Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

peers. The Mirage Men would approach the targeted individual, either directly or through an intermediary, and offer to provide the Truth about what the government was hiding, sometimes in exchange for information about th...

Some Mirage Men,

Eventually, the nation’s largest citizen UFO research groups began to cry COVER-UP! And not just to each other. Letters were written to government agencies and politicians, demanding an answer. In order to help put them at ease, and restore faith in government, Congressional hearings were held to look into the accusations, first in 1960 and again in 1966.

After the hearings concluded, the Air Force, backed by other government agencies, contracted with the University of Colorado to established a body that, while posing as an independent investigatory committee tasked with further study of UFOs, was, rather, a working group meant to depict those who reported seeing UFO’s and those who dareds question the government’s honesty in the matter as mentally unstable and devised further methods of actually making them

Perhaps best illustrative of the disinformation process at play and the long lasting effects it can have, is the classic case of Paul Bennewitz, a patriotic and brilliantly skilled but overly trusting and highly imaginative engineer, physicist and defense contractor. In 1979, Bennewitz began picking up strange radio transmissions and seeing unexplainable lights in the sky near his home located across from Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico. Fearing this might be some sort of threat to national security, perhaps from another planet, Bennewitz contacted the base security services. They sent out an intelligence officer named Richard Doty who befriended Bennewitz, thus beginning what Pilkington describes as “one of the strangest espionage campaigns of the post-war era.” Then the NSA got in on the act.

These Men In Black recruited some of the most well respected UFO researchers to help trick Bennewitz, ironically lured by promises that if they spied on the UFO movement and passed bogus but official looking information to Bennewitz (and others), they themselves would receive the actual proof about government’s classified knowledge of alien life. But Bennewitz didn’t know this and immersed himself in the subculture with only the best of intentions. He was, he thought, going to help them understand the truth and to this end, he shared his unknowingly bogus information … and as it appeared to have official bona fides, it spread like wildfire. The lies fed to Bennewitz spawned “a rich pseudo-history of human-alien interaction that stretched back at least two thousand years” and led to much of the UFO/ alien

mythology that appeared in its wake. Bennewitz himself, however, having been the constant target of aggressive psychological warfare for years, became increasingly paranoid and delusional, scattered and afraid until eventually, in 1988, his family had him committed to a mental institution.

Milton William Cooper had over the thinking of Timothy McVeigh and when his attorneys asked him what public figures might help them understand his way of thinking, William Cooper was one of the people he said they might want to talk with. They did.

Cooper, “a kook’s kook” if there ever was one, had first appeared on the UFO scene in 1988, just as Bennewitz was getting locked up in the booby hatch. Cooper really made a name for himself the next year though, when he spoke (at the behest of admitted and known Mirage Men) at a MUFON conference in Las Vegas.

He claimed that after reporting a UFO sighting to his commanders while serving in the Air Force during Vietnam, he was recruited into a secret military intelligence unit tasked with recovering crashed flying saucers and, at some point, was transferred into Naval Intelligence. In the course of his duties, he was exposed to highly classified information and now, out of the kindness of his heart, wanted to share this with the world even though his former employers kept trying to prevent him from doing so.

“His Omnipotent Highness Krill”

Behold A Pale Horse caused an immediate sensation within the UFO subculture and Cooper became a popular speaker on the UFO conference circuit. Backing him was former CIA pilot, international arms merchant, and Iran-Contra player with deep intelligence ties turned Mirage Man, John Lear, and Bill Moore, an admitted disinformer and major

player in the Bennewitz affair. Both Lear and Moore fed Cooper information originating from the Bennewitz operation; Cooper then embellished and added to this information.

community. Many of his peers made no secret of their opinion that he was a drunk lying fascist, and Cooper, in turn, continued to accuse his peers of being part of the big conspiracy. Sometimes, when they questioned him or called him out, Cooper threatened to beat them up or kill them.

Those who didn’t think Cooper was intentionally lying tended to attribute his nonsense to the fact that he was just dumb and gullible.

Even Louis Farrakhan was a fan.

In The United States Of Paranoia, Jesse Walker remarks on how more so than any other era, during the 1990s the subcultural legends of “militiamen, hippies, black nationalists, ufologists … activists opposed to drug war abuses … sovereign citizens … [and] white separatists” overlapped and blended.61 Indeed, Behold A Pale Horse lifted from

Patriot, Militia, and white supremacist rhetoric and after the book came out, Cooper made the rounds in those circles as well. After the UFO crowd began to scorn and debunk him, he focused more on the villainies of the federal government and deemphasized the interstellar aspects of his master narrative until, eventually, Cooper suggested that he may have made some inaccurate conclusions and the entire alien alliance thing had probably been a lie planted by satanic elements of the U.S. gov...

