by Don Ecker

Who are the UFO whistleblowers? They come out of relative obscurity and burst into the center of ufological attention, making incredible claims of alien activity on Earth and the government’s deep but covert involvement. Without exception, the whistleblowers of recent times only furnish the haziest evidence of their claims, if that.

Oftentimes, they will also lay claim to having worked with or for the government, in high enough positions to wield security clearances and to observe the most unequivocal documentation. Because these individuals fail to furnish proof for their startling claims, and because many people have asked us for a readout on their credibility, we are beginning a series of investigative articles on certain individuals who fall into the “whistleblower” category.

Normally, we avoid focusing on personalities, preferring to concentrate on the phenomenon itself. But these personalities force us to make an exception. Their material has appeal and sensation value. But is it legitimate? Who are the whistleblowers that are telling the truth? Who are the ruthless Pied Pipers forging a trail of lies and deception?

Our series begins with Milton William Cooper. In the last several years, few have stirred the field of ufology like Milton William Cooper. Cooper, born May 6, 1943, is a balding 47-year-old man who has enthralled thousands with lurid tales of dangerous UFOs and secret government treaties allowing the alien menace to abduct and experiment on unwilling human victims, in exchange for advanced alien technology.

Raining threats and pronouncements over the UFO field like a continuously firing shotgun, Cooper has recently leveled charges of government spookery against a number of prominent ufologists in the field, in many cases claiming to have seen their names on a government recruitment list back in 1972 and 1973, while he was purportedly serving in Naval Intelligence for CINCPACFLT (Commander-in Chief, Pacific Fleet).

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Not above accusing former friends and associates, Cooper has charged various ufologists with illegal acts, moral turpitude, and purveying disinformation that permeates the field. Now with an agent booking speaking engagements at any and every UFO event possible, Cooper is fond of stating to his audiences, “Don’t take my word for it; go out and check the information yourself.” We have, and the following is the result of our investigation.

Who is Milton William “Bill” Cooper, and where did he come from? Cooper’s first public appearance resulted when he uploaded a text on ParaNet, the international computer data service. The file alleged a fantastic UFO sighting while Cooper was a crewmember of the USS Tiru, a United States Navy submarine, in 1966.

According to Cooper, the sighting took place while he was on duty as port lookout. Claiming that the sub’s skipper immediately classified the incident, Cooper reported that when the submarine reached port, the witnesses were debriefed by naval security.

During this timeframe of Cooper’s initial appearance on the scene, John Lear, son of William “Bill” Lear of Lear Jet fame, had also been undergoing ParaNet scrutiny, as a result of the release of his hypothesis concerning an alien threat.

Lear’s document, released in December of 1987, had created quite an uproar in its own right. Lear alleged that the U.S. government had entered into a relationship with a possible ET intelligence, and in exchange for super-technology, gave carte blanche to the ETs to conduct experiments and abductions on unsuspecting human beings.

Lear also claimed that the ETs, with our government’s knowledge, were mutilating domestic animals such as cattle and sheep, and in some cases even human victims. Because much of Lear’s information was hypothesis, and little checkable information was forthcoming, many ParaNet members and others in the UFO community were asking very hard questions. In a number of instances, Lear’s credibility was attacked.

When he again visited the ParaNet system, Cooper allied himself with Lear, publicizing the claim that because of releasing his UFO information, he had just been terminated from his $75,000-a-year job as the executive director of a commercial business school.

In October of 1988, Cooper contacted this writer, requesting a favor. Telling me at that time that “this is dangerous if anyone finds out,” he asked me to accept the electronic transfer of a file into my computer, to be sent to Stanton Friedman with the information of those who wanted Friedman to see it.

The document included information about purported government UFO involvement under the terms MAJI, MJ-1, THE BLUE TEAM, GRUDGE, etc., and, according to Cooper, various other alleged secret government projects dealing with the alien presence. I agreed to send the information to Friedman. (I never heard anymore about it until later, when Cooper was barred from ParaNet due to claims of feeding fraudulent information.)

I basically forgot about the file to Friedman, until Cooper released additional files with the claim that they were the “final” release. Subsequently, Cooper was to issue several “final” releases. In one, he claimed, “MJ-12 is the name of the secret control group. The Jason Society was set up to sift through all the evidence, technology, lies, and deception.”

But later, in another file, he stated, “MJ-12 cannot be used as a name for the control group, as it would cause confusion in meaning.” By this time, myself and others were becoming confused with the various “final releases.”

In another public release, Cooper claimed that “Project Luna” was an alien base on the far side of the moon, which had been observed by various astronauts, but changed the story in one more “final release,” stating that it was the codename for an underground base near Dulce, New Mexico.

