Cooper Milton William - Pale horse rider: William Cooper, the rise of conspiracy, and the fall of trust in America

Even a broken clock is right twice a day; thats what they say about people who are supposed to be crackpots. Its the idea that there is a moment in time when even the most outlandish contention, the most eccentric point of view, the most unlikely person, somehow lines up with shifting reality to produce, however fleetingly, what many perceive to be the truth.

But to accept the notion of the broken clock is to embrace the established, rationalist parameters of time, twenty-four hours a day, day after day, years arranged in ascending numerical order, decade after decade, eon upon eon, a forever forward march to an undetermined future, world without end, amen.

For some people, people like the late Milton William (Bill) Cooper, collector of clocks, time did not work that way. American shortwave talk-show host, author, and lecturer during the millennial period of the late 1980s onward to the advent of the current century, Bill Cooper chose not to adhere to the mandated linear passage of existence.

This wasnt because Cooper, a voracious reader and self-schooled savant, was anti-science or anti-intellectual. He believed in evolution and, like his philosophical hero Aristotle, Cooper treasured the supremacy of knowledge and its acquisition. For Cooper, the entire span of timethe beginning, the middle, and the endwas all equally important, but there could be no doubt where the clock had stopped. A minute to midnight, that was Bill Coopers time.

Cooper sought to dramatize the compounding urgency of the moment on The Hour of the Time, the radio program he broadcast from 1992 until November of 2001, his resonant, sometimes folksy, sometimes fulminating voice filling the airwaves via satellite hookups and shortwave frequencies. Nearly every episode of The Hour of the Time began the same way, with the shows singular opening, one of the most arresting sign-ons in radio history.

It starts with a blaring air-raid siren, a blast in the night. This is followed by a loud, distorted electronic voice: Lights out! comes the command, as if issued from a penitentiary guard tower. Lights out for The Hour of the Time! ... Lights out for the curfew of your body, soul, and mind.

Dogs bark, people shriek, the bleat of the still half-sleeping multitudes. There is the sound of tramping jackbooted feet, growing louder, closing in.

Now is the time, a minute to midnight, sixty seconds before total enslavement, one last chance. Some citizens will rise, if only from not-quite-yet-atrophied muscle memory. They will shake themselves awake as their forebears once did at Lexington and Concord, heeding Paul Reveres immortal call. They will defend their homes, families, and the last shreds of the tattered Constitution, the most close-to-perfect political document ever produced.

The vast majority, however, wont even get out of bed. Some will cower under the covers, but most will simply roll over and go back to sleep. They slept through life, so why not sleep through death?

This is how it will be at a minute to midnight, according to Bill Cooper. At the End of Time, a broken clock is always right.

Reputed instances of Coopers prescience are legion. An early roundup of these forecasts can be found in the August 15, 1990, edition of the newsletter of the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI), an organization Cooper created, billing it as the largest private intelligence-gathering agency in the world. Published on a dot matrix printer, carrying the tagline Information, not money, will be the power of the nineties, Cooper ran an article entitled Every Prediction Has Come True. He listed sixteen of his most recent prognostications that had come to pass or will soon be fulfilled.

These included the disclosure that the CIA and the military are bringing drugs into the United States to finance their black projects. Cooper also predicted that the rape of the Savings and Loans by the CIA is only the tip of the iceberg. At least 600 banks will go under in the next two years. The current monetary structure, Cooper said, will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer. If you attempt to stay out of the system you will not be allowed to buy, sell, work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.

Cooper continued to make predictions in his watershed book, Behold a Pale Horse. Published in 1991 by Light Technology, a small New Ageoriented house then located in Sedona, Arizona, Behold a Pale Horse is something of a publishing miracle. With an initial press run of 3,500 (500 hardcover, 3,000 paperback), by the end of 2017, the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.

Behold a Pale Horse is the biggest-selling underground book of all time, Cooper often told his audience. Yet sales figures represent only a fraction of the books true reach. For one thing, as its author often bragged, Behold a Pale Horse routinely topped lists of the most-shoplifted books in the country. To this day, Barnes & Noble stores keep BAPH, as it is sometimes called, behind the cashiers counter to reduce pilferage. This was because, as one clerk at the Barnes & Noble near my house in Brooklyn told me, that book has a habit of walking out all by itself.

There is also the captive audience. Since its release,