Allegations of conspiracy shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand without investigating. Yes, there have been conspiracies in history.

Cooper had not been on my radar, and I’m grateful to Mark Jacobson for Pale Horse Rider, his in-depth portrait of an influential conspiracy-theory crank and the beliefs he insidiously spread to the vulnerable-minded. pizza parlor (which had no basement).īut Milton William Cooper-you might think of him as Alex Jones before Alex Jones-no. I’ve choked down my disgust at “Pizzagate,” the conspiracy promoted by Alex Jones and Mike Cernovich, who posited (on the basis of zero evidence) that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a D.C. I’ve followed truthers (9/11 was a “false flag” op) and birthers (Obama was Kenyan-born). I later assembled a team of Yale videographers to clandestinely tape the dramatic climax of the Bonesmen’s weird “throat slitting” initiation. And to its network of powerful graduates, who all too many gullible souls had come to believe were the secret rulers of the world-along with the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers, of course. I don’t know, but it became an iconic data point in JFK conspiracy-theory lore.Īnd it was in this very magazine (September ’77) that I was able to bring national attention to the overwrought gothic rituals of the Yale secret society called Skull and Bones. After all, I was there the summer after the JFK assassination when Warren Commission “critic” Mark Lane gave a primitive PowerPoint presentation “proving” that someone had Photoshopped a picture of Lee Harvey Oswald holding his rifle so that the shadow pointed in.

Have you heard of William Cooper? I used to think I knew all the big players in conspiracy-theory culture.

William cooper skull bones