Bill Cooper - Part 2

Don Ecker, one time of UFO magazine and lately of Dark Matters radio, sent me an email in which he wanted to know why I would say anything about Cooper and not mention his exposes of the man. A somewhat fair question. The answer is, I just didn't think about it at the time.

So, for those who wish to read, or hear more about Cooper and his exploits... or adventures... or outright paranoia, take a listen to or read the following, courtesy of Don.

Radio Show - Bill Cooper
http://www.dqrm.com/shows/DMR/wk20/dmr-21-th.mp3

On ATS
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread587733/pg1

From UFO Magazine
http://www.ufoinfo.com/ufonewsuk/v01/sped.shtml

After reading or listening, I don't believe anyone will seriously be lieve anything that Cooper said or wrote. It is too bad that many of those entering the UFO research field in today's world must be subjected to the nonsense put out by Cooper. Remember, we all call his book, "Behold a Pail of Horses..t." And those are the nice comments.

William Cooper and Behold a Pail of Horse...

In the last few days I have had a number of people ask about or talk about the UFO research of Bill Cooper. He claimed that he had been part of a secret Navy briefing team and that he had inside information about how some of these clandestine organizations work. Eventually he wrote a book called Behold a Pale Horse, which some have embraced. Cooper was killed a number of years ago in a shoot out with Arizona sheriff’s deputies when he pulled a pistol on them.

Normally I would just ignore this because I found nothing in Cooper’s work worth repeating and found some of his conclusions to be flawed. He made leaps of logic, embraced the almost discredited MJ-12 documents, and rode off on many conspiracy tangents. He was as crazy as they come. (I was going to say as crazy as a bedbug, but with the all the talk in the media about them, I thought I’d just stay away from that).


As just a single example of this craziness, Cooper believed that the real assassin of President Kennedy was the limousine driver. In Dealy Plaza, where there were, literally, hundreds of witnesses, Cooper said the driver turned in his seat and shot the president (Me at the precise location that Zapruter stood, the school depository and the famous grassy knoll). He said that if you watched the Zapruter film of the assassination carefully, you could see it happen.

I have and I didn’t.

It was also means that everyone else in the car was in on it or the driver would have had to shoot them all. If he didn’t, what motive would they have for remaining quiet once they were out of the car. This is a ridiculous notion, but one that Cooper held.

Almost everything he claimed about his military career was distorted. Oh, he served in the Navy but he was a low-ranking enlisted man. He did seem to have participated on a couple of briefing teams for high-ranking officials, but his role might have been little more than making sure the projectors worked, the ashtrays were empty and the room cleaned when the conference was over. He wasn’t brought in to talk about UFOs or other highly sensitive topics. He had neither the education nor the military experience.

Yes, I know the excuse will be that his records have been altered so that he couldn’t prove what he said. This is just a weak excuse to provide an answer for all those who didn’t believe him. The truth is that military records aren’t just a single file with everything in it. They cover a lot of ground from a lot of sources and it would be impossible to alter everything. There is just too much of it.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Cooper claimed he had attended a specific military school... maybe at the DIA, as part of his training. All that would be recorded in his 201 File, which, upon his leaving the military whether as a retiree or having been discharged at the end of this tour, would have been sent to the National Archives in St. Louis. Now that document, in a single place, would be easy to find and alter.

But, there would be records of his attendance at the DIA school. There would have been a certificate given to him at the completion of the course (I have lots of these from various military schools). Depending on the specific school, there might be rosters available. There would be records in his home unit. There might be base newspaper stories written by the Public Affairs Office about his participation or completion of the training. There are literally dozens of sources of documentation. But with Cooper none of that was available. His records simply did not reflect his various claims.

I have been through this before when a witness’s records do not match the story he or she is telling. The big fire in St. Louis destroyed them is a favorite excuse. They have been altered is another. Stolen is yet another... But the point is that multiple sources exist and records can be reconstituted. They can be reconstructed. And there are so many sources out there that they all can’t be altered, hidden or destroyed. The validation would be available... or rather enough would be to question the idea he was lying about his service.

There is nothing to support Cooper’s claims, other than he served in the Navy and was honorably discharged. There were many in the UFO community who wanted to believe him and many who tried to find evidence to support his claims. In the end, there was no where to go. The trail ended with Cooper and that just isn’t good enough.

As for his book, I suppose I should point out that inside the UFO community it is called "Behold a Pail of Horses..t." There just isn’t anything in it that can be confirmed and without validation we believe what he wrote at our own risk.

Our best move is to point out that Cooper was a wild man who could not prove what he claimed and let it go at that. He is but another footnote in the great UFO search.

UFO Solution Survey

The results of the latest, unscientific poll, are not very surprising, given the overall nature of this blog. As almost everyone must know, I believe that we have been visited by creatures from other worlds. The evidence, when looked at in a dispassionate way, seems to be overwhelming. Everything from reports of the alien craft interacting with the environment, recordings on various forms of instrumentality, to eyewitness testimony, some of it gathered in a day or so after the events.