In Cooper’s later releases are a number of names that were never mentioned in earlier releases, such as JOSHUA, KRILL, and CRILL. Cooper later claimed that the reason the documents were “different” was because he wanted to throw the government off his trail, until someone would verify that what he said was the truth. He stressed that “it does not matter who is right and who is wrong, or if a project name is in the wrong place. We must all band together and expose it now.”

As time progressed, Cooper severed all ties with other researchers in the UFO field. At one time, a very close confidant of John Lear, Cooper turned on Lear and now accuses him of being an agent of the CIA. At one time, Lear was, in fact, employed as a pilot with Continental Air, a CIA contract airline, and claims a number of anonymous sources for his own data, which may lend suspicion to his background and information. But Lear denies any current alliance with the agency, and no one has been able to prove otherwise.

Cooper now operates an electronic bulletin board service, the Citizen’s Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI). In his last two electronic newsletters, Cooper has leveled charges against numerous people in the UFO community. When anyone challenges him, he will once more blast the questioner as an “agent of the secret government.”

Cooper has been a star guest on the “Billy Goodman Happening,” a radio show broadcast on KVEG-AM in Las Vegas. Another alleged former government employee, physicist Robert “Bob” Lazar, appeared on Goodman’s show. Initially, Cooper was lavish in his praise of Lazar’s willingness to come forward to expose the cosmic secret. Now, like Lear, Lazar is suffering Cooper’s allegations of being a purveyor of disinformation.

In a previous edition of his newsletter, Cooper charged that Lazar, the “self-claimed physicist who worked on saucers, was arrested today for participation in one of Las Vegas’ prostitution rings. He was also accused of running a meth lab.” When Lear heard about these allegations against Lazar, he said, “It’s all fabrication and fantasy.”

And at that time, it was. There is record of police interest in Lazar during that time. Lazar had admitted on television that he had set up software for a bordello, and shortly thereafter, members of the Vegas vice squad, bearing a warrant, searched his premises.

The bordello was subsequently closed by police, but Lazar wasn’t formally arrested and charged until June 4. A plea negotiation ensued, and Lazar ended up pleading guilty to one count of felony pandering. But at press time, no other charges had been filed, and no suspicion of drug activity has ever been officially or unofficially voiced.

With respect to all of these allegations against Lazar, Cooper claims to have received the information from John Lear, as well as from two additional UFO buffs, Cory Testa and Geoff Graff. Testa, when told of Cooper’s statements, was shocked at the allegation that Lear had claimed Lazar was facing drug violations. Testa states, “I still believe that he (Lazar) is real, and that John Lear never said anything like that.”

Testa later called back and said that he had talked to Cooper, and that Cooper had denied naming him or having said anything about Lazar. The paragraph from the CAJI newsletter was read to him four times and he responded sadly, “You know, I am just a guy who is really interested in UFOs. I never wanted to get involved in anything like this. Why would Bill say I said something like that?” For his part, Graff vehemently denies ever making any statements of this nature to Cooper.

Additional charges in Cooper’s newsletter included naming Lear and Lazar as members of a “ring” of government agents that “include the greats of ufology.” Cooper also named Bruce Maccabee, William Moore, Jaime Shandera, Stanton Friedman, and made similar allegations about others left unnamed at that time. With that document, Cooper left the impression that the “others” would include those who questioned his information.

Cooper also claimed that Stayce Borland, a woman who at one time led a Las Vegas contactee group, was murdered after she had sponsored a talk with Budd Hopkins, and had received a document from a man who reportedly worked at “Dreamland,” site of high-tech aircraft testing and alleged alien activity at Nellis Air Force Base.

Also alleged in Cooper’s CAJI newsletter was that when still an active-duty Air Force NCO, John Grace took over Borland’s contactee group, and when the police investigation into her murder was started, the list of the contactee group members and the sign-in sheet from Hopkins’ talk were missing.

These were serious inferences, if true, so we immediately contacted George Knapp of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas. Knapp and his associates had looked into the Borland murder in the course of producing the documentary, “UFOs: The Best Evidence.” According to Knapp, Hopkins was in Las Vegas weeks after Borland and her brother were found dead. Borland’s boyfriend was the initial suspect, but was quickly cleared by Vegas Police.

The search then centered on a 24-year old suspect, William Mitchell Smith, also known as William “Bo” Stevens. No UFO involvement at all was discovered by police. In a now-public letter to Michael Corbin, director of ParaNet, Knapp states, “Bill Cooper wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on the ass.”

