The Conspiracy Theory Thread
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The Granddaddy of American Conspiracy Theorists
Decades before QAnon, false flags, "crisis actors" and Alex Jones, there was Milton William Cooper. An exclusive excerpt from 'Pale Horse Rider' by Mark Jacobson
BY MARK JACOBSON
AUGUST 22, 2018
EVEN A BROKEN clock is right twice a day; that’s what they say about people who are supposed to be crackpots. It’s the idea that there is a moment in time when even the most outlandish contention, the most eccentric point of view, the most unlikely person, somehow lines up with shifting reality to produce, however fleetingly, what many perceive to be the truth.
But to accept the notion of the “broken clock” is to embrace the established, rationalist parameters of time, 24 hours a day, day after day, years arranged in ascending numerical order, decade after decade, eon upon eon, a forever forward march to an undetermined future, world without end, amen.
For some people, people like the late Milton William (Bill) Cooper, collector of clocks, time did not work that way. American shortwave talk‐show host, author, and lecturer during the millennial period of the late 1980s onward to the advent of the current century, Bill Cooper chose not to adhere to the mandated linear passage of existence. For Cooper, the entire span of time — the beginning, the middle, and the end — was all equally important, but there could be no doubt where the clock had stopped. A minute to midnight, that was Bill Cooper’s time.
This wasn’t because Cooper, a voracious reader and self‐schooled savant, was anti‐science or anti‐intellectual. He believed in evolution and, like his philosophical hero Aristotle, Cooper treasured the supremacy of knowledge and its acquisition. He had a massive collection of jazz records. But somewhere along the way, dating at least back to his service as river-boat captain in a hot zone during the Vietnam War, Cooper came to believe that something wasn’t right. What he’d always accepted as truth, what he was willing to give his life to protect, wasn’t true at all. It was part of a vast web of lies that stretched back through the centuries, contrived to rob the common man of his unalienable right to know the reality of his place on the planet. It was a deep-seated conviction that became an obsession — and a potent bridge to the current environment, where no one seems to believe anything they’re told, where long-respected bastions of truth are thought to be so corrupt as to be what Donald Trump calls “the enemy of the people.” The idea of “fake news,” along with personages like Alex Jones and QAnon (notably influenced by Cooper) are not unprecedented in American life. But none of them would have manifested as they have without Bill Cooper as an immediate predecessor.
Cooper sought to dramatize the compounding urgency of the moment on The Hour of the Time, the radio program he broadcast from 1992 until November 2001, his resonant, sometimes folksy, sometimes fulminating voice filling the airwaves via satellite hookups and shortwave frequencies. Nearly every episode of The Hour of the Time began the same way, with the show’s singular opening, one of the most arresting sign‐ons in radio history. It starts with a blaring air‐raid siren, a blast in the night. This is followed by a loud, distorted electronic voice: “Lights out!” comes the command, as if issued from a penitentiary guard tower. “Lights out for The Hour of the Time!…Lights out for the curfew of your body, soul, and mind.” Dogs bark, people shriek, the bleat of the still half‐sleeping multitudes. There is the sound of tramping jackbooted feet, growing louder, closing in.
Now is the time, a minute to midnight, 60 seconds before enslavement, one last chance. Some citizens will rise, if only from not-quite‐yet‐atrophied muscle memory. They will shake themselves awake as their forebears once did at Lexington and Concord, heeding Paul Revere’s immortal call. They will defend their homes, families, and the last shreds of the tattered Constitution, the most close‐to‐perfect political document ever produced.
The vast majority, however, won’t even get out of bed. Some will cower under the covers, but most will simply roll over and go back to sleep. They slept through life, so why not sleep through death?
This is how it will be at a minute to midnight, according to Bill Cooper. At the End of Time, a broken clock is always right.
Reputed instances of Cooper’s prescience are legion. An early roundup of these forecasts can be found in the August 15th, 1990, edition of the newsletter of the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI), an organization Cooper created, billing it as “the largest private intelligence‐gathering agency in the world.” Published on a dot-matrix printer, carrying the tagline “Information, not money, will be the power of the nineties,” Cooper ran an article entitled “Every Prediction Has Come True.” He listed 16 of his most recent prognostications that had come to pass “or will soon be fulfilled.
These included the disclosure that “the CIA and the military are bringing drugs into the United States to finance their black projects.” Cooper also predicted that “the rape of the Savings and Loans by the CIA is only the tip of the iceberg. At least 600 banks will go under in the next two years.” The current monetary structure, Cooper said, “will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer. If you attempt to stay out of the system you will not be allowed to buy, sell, work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.”
