On Bill Cooper and Zetatalk [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes, 25 seconds. Contains 2886 words

Welcome back!

This is the Trenchant Edges and I’m your humble narrator Stephen.

Today I’ve got a few things to share with you.

First, unlike what I said here: The Bill Cooper podcast is happening. I’m tired of setting an arbitrary goal for subscribers.

Two. A reader generously sent me a copy of Zetatalk and I’ve been perusing it. I have thoughts.

Book cover design peaked in 1999

Three, I’ve got an audio engineer for my regular releases so we should be getting some more podcasts happening here as well.

Oh, and I got into grad school. So, that’s neat.

Lots of things developing. Let’s get into it.

On Bill Cooper

One of the nice things about a project like, “Listen to 42 hours of this man explain his deep worldview” is that it affords me a chance to wipe my mental slate clean and examine the subject anew.

I’ve already found lots of places where I’d forgotten or not really processed stuff.

First, I thought that Mystery Babylon was recorded later than it was: maybe 95-97. But it started in February 1993. This shift in timeline is significant because Bill’s worldview went through some radical shifts between his initial rise on Paranet in 1988, leaving the UFO scene a few years later, publishing Behold A Pale Horse in 1991, and starting the Hour of the Time in 1992.

That means he was only recording for a _ months before developing this.

Is that significant? I’m not sure. One of the things I find interesting about Cooper is his worldview shifted a lot more than his peers before and since.

Second, after a few episodes into the project I’m kinda stunned how, uh, Christian Cooper’s framing is. I’m going to have to spend a lot more time investigating Cooper’s relationship with Christianity because a ton of his framing of the ancient conspiracy ruling the world is in pure, “They hate us because we’re Christians” rhetoric. I don’t usually think of Bill as a kind of evangelist.

Which is a bit funny because that’s exactly how I see Alex Jones who carried (some might rightfully say stole) Bill’s torches after his death.

Third, I’d completely forgotten about how abusive a spouse he was. As, unfortunately, one might expect from a combat vet with PTSD, he got drunk and would black out and get violent. Several of his ex-wives would attest to this kind of behavior.

I could comment more on his domestic life, but I’m not really here to discuss Bill as a person as much as his ideas and why they’ve had the influence they’ve had.

In a real sense, I want to treat him seriously. To follow his often touted maxim that you shouldn’t repeat his claims unless you can prove them. And with how little of Behold a Pale Horse survives scrutiny… well, let’s just say I’m not worried that he might be right.

This brings us to something I want to develop a bit.

Don’t think I’ve forgotten about Ray Palmer

Why The Hell Am I Doing This Podcast Thing?

I find Bill Cooper’s place in modern culture very alive, if somewhat forgotten. Filtered by people acting in even worse faith than he was, his ideas have been reduced to their most malicious forms.

While I read a bunch of Bill Cooper in the mid 00s going through MJ-12 documents on TOTSE, I found about him again more recently when I saw neonazis introducing people to him to see if they’re ready to go from apparently more generic conspiracies to outright anti-Semitism.

I didn’t pay too much attention until I started really following Alex Jones and learned about their connections. That got me listening to The Hour of the Time here and there.

So, I don’t really want to do your traditional leftist debunking and dunkfest here.

First, other people have already played Cooper for laughs and it’s been done. Second, I think the most powerful defense against far-right propaganda is actually learning its history.

Like, when someone tells you about this secret group stealing our children’s blood for mysterious reasons, if you recognize that as the Blood Libel it’s a lot harder to sell you on the narrative.

Cooper was, like Aleister Crowley and Helena Blavatsky, an exemplar of weird synthesis. He pulled together all these little threads and rolled them up together.

The question is what drew him to the strands he chose and what drew other people to him? Why has the paranoid ideation of this man outlived him?

And even if you agree with him you have to admit that’s what a lot of it was. Bill was a lot of things and unfortunately an alcoholic was one of them. He’d probably still be alive today if he’d gotten help for his PTSD and cut out the drinking earlier.

But then he probably wouldn’t have been motivated to write or say the things he did.

Bill’s a cautionary tale.

You can’t control what people do with what you say.

And sometimes that goes to weird and dangerous places.

The other thing about Bill is I feel like if he’d been willing to be more critical of his own most deeply held beliefs about the goodness of America he might have been able to dig his way out of the propaganda he unquestioningly accepted. He knew that the system was fucked but couldn’t handle it being fucked by design.

Which can only lead to looking for someone to blame.

The thing about rationality people forget is that it’s just a process of making internally consistent arguments. Like with mathematics, there are many internally consistent systems that have nothing to do with the world we live in.

For external validity you need empirical testing and that’s a tricky business on a good day.

