I found out he was very sick in his head and 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. Yes. Because I have the same problem. Wow. Okay.

We both had violent mood swings and pulled firearms on each other regularly. That's how I knew we were friends. And did we have interest in addressing this? No. Of course not. Therefore we 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.

In excited online rants, Bill would claim to have access to top secret information that at least 16 alien craft had crashed and been found by the US government. About 65 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 unholy 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 10th, 1954, and Murock, 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 writes 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. Yeah. Okay. 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.

Yeah. Yeah. And Bill wasn't content with just being a giant among the very first and the very saddest conspiracy nerds in the internet. No, it has that like kind of fun, everything is connected, vibe to it that people online love. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And he gets, he starts to get kind of famous within this community for that. And soon he's speaking at like conventions and stuff, UFO conventions all around. Like he's kind of in demand by like, We're making angel fire fan sites. Yeah. And in 1989, 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 535 copies of all of his findings on extraterrestrials and he sends out copies to every member of the US house and Senate. And he'd written so much like these documents he was sending everyone in Congress were so extensive that the whole endeavor costs $27,000. Oh my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Wait. What? Yeah. Hey, in like 1989 money? In 1989 money. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Okay. Bill's dedicated. His guides for Congress included a helpful taxonomic guide to all the different alien species out in the galaxy, including two different kinds of gray aliens and the Draco Mothman. The Draco Mothman? Yeah. That's what I heard too. Mothman.

Draco Mothman. Let's not make fun of Mothman here, okay? Oh, Mothman. Okay. Now, Bill obviously hadn't seen anything like these creatures in person, but he was at this point claiming openly, he'd been claiming for years to his friends of all the secret seed scene in that Admiral's cabinet. And now he starts justifying like this is how I learned about all these aliens is from

the cabinet. This is a very wise cabinet. Yeah. That Admiral really kept a lot of different shit 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, a lot of three martini lunches happening in the Admiralty back then. Sure. Sure.

Sure. 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. No one took him up on the author. But could. Yeah. That's a tragedy.

Just let me hypnotize you. I can convince 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. Yeah. Watch like 30 different episodes of the X files for more information on hypnotic regression. I guess.

So yeah, 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. A lot of faith to heaven, this evil government. Yeah. So luckily for Bill, the late 1980s saw the meteoric rise in popularity of the UFO movement and Bill became one of its first celebrities.

He started making money, selling his different writings on extraterrestrials and he was invited to speak at the Mutual UFO Network Mufon Symposium in 1989. Okay. Now, the Mufon Symposium started with disaster when on Saturday evening, an MJ12 expert named William Moore admitted that he'd 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. But unfortunately, Moore admitted to that some of the disinformation he'd spread 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. 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 MJ12 story that revealed Washington malfeasance was itself part of a government directed disinformation program. Speaking more speech, Cooper ended up at Lear's home in a rage. He was roaring drunk, screaming that he'd been set up and demanding to know who I was

really working for, Lear recalled. That was one of those times I thought he might kill me. By the next day, Cooper had calmed down. Who cared what William Moore said anyway? The man was a liar, a fake, less than a pawn in the larger game. The original MJ12 papers were bogus, Cooper said, a pile of crap designed to lead you right through the Rose Garden. The truth, the real truth, the one he'd 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 Mufon's, 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 going to play you a little segment of that right now, Jamie. Please. 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 pitchman, how he is it 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. Exactly. He's still finding his voice.

Hey, you know, we've all been there. For 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 Buck Report Number 13. 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 50, the important thing is that it occurred and that there were dead alien bodies that were not of this world.

Okay. Yeah. I think, you know, he does kind of have the energy of a Reddit user who is on stage for the first time. Yeah. But it sounds like he course corrects this later in his life. He sure does. But I mean, there's ideas being thrown out.

There's ideas being thrown out and a decent shirt. Yeah. And a decent shirt. So, yeah, one of the things you know that is from that is that like what Bill's saying is obviously absurd, but he's smart enough not to dwell on any like one piece of data for long. It's 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 1980s, 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. 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 after World War Two? So I have 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 not like a media personality.

It's like he sounds like a military person saying the weirdest should I've ever heard. Yeah. And he, yeah, another quote from that speech where he kind of goes into detail about how the aliens had 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 44 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, we are 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 word sheeple. Wow. Yeah. He's the sheeple guy.

Yeah. He's certainly the guy who popularized it. If you sub out any of what he said with a absurd devotion to capitalism, I agree with it. Just about aliens with devotion to capitalism. They'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, like recognized

that things were really fucked up. And he created this because he was a liar and a fabulous. 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 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 part is 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. 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.

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, but it seems like both things are kind of going on. It seems like he truly is suffering of a lot of... He's definitely suffering, yeah. He's definitely suffering.

He's definitely has some mental illness issues. And I can't wait to hear what he does next. Well Jamie, first you're going to have to tell us where they can find you next so that you can... Ooh. Stare your own grift. Well, sure, you can follow me on Twitter. This never feels right.

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 it and some developments in the near future. And you can listen to the Bechtelcast every Thursday, feminist movie podcast. And yeah. All right. And you can find me somewhere. No one's ever learned how though.

So goodbye. You can follow him at I write okay on Twitter. He doesn't believe in Instagram. I don't believe in Instagram now. Or the TikToks, what the kids are doing. Robert, I really think you would be really good at TikToks. Robert, you would fucking love TikTok. It's a bunch of angry teenagers saying fuck the patriarchy.

It's very cool. You would love it and you would be good at it. Yeah, but I mean... I don't recommend it. I don't like that. Absolutely not. Unless you're looking for some teenager... Makes me feel 500 years old.

If you're looking for a teenager to tell you how to have flawless skin, TikTok. If you're looking for a teenager to tell you that your parents are racist, TikTok. That's my... You're looking for Kellyanne Conway's daughter being on the right side of history, TikTok. If you're looking for teenagers that are trying to make it so that there's empty seats at Trump rallies, also TikTok. TikTok. Are you a sponsor?

No, I'm kidding. I'm so tired even thinking about TikTok. I'm so tired thinking about young people in general. All right, old guy, the podcast's over. Alpha Bet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alpha Bet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know. Because I'm Lance Bass.

And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.