Then, in reference to Cooper’s allegation of a ufological spy ring, Knapp wrote: “A secret organization is highly unlikely. Moore (Bill) and Lear can’t stand each other. Moore and Friedman have tried to contact Lazar through me on several occasions. Some of the individuals have provided me with proof of Cooper’s dishonesty – proof that will be made public in the near future.”

Knapp was true to his word. In part five of his UFO special recently aired by KLAS, Knapp pointed out one such occurrence where serious questions about Cooper’s information were raised. According to Cooper, in his purported viewing of a top-secret government document in 1972-1973, he saw information about O.H. Krill, which according to Cooper stood for “Original Hostage” Krill (a captured alien).

The problem with this particular claim by Cooper, however, comes from the two people involved in the O.H. Krill document. The origin of the controversial document has been known for some time in the UFO field. Conceived by UFO researcher John Grace, who heads the Nevada Aerial Research organization and who uses the pseudonym “Val Valerian,” the title was chosen as an inside joke, according to both Lear and Grace.

Lear told UFO that he heard Cooper tell a television interviewer that he (Cooper) had seen the O.H. Krill document back in the early ’70s. That made Lear turn “beet red,” he said. He motioned for Cooper to speak to him privately. Lear then informed Cooper, “Bill, O.H. Krill is a joke! John Grace and I used ‘Krill’ from Bob Emenegger’s special, ‘UFOs: It Has Begun,’ because of a woman who allegedly channeled an entity named CRYLL. Grace just pulled the O.H. out of thin air!”

According to Lear, Cooper flatly disagreed, saying, “No, I saw it in 1972.” Lear said, “I dropped it then. I could see that there was no talking to him. I then began to wonder just how much of Bill Cooper was real.”

Cooper alleges that Lear is the shadowy “Condor” from William Moore’s anonymous intelligence “aviary.” Cooper happened to tell this to Testa, who was then an associate of Lear’s. “Cooper claimed everyone I associated with was a government agent.”

Moore’s apparent association with unnamed government agents has also brought him under fire by many in the UFO community. His admitted participation in a disinformation scheme, and claims of ongoing associations with these agents, have incited a good many suspicions, which, in Cooper’s case, have mushroomed into full-blown allegations.

In his CAJI newsletter, Cooper stated, “No one likes to be a fool, but most ufologists are exactly that. I keep saying to do research, to investigate, but no one does it. They just sit around and call each other names.” I attempted to contact Cooper, to verify his claims, by leaving a message on his computer service. Cooper read the message and called about an hour later.

When I answered the phone, Cooper growled, “What the hell do you want?” When I attempted to explain that I was doing a story for UFO and wanted to verify his claims, he shot back, “What are you writing for your [expletive] trashzine?” I then said that I had received a copy of the CAJI newsletter, and he replied, “I would be very careful if I were you. That newsletter is copyrighted.”

Cooper then stated, “I don’t trust you or anyone you are associated with.” The only response I was able to get concerned the allegation that Bob Lazar ran a speed lab. “John Lear told me that out of his own mouth. I got the information from a man named Cory and Geoff, who are good friends of John Lear.”

Just at that moment, the phone rang with the call-waiting feature, and Cooper refused to hold until I could find out who was calling. He refused to speak any further and hung up. This seems out of character for a person who claims that his information is legitimate.

As this article was going to press, and as we expected, Cooper’s newest newsletter attacked this writer and the magazine. Cooper now claims that Cory Testa was intimidated by us regarding the claims that Bob Lazar is involved with drugs, and that we are somehow a part of Cooper’s paranoiac “secret government.”

The absurdity of this speaks for itself. But for the record, we will attempt to get Testa’s version of this. Bill Moore vehemently denies Cooper’s claims. Moore was advised that in the CAJI newsletter, Cooper made the claim that the tape of Condor was placed in voice analysis, and that he had unscrambled it, proving that Lear was Condor.

Moore laughed at that and stated: “There is nothing to undo; nothing to unscramble! Jaime and I masked Condor’s voice through a Vocoder. The Vocoder is a device that runs the sound source through a microphone, and then to a voice envelope and a Vocoder. Nothing of the human qualities are left to unscramble.”

When asked about the additional allegations of his being identified as a government operative, Moore stated, “It is absolutely false. You know, I am getting tired of all these accusations. Cooper is always wrapping himself up in the flag and Constitution. What happened to the basic right of being innocent until proven guilty? I have never spoken to Cooper or had as much as a single correspondence with him,” he added, saying he had just been given a copy of the CAJI newsletter, and was “amazed” at the contents.