Let’s shift tones a bit and get back to Nancy Lieder.

It’s Always Back To Skull Measuring Eventually

I knew saying Zetatalk was mostly harmless without actually reading Nancy’s book was going to bite me in the ass and, indeed, it does.

As I expected it’s a real guided tour of weird shit.

What I didn’t expect, which just goes to tell you how I read things because it’s literally in the description for chapter 1, was starting off in true Blavatsky style, is talking about some Race Science.

I’m not going to go into it but it’s the kind of thing someone in the 90s might come up with if they were trying to imagine what wise, telepathic aliens might say about human biological development.

Much of it is gibberish and I’m not going to give the actual race science bits any oxygen. Let’s leave it at kind of milktoast attempts to avoid being too racist while picking the finest racist assumptions from the 19th century.

None of that matters because in the far off distant year of 2003, the rogue planet Niberu will return to earth and cause horrible disasters forcing humans to flee cities and greatly reducing the human population.

Only those of us who embrace the Service-To-Others mentality the Zetas who contacted and genetically modified Nancy can hope to survive the years of deprivation and sorrow.

And indeed, we must admit that everything they predicted was spot on. Good thing we got rid of that global capitalist system, eh comrade?

Jokes aside, the Zetas want to let us know that we’re the product of a long term, sometimes very janky, genetic engineering. Which is kind of funny because their argument is that evolution wouldn’t have produced the triune brain structure that humans have.

Except that kind of accumulated systems built on older systems is exactly how things work. Sorry, Zetas.

This is pretty standard UFO milieu, tbh.

What’s Compelling About This?

I have a pretty hardwired admiration for people trying to understand the world for themselves even when they, frankly, fuck it up this badly.

One has to wonder how much Nancy bought into any of this in the 90s and how much she buys into it now. There’s an interesting and fleshed out world here. Like, if she aimed this as a fiction novel I think she could have had some success in the scholastic book fair.

The whole thing is kind of fairy tale.

The first half of Zetatalk is all exposition. Going into unnecessary and often provably wrong explanations of human evolution and biology, how culture develops, the basic choice structure of human incarnation, and the larger context of different densities, the association of worlds, and the inevitable destruction from Nibiru coming back into the core solar system.

It’s all a bit tedious.

But I think there’s an interesting idea. I joked about race science before that’s more of a sideline compared to the book’s core distinction: Service-to-others people vs Service-to-self people.

Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of racist ideas regurgitated here. They’re mostly at the level of, “I didn’t think about how racist that might be” and aren’t really central points. Honestly, I wonder if this would even be here if this wasn’t a contactee book.

As I’ve mentioned before, contactees are direct intellectual descendants of Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy by way of cult leader George Adamski.

So the evolutionary theme here is both important framing for the moral question involved and itself inherited from earlier iterations of this ideology.

With that as context I hopped over to her more active website and looked at her recent newsletters.

From her most recent post:

In case you’re wondering if Nancy is a true believer: Looks like!

I want to take a moment and think through the logical possibilities of Nancy continuing to be in communion with the Zetas.

1. Nancy is lying and making everything up.

2. Nancy is telling the truth and the Zetas are real.

3. Nancy is deluded but believes herself to be truthful.

1 and 3 kind of immediately jump out at me as considerably more likely than 2 by an enormous margin.

Set aside skepticism for a moment. The Zetas are real. They are an advanced, hyperdimentional species with advanced starfaring abilities and IQs of 287 (a thing the book claims).

How could they possibly fuck up the timing of the expected return of Nibiru causing a poleshift and killing 90% of humanity?

I’m sure Nancy wrote an answer. I’m sure I could find it.

I’m equally sure I don’t care what her justification is. She’s failed a basic test of integrity: Admitting when you’re wrong. Only 1/10 of the people reading this should be alive right now.

And we can find her operating out of the same playbook she published in 1999 to an admittingly much smaller audience. Her most recent newsletter only has 300 visitors to it.

Her most recent newsletter starts with speculating about the 2nd Trump assassination attempt being an inside job mostly based on some conservative media nonsense and this tweet.

Friends, my sweet sweet friends, imagine getting so into conspiracy narratives that you’ve forgotten:

1. Donald Trump lives at Mar-A-Lago

2. Mar-A-Lago has a golf course,

3. Donald Trump loves golfing.

4. Anyone can go look and see if he’s golfing on the course he lives at and owns.

This doesn’t have anything to do with anything but I was kind of stunned to see it even needed saying.

Bad paranoids y’all. Dangerous. and foolish.

