The whole time I was in Vietnam and especially on the DMZ I had noticed that there was a lot of UFO activity. We had individual 24-hour crypto code sheets that we used to encode messages, but because of the danger that one of them could be captured at any time, we used special code words for sensitive information. UFOs, I was told, were definitely sensitive information. I learned exactly how sensitive when all the people of an entire village disappeared after UFOs were seen hovering above their huts. I learned that both sides had fired upon the UFOs, and they had blasted back with a mysterious blue light. Rumors floated around that UFOs had kidnapped and mutilated two army soldiers, then dropped them in the bush. No one knew how much of this was true, but the fact that the rumors persisted made me tend to think there was at least some truth in them. I found out later that most of those rumors were true.
Cooper also claims that during the Vietnam War a UFO shot down a B-52, that U.S. troops were attacked by “something” which they first thought were helicopters and that he himself witnessed an incident involving the recovery of “a craft” which was listed as a Soviet submarine. But it was only when he was back in Hawaii, with an upgraded security clearance (Top Secret, Q, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information), that he found out what all this UFO activity meant. As a member of the Intelligence Briefing Team of the Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINPACFLT), it was Cooper’s job to brief high-level officers about various documents. The contents of these documents were what led Cooper to an “18-year search” that culminated in writing Behold a Pale Horse.
Cooper’s first revelation as a member of the CINPACFLT briefing team was that the Office of Naval Intelligence “had participated in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that it was the Secret Service agent driving the limo that had shot Kennedy in the head. …” But this was only the tip of the iceberg. By 1972, Cooper had found out all about the Secret Government, the coming ice age, Alternatives One, Two and Three, Project GALILEO, and most sinister of all, the plan for the New World Order.
Chapter 12 of Behold A Pale Horse, entitled “The Secret Government” reads like The Weekly World News but was originally delivered as a research paper at the MUFON Symposium in Las Vegas on July 2, 1989. It contains Cooper’s conspiracy theory in a nutshell. The information was supposedly gleaned during Cooper’s stint as a member of the CINPACFLT briefing team, but he cannot divulge the specific sources, “for obvious reasons.”
Anyone of Cooper’s revelations, if true, would have been enough to keep investigators, journalists, historians and scientists busy for the next hundred years. But focusing on any one aspect of Cooper’s junk heap of claims is impossible. Each revelation only leads deeper into the sinister tangle of secrecy and manipulation.
Though Cooper believes that secret societies have been running the world for centuries, the modern era of secret government began in 1947, with the advent of flying saucers. Between January 1947 and December 1952 “at least 16 crashed or downed alien craft, 65 alien bodies and 1 live alien were recovered.” In addition to the alien bodies, those who recovered the saucers discovered “a large number of human body parts stored within [two of the] vehicles.”
At the time, a special group of American top scientists was organized to study the alien phenomenon; this was all top secret, of course. In fact, the original CIA, then called the “Central Intelligence Group” as well as the National Security Agency was formed for the express purpose of dealing with the alien presence.
Cooper reveals that not everyone agreed with the policy of secrecy, and were dealt with accordingly:
Secretary of Defense James Forrestal objected to the secrecy. … He believed that the public should be told. James Forrestal was also one of the first known abductees. When he began to talk to leaders of the opposition party and leaders of Congress about the alien problem he was asked to resign by Truman…
Forrestal later was said to have suffered a mental breakdown.
He was ordered to the mental ward of Bethesda Naval Hospital. … Finally, on May 21, 1949, Forrestal’s brother made a fateful decision. He notified authorities that he intended to remove James from Bethesda on May 22. Sometime in the early morning of May 22, 1949, agents of the CIA tied a sheet around James Forrestal’s neck, fastened the other end to a fixture in his room, then threw James Forrestal out the window.
The sheet tore and he plummeted to his death. James Forrestal’s secret diaries were confiscated by the CIA and were kept in the White House for many years. Due to public demand the diaries were eventually rewritten and published in a sanitized version. The real diary information was later furnished by the CIA in book form to an agent who published the material as fiction. The name of the agent is Whitley Streiber and the book is Majestic. James Forrestal became one of the first victims of the cover-up.
Whitley Streiber had openly written Majestic as a fictionalized account of a possible event, but Cooper apparently sees it as factual. What is even more surprising is that Cooper also sees the movies E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind as “thinly disguised” versions of historical fact.
The science fiction book Alternative 003 is also, according to Cooper, “70% true.” The real story behind the movie E.T., Cooper says, is that the true-to-life alien was actually called “EBE,” to stand for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity. In 1951 the “chlorophyll-based” EBE became ill and though doctors, botanists and entomologists were called in, their efforts to save him failed; EBE died on June 2, 1952.