by Billy Cox
Rants from oblivion | De Void
Nothing, no matter how toxic or discredited, ever dies in the eternal limbo of the Internet. But after hearing a recent podcast lionizing Bill Cooper as the noble martyr who sewed “the seed beds for the patriot movement,” Don Ecker figured it was time for a history lesson. “I’m shocked that people don’t know what a maniac this guy was,” Ecker says from his home outside Los Angeles. “The guy was absolutely out of his mind.”
Combustible, paranoid, grandiose and delusional, Cooper’s ravings continue to attract admirers, and you can still find his One World Order conspiracy rant — “Behold a Pale Horse” — on chain-store bookshelves. At the end, when he wasn’t waving guns at neighbors outside his hilltop ranch near rural Eagar, Ariz., Cooper was spewing apocalyptic confabulism from a show called “The Hour of the Time” via the Worldwide Christian Radio network in Nashville.
Cooper was wanted for tax evasion and bank fraud at the time of his attempted arrest on 11/5/01. An exchange of gunfire left him dead and a sheriff’s deputy critically wounded. In another time, another age, that might’ve been all she wrote.
Talk radio first placed Cooper’s riffs before mass audiences in the late Eighties, when the Navy veteran uncorked insider tales of UFOs and military intelligence. But with each passing year, his conspiracy yarns ballooned by orders of magnitude, careening from JFK’s assassination at the hands of his limo driver to world domination by the insidious Illuminati. Ultimately, he began accusing UFO researchers who questioned his veracity of being CIA stooges.
Among the first to challenge him was Don Ecker, then investigative director of UFO Magazine. Ecker, who calls Cooper’s book “Behold a Pail of Horse*&#!,” exposed Cooper’s lies in a two-part series way back in 1990. Between the Bill Coopers of the world and a mainstream media that wouldn’t follow a legitimate trail of UFO evidence if was wrapped in thousand-dollar bills and served with Dove bars, Ecker tired of spinning his wheels and left UFOlogy research in 2007.
Among the things Ecker left behind was a decade’s worth of his own radio shows, called “Dark Matters.” Lately, he’s been uploading these archives on The Paracast network, and they’re worth a listen. His BS meter tingling with the skepticism of the police detective he once was, Ecker tested his lines of logic and research on some of the biggest names in the UFO subculture. The results are instructive and often quite entertaining.
Anyway — after being sufficiently aggravated by the persistent afterlife of the Bill Cooper phenomenon, Ecker assembled a two-hour show restoring some proportion. It’s all here, Cooper in his own words, the bullying, the contradictions, the threatening, drunken voice messages resembling the howl of a wounded lycanthrope.
And it remains, unfortunately, relevant. Because, as the Arizona Republic reported in 2001, at least one avid fan of “The Hour of Time” was so impressed he apparently visited Cooper in early 1995. All it takes is one. His name was Timothy McVeigh.
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Rants from oblivion | De Void
Nothing, no matter how toxic or discredited, ever dies in the eternal limbo of the Internet. But after hearing a recent podcast lionizing Bill Cooper as the noble martyr who sewed “the seed beds for the patriot movement,” Don Ecker figured it was time for a history lesson. “I’m shocked that people don’t know what a maniac this guy was,” Ecker says from his home outside Los Angeles. “The guy was absolutely out of his mind.”
Combustible, paranoid, grandiose and delusional, Cooper’s ravings continue to attract admirers, and you can still find his One World Order conspiracy rant — “Behold a Pale Horse” — on chain-store bookshelves. At the end, when he wasn’t waving guns at neighbors outside his hilltop ranch near rural Eagar, Ariz., Cooper was spewing apocalyptic confabulism from a show called “The Hour of the Time” via the Worldwide Christian Radio network in Nashville.
Cooper was wanted for tax evasion and bank fraud at the time of his attempted arrest on 11/5/01. An exchange of gunfire left him dead and a sheriff’s deputy critically wounded. In another time, another age, that might’ve been all she wrote.
Talk radio first placed Cooper’s riffs before mass audiences in the late Eighties, when the Navy veteran uncorked insider tales of UFOs and military intelligence. But with each passing year, his conspiracy yarns ballooned by orders of magnitude, careening from JFK’s assassination at the hands of his limo driver to world domination by the insidious Illuminati. Ultimately, he began accusing UFO researchers who questioned his veracity of being CIA stooges.
Among the first to challenge him was Don Ecker, then investigative director of UFO Magazine. Ecker, who calls Cooper’s book “Behold a Pail of Horse*&#!,” exposed Cooper’s lies in a two-part series way back in 1990. Between the Bill Coopers of the world and a mainstream media that wouldn’t follow a legitimate trail of UFO evidence if was wrapped in thousand-dollar bills and served with Dove bars, Ecker tired of spinning his wheels and left UFOlogy research in 2007.
Among the things Ecker left behind was a decade’s worth of his own radio shows, called “Dark Matters.” Lately, he’s been uploading these archives on The Paracast network, and they’re worth a listen. His BS meter tingling with the skepticism of the police detective he once was, Ecker tested his lines of logic and research on some of the biggest names in the UFO subculture. The results are instructive and often quite entertaining.
Anyway — after being sufficiently aggravated by the persistent afterlife of the Bill Cooper phenomenon, Ecker assembled a two-hour show restoring some proportion. It’s all here, Cooper in his own words, the bullying, the contradictions, the threatening, drunken voice messages resembling the howl of a wounded lycanthrope.
And it remains, unfortunately, relevant. Because, as the Arizona Republic reported in 2001, at least one avid fan of “The Hour of Time” was so impressed he apparently visited Cooper in early 1995. All it takes is one. His name was Timothy McVeigh.
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