Cooper continued to make predictions in his watershed book, Behold a Pale Horse. Published in 1991 by Light Technology, a small New Age–oriented house then located in Sedona, Arizona, Behold a Pale Horse is something of a publishing miracle. With an initial press run of 3,500 (500 hardcover, 3,000 paperback), by the end of 2017, the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.
“Behold a Pale Horse is the biggest‐selling underground book of all time,” Cooper often told his audience. Yet sales figures represent only a fraction of the book’s true reach. For one thing, as its author often bragged, Behold a Pale Horse routinely topped lists of the most‐shoplifted books in the country. To this day, Barnes & Noble stores keep BAPH, as it is sometimes called, behind the cashier’s counter to reduce pilferage. This was because, as one clerk at the Barnes & Noble near my house in Brooklyn told me, “that book has a habit of walking out all by itself.”
There is also the captive audience. Since its release, Behold a Pale Horse has been among the most popular “prison books” (in that prisoners read them), a distinction it shares with Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. During the crack epidemic of the 1990s, it was not unusual for a single copy of Behold a Pale Horse to go through enough hands in the cellblocks of places such as Attica to break the book’s spine.
Some of Cooper’s best‐known predictions appear in Behold a Pale Horse, which runs a densely typed 500 pages. Eight years before the Trench Coat Mafia murders at Columbine High School, Cooper wrote: “The sharp increase of prescriptions of psychoactive drugs like Prozac and Ritalin to younger and younger children will inevitably lead to a rash of horrific school shootings.” These incidents, he said, “will be used by elements of the federal government as an excuse to infringe upon the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights.”
For many, including those who would later claim that the seemingly endless series of school shootings were part of a plot by gun‐control advocates to take away America’s weapons, Cooper’s words took on the air of prophesy.
But Bill Cooper never claimed to be a prophet. He never imagined himself in the line of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, the ancient Hebrew seers carried off by King Nebuchadnezzar II to a 70‐year captivity in Babylon. Neither did Cooper compare himself to John, an exile on the island of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation, which is where the title Behold a Pale Horse comes from. The phrase appears in chapter 6, verse 8, in which John is witness to the opening of the Seven Seals, the preview of God’s secret plan to once again destroy the world prior to its rebirth as the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
When the Fourth Seal was revealed, John wrote, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“I am no Prophet, I am no Nostradamus, I have no crystal ball,” Cooper proclaimed. He was “just an ordinary guy.” There was nothing supernatural about his predictions. Anyone could do it. It was all in the methodology, summed up in what he called his “standard admonition,” the one rule every prospective Hour of the Time listener had to obey, “no matter what.”
“You must not believe anything you hear on this show,” Cooper declared. Nor was the listener to believe anything they heard from any other shortwave host, “or Larry King Live, Dan Rather, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or anyone else in this entire world, whether you hear it on radio, on television, or from the lips of someone standing right in front of you.
“Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research,” Cooper told the audience. “Only free‐thinking, intelligent people who are prepared to root through all the crap and get at the truth should be listening to this show. Everyone else should just turn off their radio. We don’t even want you to listen.
“Listen to everyone. Read everything, believe nothing . . . until you can prove to yourself whether it is true or false or lies between the many shades of gray. If you don’t do this, if you cannot do this, or are just plain too lazy to do this, then I can assure you that you will march into the New World Order as a docile slave.”
Then Cooper made the sound of a sheep. “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaing all the way.”
Cooper’s most famous prediction was made during the June 28th, 2001, broadcast of The Hour of the Time. A little past his 58th birthday and drinking heavily, Cooper was doing his program from a studio he’d built in the den of his house at 96 North Clearview Circle, atop a hill in the small White Mountains town of Eagar, Arizona, 15 miles from the New Mexico line.
“Can you believe what you have been seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” Cooper asked the Hour of the Time audience that evening.
“Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, and interviewed him and his top leadership, lieutenants, and his colonels, and generals…in their hideout!
“Now don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper asked with his signature chuckle. “Because the largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years, and years, and years, and can’t find him!
“But some doofus jerk‐off reporter with his little camera crew waltzes right into his secret hideout and interviews him!”
This meant one of two things, Cooper told the audience. Either “everyone in the intelligence community and all the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, or they’re lying to us.”