So, when the most people suggest they too accept alien visitation, I’m not too surprised. It does not mean that we all think that every UFO is an alien craft, only that some of them, probably just a few of them, are alien.

That so many believed that UFOs were just misidentified natural or manmade objects is no surprised. We all know that more than 95% of all UFO sightings have a mundane explanation. And when we throw in the next generation of military aircraft being tested, it is sometimes difficult to tell the alien technology from that we’re developing.

And, I’m not overly surprised that some thought that there was an inter-dimensional component to UFO sightings. When you begin to think about the vast distances that must be covered by an alien race on another world, almost anything that suggests a way around those distances deserves a closer look.

Don’t misunderstand. I believe that we will someday travel around our galaxy. In fact, we do have the technology to do that now, but the journey would last centuries. We’ve launched unmanned probes on interstellar flights. To do it with a living crew is another matter.

I threw time travel in there, but only because it is an interesting suggestion. The implication here is that our descendants are travel back for some reason but I’m not sure that travel into the past is possible (Yes, I know that Stephen Hawking talks of gravity bending time and space so that travel into the past might be possible but I think it very unlikely). Travel into the future is certainly possible, but once there, you just can’t get back.

You might say that all the answers are the correct ones. Some UFOs are alien craft. Many UFOs are misidentifications. Some could be inter-dimensional travel and a very few could be time travelers. In fact, I’ll be posting a story at http://www.thesciencefictionsite.blogspot.com/ (called Travel Guide, you'll have to scroll down for it) that deals with the time travel aspect of the survey. You might say that it is a theory wrapped in the guise of a science fiction story.

So, there were really no wrong answers here. Just a series of them that suggest that the UFO phenomenon will not be solved by a single solution. It just tells us that search should continue.

Ralph Multer and the Roswell UFO Crash

Not all that long ago a couple of people asked me what I knew about this Ralph Multer guy. I hadn’t heard of him but did a little research and discovered he was about to be added to the list of Roswell witnesses. Well, not really. His family was saying that he had told them about his brush with the Roswell case so his name might be added but he wouldn’t be telling us anything new.

Multer, who was described by Ed Balint at CantonRep.com, as a blue-collar worker, a World War II veteran who had been wounded during the war and had participated in the Invasion of Iwo Jima, apparently told family before he died that he had seen something from another world. He was married young and worked at the Timken Company as a truck driver.

According to the family, he told them that he had hauled debris from the flying saucer crash for testing at the plant. He said he had been told, along with two fellow truck drivers to pick up a load from the rail yard. He said that three trucks, covered by tarps, carried the material to the Timken furnaces for testing. His truck had the largest of the loads.

When they arrived at the plant, the were met by the FBI agents. In an incredible breach of security, one of that agents told him that the metal had come from a flying saucer recovered in New Mexico. Multer was told by an FBI agent not to tell anyone about what he had seen. It was all highly classified.

According to the story, Multer talked to someone at the plant who told him that the metal couldn’t be cut and couldn’t be heated, let alone melted. It was lightweight and silver or gray, which isn’t much of a description.

This story apparently surfaced in the mid-1990s when William E. Jones and Irena McCammon Scott heard it from Multer’s widow. He died in 1982 without talking to anyone about it other than family. They, of course, believe it, insisting that Multer wasn’t a liar and didn’t tell tales.

So, what do we make of all this. Frankly, I’m quite skeptical of this story. Why? Because there is no reason for the Army to have taken that much debris to a private company to run these sorts of tests. The facilities at Wright Field, in 1947, could have run the tests and not risk compromising the case. Why take that chance?

And, of course, the testing was compromised by Multer. He told family about it, apparently all his life. He was told not to talk, but did anyway.

And here is something else. Why was the FBI involved at all? The Army could have assured that the truck drivers and all the other civilians were warned not to talk about the case. No reason to bring in the FBI or to let even more people in on the secret.

That’s why this case breaks down. There is no need to compromise security by using a civilian agency, no matter what sort of governmental contract work they might be doing, or had done. There was no reason to take three truckloads of the stuff to Timken for testing.

If you are attempting to keep a secret, you simply do not involve people who have no need to know. You don’t ship it to a location to be put on trucks to be driven to a civilian plant. You protect it carefully and run the tests in isolation on military facilities. You don’t involve the FBI or anyone else, if you can avoid that.

Ben Franklin said that three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. In this case, it seems that the Army was spreading the secret much farther than necessary.

And if they needed the special facilities at Timken to test the debris, there is absolutely no reason to tell the truck drivers what they are carrying. There is no reason to mention flying saucers or New Mexico. Just tell them it is a specialized aircraft from Dayton (location of Wright Field) and let it go at that.

In fact, there is no reason to give this information to the FBI agents. They could have done their jobs without knowing the material was from a crashed flying saucer in New Mexico. A cover story could have been invented... sort of like the Project Mogul story we’re saddled with today.

No, I am not buying this story, especially since there is no way to corroborate it. Without something more, we might want to note it in passing, but we certainly don’t want to add it to the lists of evidence proving Roswell was extraterrestrial. It doesn’t do that and it is an unnecessary diversion. Let’s just leave it at that.