Pretty much everybody knew that Cooper had stolen the ideas and research of others, in some cases blatantly plagiarized them and had lied about his military background (a particularly gruesome offense among the Patriots). As it turned out, Cooper’s official military records reflected he had only been a low-level clerk although, of course, if he was even kind of who he said he was, it would not be documented in his official records.

In early summer of 2000, the South African Minister of Health distributed photocopied pages of Behold A Pale Horse to members of the senior officials of the Health Committee, in support of her suspicion that something other than or in addition to HIV might cause AIDS and that AIDS itself might be the result of an international conspiracy intended to reduce the African population.

After all, McVeigh was a fan of Cooper’s radio show, and Cooper was, according to the Clinton administration “America’s most dangerous host,”

Along with several other recognizable names in the UFO and Patriot crowds who pegged Cooper for a Mirage Man, was Jim Keith, a kind of jack-of-all-trades conspiracy guy. To Keith, Cooper was just another in a long line of official disinformers who had injected epistemological toxins into subversive but legitimate subcultural discourses and Behold A Pale Horse, more than likely was:

The success [of disinformation campaigns] is dependent upon dropping information upon a target or ‘mark’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it.67

Despite that a lot of the interstellar themed information was obviously taken from the bad information fed to Paul Bennewitz, main stream news reports that ridiculed Cooper, and by extension a wide range of fringe movements and their participants, liked to point out that a lot of Cooper’s information originated with “things the UFOlogists made up as jokes.” While that happened, Cooper had worked closely with known disinforming Mirage Men like John Lear and, out of stupidity or nefarious intent, incorporated and popularized a lot of intentionally planted disinformation. When people like Lear or Cooper were asked about their position on actual abusive government practices against Americans and others, they consistently took the position that these were a ‘smokescreen’ for the larger human/alien drama and were of no consequence in the face of the extraterrestrial threat. So, the disinfo campaign was going swimmingly even if Cooper wasn’t a witting part of it (which seems unlikely).

said one report, indicative of so many others that overlook the actual role of the government in creating and spreading alien/UFO related theories. But then again, to acknowledge this would feed into the very paranoia such cultural crusaders were trying to combat.68 Plus, if the government helped create and spread the kinds of astounding nonsense floated by Cooper, and if Cooper had helped corrupt the mind of McVeigh, then the government kind of helped make McVeigh, and that’s the kind of thing that Cooper would say, so best not to bring it up.

Big names appearing there included retired Air Force Intelligence officer George Filer and Stanton T. Friedman, the latter described by the Huffington Post as “a former nuclear physicist … the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident and one of the most outspoken scientists who believes there is overwhelming evidence that alien space crafts are visiting earth.” Jodi Dean described Friedman as “a nuclear physicist who earns his living lecturing on UFOs [and] argues that government confirmation of contact with aliens and their superior technology will shatter early economic and political structures” and, because of this, the government is actively covering up this information.

Joining them at the conference was former John Doe #2 candidate, Steven Colbern, who had disappeared from the public’s view after the conclusion of McVeigh’s trial, only to rise again as a MUFON spokesperson.

the Arab “rag heads” bent on destroying the American way of life.

The scientific and technological advances of the American flight development and space program are inseparable from Project Paperclip, which remains “an element of history that continues to elude narrative, a history of black budgets, experiments on civilian populations and a community of secrets.”

In the years following the Ruby Ridge incident, a remarkably strange series of events came to entwine Bangerter with PATCON, McVeigh and the OKC bombing plot investigations (explored in my follow-up book, REDACTED).

“Fusion Paranoia,” a term coined by Michael Kelly in 1995, refers to “the convergence of political wings in the conspiracy theory milieu.”

Beyond the conspiratorial musings of the ‘reactionary right,’ the so called ‘conspiracy theories’ that circulated among the ‘intellectual left’ at this time touched upon a variety of issues including the U.S. government’s involvement in domestic and foreign assassinations and coups, surveillance and infiltration of the New Left, drug and arms running during an alleged War on Drugs, policies targeting minorities, the cover-up of facts surrounding the Gulf War and Gulf War Syndrome (Jack Z. Bratich, Jack Z. Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture. Albany, New York, State University of New York Press, 2008:36 citing Los Angeles Times “America the Enemy” June 18, 1995, Nina J. Easton).

Knight listed a number of subjects often appearing within the “canon” of conspiracy theory. They included the deaths of JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X and Marilyn Monroe; various classified government programs including MK- ULTRA, Operation Paperclip, Phoenix, Mongoose, Majestic 12, COINTELPRO; the lives of various assassins including Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan Sirhan, Arthur Herman Bremer, Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley, Jr.; as well as theories about soldiers Missing in Action (MIA), LSD, CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, Octopus, Gemstone, Roswell, Area 51, Jonestown, Chappaquiddick, Waco, Oklahoma, Watergate, Iraqgate, Iran-Contra, October Surprise, Savings & Loan, BCCI, Whitewater, Lockerbie, TWA Flight 800, Ebola, AIDS, crack cocaine, military industrial complex, grassy knoll, magic bullet, lone nut.”