Moore’s name, of course, was supposedly on that list of people to be recruited as government agents, which Cooper said he viewed in 1972, and which included the names of Stanton Friedman, John Lear, and Bruce Maccabee. He also claimed that Bob Swan, apparently a former Navy buddy, was also informed of this back in 1972. When questioned by researcher Linda Howe and reporter Tony Pelham, Swan stated for the record that the only thing he remembered was “something to do with UFOs.”

It would appear that Moore evidences few reasons to have aroused government interest 18 years ago. He did not really come into the UFO scene with any great splash until the publication of The Roswell Incident in 1979. Moore said that in 1972, he was employed as a teacher by Herman, Minnesota School District 264, where he taught from the fall of 1969 until spring 1979. It appears that Moore would have been an unlikely candidate for government recruitment in 1972 (unless the CIA wanted to spy on the teacher’s union).

There is still much that is unknown about Bob Lazar. But even with his relatively short duration in the UFO limelight, Lazar is burned out with the field. Under the most intense scrutiny by the UFO community, and now facing a criminal charge, he made his UFO claims public with the express goal of stopping the harassment he says he’s undergone.
Cooper’s allegations of drug involvement amount to one more good reason for Lazar’s revulsion against the UFO field. When he spoke to us, he explained his research lab and various scientific equipment in it.

The “speed lab” (the term used in the CAJI newsletter) can be explained by my work with high-tech jet cars. Cooper is an intelligent man, but the two times I’ve seen him, he really acts crazy. He seems to believe a lot of what he says, to the point he will fight about it and get violent. On the only two occasions I have seen him, there was liquor involved, and he did get violent. He was screaming and throwing stuff around. He was a lunatic.

Another of Cooper’s allegations is that Lear, once in the company of Cooper and several others, called Lazar up and asked him to send a hooker over to Lear’s home. Lazar counters, “That’s absurd, and why it’s absurd is that my involvement with the bordello was in January of 1990. It mainly involved some electronic work and setting up software. I saw Cooper long before that, and in either case I would not be the guy anyone called for a prostitute. I had no connections. I deny his whole allegation.”

“Everyone seems to have a Bill Cooper story, and mine is about a paper I wrote at Los Alamos concerning Project Excalibur,” Lazar offered, referring to an earth-penetrating, nuclear-tipped missile designed to destroy underground facilities.

I wrote that paper in 1988. I had a witness there while I typed it, word for word. I printed it out. John Lear then gave a copy to Bill Cooper, and I heard Cooper reading it verbatim, word for word, at the (1989) MUFON convention. He claimed to have seen it in the mid-1970s.

I then heard him on the Billy Goodman show. I called him. He recognized the voice. He said he knew who I was. I then asked him, “Bill, did you get that Excalibur missile thing at John Lear’s, or did you read that in the 1970s?” I gave him an out if he had forgotten. He said, “No, I read that word-for-word in 1973.” That was my first confirmation that this guy was a complete liar.

Rebuttal By William Cooper

I have included the above article to show how ludicrous the claims against me have become. This needless negativity coming from the mouths of U.S. government assets deserves no response.

Does anyone doubt that Ecker’s employer, UFO magazine, was started with the help of the CIA? Isn’t it obvious that their goal is to steer UFO research into a corner, whereby no “disclosure” or answers will ever come about? William Moore and Robert Dean are admitted Air Force intelligence assets, and Corso an admitted CIA supervisor. While some of the players involved refuse to admit their government affiliation, you can tell who is who by their actions – or non-actions.

No doubt, in time, Bob Lazar will be shown to have led us nowhere with his testimonials. I stand by my claims that Moore, Stanton Friedman, Bruce Maccabee, Whitley Strieber, Budd Hopkins, John Lear, Linda Moulton Howe, Art Bell, George Noory (Bell’s new guest host), Richard Hoagland, Peter Levenda, Jerome Clark, Loren Coleman (Clark’s writing partner), John C. Sherwood, Bob Teets, Tim Beckley, Phyllis Galde, and Richard Dolan are part of an official disinformation campaign funded by the CIA, the Rhodes Round Table Group, and the CFR. Some of these Illuminists may even be double agents for other foreign powers.

Their plan is to create an artificial extraterrestrial threat to Earth, which was first mentioned by Marxist John Dewey, in 1917, as the best way to unite all the nations into globalism. The artificial extraterrestrial threat was thus implanted in the mind of the public, and nurtured into an always-present possibility. A large percentage of the world’s population now find themselves believing in alien visitation, mutilation of animals, and abductions of humans, with absolutely no proof that ETs exist anywhere in the universe, much less that any have ever visited Earth.

This propaganda attack against the American people continues through sophisticated mind control programming in movies, radio, television, advertising, and periodic ufological hoaxing.

Printed with the permission of New Saucerian Press