Anyway, I wanted to get a sense for how often Nancy still talks about the Service to Self vs Service to Others thing so I did a couple searches trying to find the last time she discussed it and the search kept giving me stuff from 2014-2015 so I tried google and found something more recent.

And it even has a chart!

Shit, if the Association of Worlds hears that we’ve got a majority in Service-To-Others, we should be set. (Their democracy uses telepathy to poll everyone in real time)

Anyway, I think it’s more likely their search is kind of buggy than there’s a near-decade gap between discussions of one of their central ideas.

Another reason to really up my game at web scraping. But I digress.

So while we can see some drift between the book Zetatalk and Nancy’s interests in the current year, I think the core of her ideas is still broadly the same.

We can also see some of her lasting prejudice in picking Haiti as “an example of STS takeover”. I might be willing to give most people the benefit of the doubt but, well, it’s hard to have doubts for someone who started their book with homemade race science, you know?

What I find interesting here is a old familiar structure reminiscent of Calvinism in play here. At some point we’re going to have to get way too into Ye Olde Theologye to do this right.

But here we have the elect, STO people, who are morally superior than the miserable STS sinners. The end of the world happens and it kills off all the evil people and the STOs and their kids get to be hybrid into super intelligent telepaths with 400 year lifespans.

I should probably have mentioned the hybrid program earlier, tbh. But we don’t have time to cover all the ins and outs, lol.

But wait, what if…

Another Possibility

We’ve taken a pleasant drive through Nancy’s beliefs here. I have to admit I kind of like the Service-To-Others vs Service-To-Self framework to anchor a UFO religion on.

It’s a bit too vain and messy for me to want to use the distinction but I think it’s a genuine attempt at building a coherent moral philosophy and that’s kind of neat. You rarely get that kind of thinking with these kinds of UFO cults.

This is something you can like, kind of, turn into principled action.

I think you’d run into a lot of trouble because much like a lot of Nancy’s understanding of evolution and biology, that’s just not how things work. We’re a dynamic mess of selfishness and altruism and both can be harmful in different circumstances.

Personally, I’d suggest people try to be better at being selfish than being less selfish. But that’s a whole different rabbit hole we don’t need.

Anyway I want to look at Nancy from another point of view. What if she’s sincerely experiencing communication from an other?

There are a few ways this could play out but the internal consistency of her views is interesting.

I’m just reminded of

1. Julian Jaynes the Origins of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind

2. Dissociative Identity Disorder/Plural Systems

3. Various ways you can “break” the brain to get different parts of it to seem like someone else to the conscious mind.

Jaynes believed that early modern people heard the voice of the gods tell them what to do and much of our anxiety and ennui stemmed from no longer having a guiding voice to organize our sense of action.

I don’t think he’s right about that, but it does make me wonder what’s going on in Nancy’s brain. After all, she herself says she’s been genetically engineered to be more compatible with the Zetas telepathy.

The most common variation of this might be DID, which used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, and now has a bunch of adult self-advocates arguing that this is a legitimate form of neurodiversity called Plurality or being part of a system. IE having multiple beings sharing a body.

While I lurk in a few plural groups I don’t feel like I understand it well enough to express to others.

And the last category is all half remembered stuff from my first round of university 15 years ago. I don’t want to say too much there aside from

If any of these ideas interest you and you like science fiction maybe read Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight. It’s very neat, despite some oddball flaws and arguably being psychopath apologia.

Point of all of this is I wonder if there’s a messier way Nancy may simply just be expressing her literal lived reality. The Zetas don’t appear to have any superhuman knowledge, but they do seem fairly stable across decades.

I also don’t want to assume pathology here, though I guess the alternative is calling Nancy a liar so… maybe it’s not a big jump either way.

We think of True and False as such absolutes but reality is often complex enough that it’s hard to say which fits the pattern better.

Instead a topic is like a big bowl soggy with true and false noodles. Some undercooked, some overcooked in mystery sauce.

It’s all we can do to eat up and hope we walk away a little wiser from the experience.

Wrapping Up

Alright, that was fun, right?

Nancy Lieder really did build a whole other world and run with it. The subject matter may be unusual, but I don’t think she’s that far from the norm.

I’m in a weird space where I’ve got nothing to do but hunt for work, prep for grad school, and think. It’s not bad, but I’d like to be on more solid ground.

Oh, and work through my health issues. Which are coming along bit by bit.

And there’s TE.

Working through some backlogs and the like and slowly establishing a routine with it.

I think we’re going to dig into Dabrowski next episode. I want to nail that down.

Then probably back into Epstein territory before getting back to some more UFO shit. And maybe there will be some audio along the way as well.

Anyway, would love to know what you thought of this piece. Do you have questions or comments?

See y’all soon.

-S