West include Jim Keith’s 1998 book, Mind Control, World Control: An Encyclopedia of Mind Control and David Hoffman’s 1998 book, The Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of Terror, both of which repeat and somewhat add to Constantine’s version.

Others, like Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue, did achieve success with FOIA, prying loose critical information about the bombing plot (and the surveillance of it) from the vaults of monolithic agencies engaging in institutional secrecy.

The NG could already search vehicles, buildings, and private homes without a warrant, but the 1989 DAA removed any existing restrictions placed on the NG’s ability to conduct civilian law enforcement activities.By 1997, the National Guards domestic interdiction program was the largest in the DOD.

The 1989 DAA allotted $300 million to the DOD, $40 million of which to the NG. The 1991 DAA allotted $1.08 billion to the DOD, $160 million of which to the NG. According to Balko, by 1992, the NG assisted in “20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 automobiles, entered 1,200 private buildings without a search warrant” and entered private property without a warrant 6,500 times (Balko: 180). By 1997, the National Guard was conducting 1300 missions a day in connection with JTF-6.

The Spotlight (1975-2001) was a weekly newspaper published by the populist, nationalist, right wing, anti-communist Liberty Lobby. The paper supported David Duke’s political campaigns, alternative medicine and regularly covered ‘anti-government’ and ‘conspiracy theory’ articles. In 1992, it had 90,000 subscribers. The Anti-Defamation league had called the paper anti-Semitic. E. Howard Hunt sued the paper for defamation after they published an article claiming

he was involved in the JFK assassination and famed attorney Mark Lane, defended them. In 2001, the name of the paper was changed to the American Free Press. The White Patriot Party, labeled as a terrorist organization by The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, is a white supremacist organization with ties to the Ku Klux Klan and Christian Identity groups. The organizations’ newspaper The White Patriot claims to provide ‘News For White People.’ 40 Author interviews with Johnny

Cooper attended KKK events and had his nearly imaginary ‘militia’ train with them. Cooper said that while he wasn’t member of the Klan, the organization itself was “misunderstood,” and patriots should support them because they were vigilant monitors of threats posed by the U.S. government to American sovereignty and would probably be one of the only groups, along with his, to survive the coming alien/ human or just human/ human wars (Mail & Guardian “Govt Aids nut linked to Ku Klux Klan” Sep. 8, 2000).

Icke’s teachings have been embraced by modern day Nazi’s and new age hippies alike, although Icke himself has often been accused of pandering veiled anti-Semitism. His critics argue that he works too closely with racist militants (who invite him to speak at events or who republish his writings) and point out (among other things) that, if you replace the words ‘Reptilian’ or ‘International Banker’ with ‘Jews’ Icke’s real feelings become clear. Others disagree, and offer more optimistic readings of Icke arguing that despite all the lizardly doom and gloom, his writings tend to advance a universal message of love and acceptance and anticipate a utopian era in which everybody can just get along.

77 I refer you to Dr. Roger K. Leir, D.P.M., The Aliens And The Scalpel: Scientific Proof of Extraterrestrial Implants In Humans, Granite Publishing, LLC, Columbus, N.C., 1998. Leir mentions in his book a number of individuals with intelligence backgrounds who have been directly linked to UFO disinformation schemes. Leir notes the generous contribution made by these individuals in his attempt to locate and remove alien implants.

medical records, the existence or location of which remains undetermined.

Although the existence of the FBI’s PATCON operation remained unknown for another 15 years (until 2007), in August 1992, on the heels of Ruby Ridge, the focus of PATCON’s ostensive fact-finding mission was reauthorized and expanded. Rather than seeking incriminating information about any one particular individual for the purposes of criminal prosecution, operatives were now to gather “information concerning a nationwide ‘Alliance’ of white supremacist groups being formed to fight the U.S. government.”

There were already rumors circulating among the Patriot crowd that the federal government was taking extra-legal measures to disarm American citizens and after April 19, 1993, the rumors would become self-evident fact.

Much of the rhetoric and false information cited by the media originated with spokespeople from the Cult

Awareness Network (CAN), a group that had formed in 1971 (under a different name) as a support group for parents whose children had run off to join non-traditional religious groups.

Any number of things about the events at Waco deeply disturbed McVeigh. To begin with, many of the same ATF and FBI agents who had been involved in the Ruby Ridge fiasco less than a year before were also involved at Waco.

Thompson because Thompson, like William Cooper, viewed many of her camouflage colleagues with as much suspicion as they viewed her and like Cooper, made no

secret about it but, rather, took any chance presented to accuse one or another of her peers of being CIA, FBI or ATF agents. Thompson, in fact, was a regular guest on Cooper’s show. After Waco, Thompson became (at least for the mainstream press) the “Joan of Arc of the Militia Patriot movement.”