seven years of the Tribulation before Christ’s Second Coming can inaugurate the millennial age. Essential to the Tribulation is a New World Order ruled by the Antichrist and his forces, whose control has been made possible by the appearance of the false extraterrestrials. Presumably, the saved will be spared the severities of Illuminati rule, having been rescued in the Rapture of the Church, a disappearance made plausible to those who remain by the presence of UFOs. On this point, however, Deyo is ambiguous, for he closes his book with the survivalist admonition that all opponents of the Illuminati should “acquire warm clothing, good walking boots, means of procuring food from the land, a basic medical kit, and a Bible.”50
The Conspiracism of Milton William Cooper
The most elaborate and convoluted such theory, however, has come from Milton William Cooper, characterized by one scholar of apocalypticism, Daniel Wojcik, as “perhaps the most infamous UFO conspiracy theorist.” Regardless of whether this accurately characterizes Cooper, his 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse is not only among the most complex superconspiracy theories, it is also among the most influential, widely available in mainstream bookstores but also much read in both UFO and militia circles. What little is known about Cooper’s life prior to his career as a conspiracist came from Cooper himself. He claimed to have been raised in a military family, to have served first in the air force and then in the navy (the latter in Vietnam), and to have been discharged in 1975. After graduating from a junior college in California, he worked for several technical and vocational schools. He burst onto the ufology scene in 1988 with dramatic revelations of government involvement with extraterrestrials, charges he repeated in Behold a Pale Horse.51
Cooper projected the Illuminati back to remote origins as the manifestation of a long-simmering Luciferian plot. Far from having been founded by Weishaupt, the Illuminati were an outgrowth of the sinister activities of the medieval Knights Templar. Weishaupt merely established a new and particularly evil outpost of this order, financed by the Rothschilds. Although Cooper denied any anti-Semitic intent, he followed his predecessors in linking the Illuminati to Jewish influences. As Griffin had claimed earlier, Cooper asserted that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was an Illuminatist tract. Indeed, he reprinted the entire text, with the somewhat disingenuous prefatory note that “this [The Protocols] has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word ‘Zion’ should be ‘Sion’; any reference to Jews should be replaced with the word ‘Illuminati’; and the word ‘goyim’ should be replaced with the word ‘cattle.’”52
American members of the Illuminati became so emboldened, Cooper said, that they felt free to incorporate Illuminatist and Luciferian themes into the Great Seal of the United States, and he repeated the common claim that the phrase “Novus ordo seclorum” on the seal really means “New world order.” The Illuminati, however, are allegedly not an American but an international organization, whose inner circle is the Bilderbergers. The Bilderberg group, an organization of European and North American businessmen, academics, and lawyers, was founded in 1952 and—like its offshoot, the Trilateral Commission—has been a favorite of conspiracy theorists seeking to identify the secret holders of power. Cooper claimed that together with a dizzying array of other secret societies and front organizations—including the Knights of Columbus, the Jesuits, the Masons, the Communist Party, the Nazi Party, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Vatican, and Skull and Bones—the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers “all work toward the same ultimate goal, a New World Order.” When the conspirators feel ready, their minions in the federal government will swoop down on “patriots,” probably on a national holiday, and incarcerate them in detention centers run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, removing the last sources of resistance.53
To this point, Cooper’s theory resembles the speculations of earlier conspiracists such as Todd. But UFO themes eventually emerged as central to Cooper’s view of the world. Indeed, he presented not one but two Illuminati-UFO superconspiracy theories, both of which he alleged to be true. The first, like Deyo’s, assumed that the conspirators capitalize on fear of catastrophe by inventing an alien threat in order to arrange their own rescue. The second claimed that actual extraterrestrials are acting in concert with human plotters to take over the world.
According to the first version, Illuminatists have been working on an invasion-from-outer-space hoax since 1917, the better to bring the New World Order into being. The Cold War was no hindrance, as the Soviet leaders were active participants in the conspiracy. Cooper claimed to have seen documents showing that once a year, U.S. and Soviet nuclear submarines met under the polar ice, connected their airlocks, and hosted a meeting of the Bilderberg policy committee to advance “combined efforts in the secret space programs governing Alternative 3”—surely as bizarre a gathering as one can find in a literature replete with strange meetings.54 Such astonishing efforts were necessary, according to Cooper, because “the elite” had learned that the future of the human race was grim in the absence of dictatorial regimentation:
They were told that by or shortly after the year 2000 the total collapse of civilization as we know it and the possible extinction of the human race could occur . . . They were told that the only things that could stop these predicted events would be severe cutbacks of the human population, the cessation or retardation of technological and economic growth, the elimination of meat in the human diet, strict control of future human reproduction, a total commitment to preserving the environment, the colonization of space, and a paradigm shift in the evolutionary consciousness of man.
Only the New World Order can accomplish this. Even Cooper conceded that it may be necessary: “The New World Order is evil but very much needed if man is to survive long enough to plant his seed amongst the stars.”55
But while at one level, Cooper ruefully conceded that the New World Order is a grim necessity, at another he was prepared to do battle with evil. That other level concerned the aliens, for even though Cooper sometimes believed Illuminati circles would invent an extraterrestrial threat in order to provide a pretext for the seizure of power, at other times he was certain that the ETs have already arrived.
Cooper was one of the first to link Illuminati theory with some of the stranger beliefs about extraterrestrials that began to appear in ufology circles in the late 1980s. In Cooper’s version, sixteen alien spacecraft crashed in the United States during the Truman administration, leading the inner circles of government to fear an imminent invasion from space. According to Cooper, the next president, Dwight Eisenhower, decided that the safest path was a negotiated treaty with the aliens, and one was allegedly signed on February 20, 1954, by Eisenhower and “our first alien ambassador from outer space.” In order to regulate relations with the aliens while keeping their presence secret, an inner circle was established within the U.S. government, consisting of individuals involved with and controlled by the Illuminati. Although the aliens have proved to be slippery allies, routinely violating the treaty, they have been a boon to the Illuminati, who could now pursue an Alternative 3–style escape from the earth’s coming calamities, thanks to the space travel technology they acquired.56
In the end, Cooper gave the aliens the last word, asserting that the Illuminati are really not so powerful after all. In fact, the conspirators are little more than the unknowing tools of extraterrestrial masters: “aliens have manipulated and/or ruled the human race through various secret societies, religions, magic, witchcraft, and the occult.” The Illuminati, seemingly at the pinnacle of the world’s power hierarchy, are exposed as the dupes of a strange and evil alien race.57
THE NEW WORLD ORDER AS A POST–COLD WAR PHENOMENON
As we have seen, by the early 1990s, both the Antichrist and the Illuminati literatures had identified their respective subjects with an imminent tyranny most often subsumed under the New World Order rubric. The two literatures had also begun partially to overlap, so that religious students of the Antichrist like Robertson experienced no difficulty in drawing the Illuminati