The fact was, Cooper told the audience, no one in the U.S. intelligence services was really looking for Osama bin Laden. They knew where he was. They had since the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, along with his entire family, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“They created him. They’re the ones funding him. They supported him to make their new utopian worlds…and he has served them well.” There were rumors floating around the mass media that bin Laden was planning attacks on the United States and Israel, but this was just subterfuge, Cooper said. “If Osama bin Laden is an enemy of Israel, don’t you think the Mossad would have taken care of that a long time ago?” Cooper asked.
Something else was in the wind. There was no other reason for the government to allow the CNN report but to further stamp bin Laden’s bearded, pointy face upon the collective American mind‐set. Bogeyman of the moment, the Saudi prince was being readied for his close‐up.
“I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” Cooper declared. The target would be a large American city.
“Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”
Two and a half months later, on September 11th, 2001, after two commercial airliners flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in a cataclysm that killed 2,996 people, including 343 New York City Fire Department personnel, Cooper’s prediction came to pass.
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/best-wireless-bluetooth-headphones-777800/
By the time Cooper got on the air that morning, the towers had already fallen. Several hours passed before the name Osama bin Laden surfaced on the BBC feed Cooper was monitoring. The British station, which Cooper regarded as marginally more reliable than the American networks, was doing an interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak and Richard Perle, chairman of George W. Bush’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.
Widely known as the Prince of Darkness, in part for his Reagan‐era support of Edward Teller’s $100 billion Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, Perle said the attacks on New York and Washington were “clearly an act of war.”
“All our Western civilization is under attack,” Barak put in. The interviewer asked Perle if he thought the United States would be justified in firing cruise missiles at Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Perle, who along with fellow neocons Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld would soon push hard for the reinvasion of Iraq, answered in the affirmative.
The Afghani authorities had “allowed Osama bin Laden to operate in their territory,” Perle said. That alone was reason enough for a military strike. Bin Laden was involved, no doubt about it. Yes, Barak agreed, there was “every reason to believe” bin Laden was behind the attack.
It was then Cooper interrupted the transmission, shouting, “How do they know who did it?
“If the United States government had no warning like they say, if they didn’t know who was going to mount these attacks, and there are no survivors from the people in these planes, how do they know Osama bin Laden is behind it?”
So, yet again, Cooper was right. Events were transpiring exactly as his research had indicated. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi mama’s‐boy prince, was about to be officially blamed for the most spectacular foreign attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
Not that Cooper was gloating about his latest successful prediction. What had happened in New York City — thousands dead, their bodies crushed beneath tons of twisted rubble, a toxic cloud rising over the metropolis — was just the beginning of a new torrent of death. On the radio feed, Perle and Barak were discussing logistics; Afghanistan would be a target, possibly, Iraq as well.
“How can they determine that they should bomb Afghanistan?” Cooper shouted with alarm. “Who are we going to be bombing? The terrorists, or the innocent people of Kabul?”
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/best-compact-sound-bars-1012643/
Cooper made another prediction. “Folks, I can assure you that 72 hours from now we will be at war. We will be bombing two or maybe three countries….Because that’s how it works. When governments are attacked, they lash out. Thousands of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are going to die.
“Nothing will be the same after today,” Cooper said grimly.
“Get ready for it, folks, because that’s what you’re going to be hearing in the next weeks and months on radio and television: Nothing will be the same after today….Because I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what the people who really did this want you to think, that nothing, nothing, will be the same after today.
“And you know what? They’re right. They’re telling the truth about that. Within weeks the Congress will pass draconian legislation aimed at restricting the rights of American citizens. You’re going to have surveillance cameras on every street corner. You think your phones are being tapped now, just wait.
“No one is going to gain from this except a very small group of people. Everyone else will lose. No one will lose more than the American people.” This would be the most grievous casualty of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper told the audience, the nation itself, the America that could have been.
Freedom, the most elusive of qualities, best distilled in the inspired documents of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, had been dealt a fatal blow: “From now on, freedom will be whatever the law allows you to do.”
That wasn’t going to stop him, Cooper told listeners. He’d stay behind his microphone up in his hilltop studio. He’d keep sending out The Hour of the Time, speaking truth to the ultimate power, if it was the last thing he did.
It was soon after that Cooper’s final prediction came true.
“They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the audience. “They’re going to come up here in the middle of the night, and shoot me dead, right on my doorstep.”
And, around midnight on November 5th, 2001, less than two months after the 9/11 attacks, that’s exactly what happened.
Decades before QAnon, false flags, "crisis actors" and Alex Jones, there was Milton William Cooper. An exclusive excerpt from 'Pale Horse Rider' by Mark Jacobson
BY MARK JACOBSON
AUGUST 22, 2018
EVEN A BROKEN clock is right twice a day; that’s what they say about people who are supposed to be crackpots. It’s the idea that there is a moment in time when even the most outlandish contention, the most eccentric point of view, the most unlikely person, somehow lines up with shifting reality to produce, however fleetingly, what many perceive to be the truth.
But to accept the notion of the “broken clock” is to embrace the established, rationalist parameters of time, 24 hours a day, day after day, years arranged in ascending numerical order, decade after decade, eon upon eon, a forever forward march to an undetermined future, world without end, amen.
For some people, people like the late Milton William (Bill) Cooper, collector of clocks, time did not work that way. American shortwave talk‐show host, author, and lecturer during the millennial period of the late 1980s onward to the advent of the current century, Bill Cooper chose not to adhere to the mandated linear passage of existence. For Cooper, the entire span of time — the beginning, the middle, and the end — was all equally important, but there could be no doubt where the clock had stopped. A minute to midnight, that was Bill Cooper’s time.
This wasn’t because Cooper, a voracious reader and self‐schooled savant, was anti‐science or anti‐intellectual. He believed in evolution and, like his philosophical hero Aristotle, Cooper treasured the supremacy of knowledge and its acquisition. He had a massive collection of jazz records. But somewhere along the way, dating at least back to his service as river-boat captain in a hot zone during the Vietnam War, Cooper came to believe that something wasn’t right. What he’d always accepted as truth, what he was willing to give his life to protect, wasn’t true at all. It was part of a vast web of lies that stretched back through the centuries, contrived to rob the common man of his unalienable right to know the reality of his place on the planet. It was a deep-seated conviction that became an obsession — and a potent bridge to the current environment, where no one seems to believe anything they’re told, where long-respected bastions of truth are thought to be so corrupt as to be what Donald Trump calls “the enemy of the people.” The idea of “fake news,” along with personages like Alex Jones and QAnon (notably influenced by Cooper) are not unprecedented in American life. But none of them would have manifested as they have without Bill Cooper as an immediate predecessor.
Cooper sought to dramatize the compounding urgency of the moment on The Hour of the Time, the radio program he broadcast from 1992 until November 2001, his resonant, sometimes folksy, sometimes fulminating voice filling the airwaves via satellite hookups and shortwave frequencies. Nearly every episode of The Hour of the Time began the same way, with the show’s singular opening, one of the most arresting sign‐ons in radio history. It starts with a blaring air‐raid siren, a blast in the night. This is followed by a loud, distorted electronic voice: “Lights out!” comes the command, as if issued from a penitentiary guard tower. “Lights out for The Hour of the Time!…Lights out for the curfew of your body, soul, and mind.” Dogs bark, people shriek, the bleat of the still half‐sleeping multitudes. There is the sound of tramping jackbooted feet, growing louder, closing in.
Now is the time, a minute to midnight, 60 seconds before enslavement, one last chance. Some citizens will rise, if only from not-quite‐yet‐atrophied muscle memory. They will shake themselves awake as their forebears once did at Lexington and Concord, heeding Paul Revere’s immortal call. They will defend their homes, families, and the last shreds of the tattered Constitution, the most close‐to‐perfect political document ever produced.
The vast majority, however, won’t even get out of bed. Some will cower under the covers, but most will simply roll over and go back to sleep. They slept through life, so why not sleep through death?
This is how it will be at a minute to midnight, according to Bill Cooper. At the End of Time, a broken clock is always right.
Reputed instances of Cooper’s prescience are legion. An early roundup of these forecasts can be found in the August 15th, 1990, edition of the newsletter of the Citizens Agency for Joint Intelligence (CAJI), an organization Cooper created, billing it as “the largest private intelligence‐gathering agency in the world.” Published on a dot-matrix printer, carrying the tagline “Information, not money, will be the power of the nineties,” Cooper ran an article entitled “Every Prediction Has Come True.” He listed 16 of his most recent prognostications that had come to pass “or will soon be fulfilled.
These included the disclosure that “the CIA and the military are bringing drugs into the United States to finance their black projects.” Cooper also predicted that “the rape of the Savings and Loans by the CIA is only the tip of the iceberg. At least 600 banks will go under in the next two years.” The current monetary structure, Cooper said, “will be replaced by a cashless system that will allow the government to monitor our every action by computer. If you attempt to stay out of the system you will not be allowed to buy, sell, work, get medical care, or anything else we all take for granted.”
Cooper continued to make predictions in his watershed book, Behold a Pale Horse. Published in 1991 by Light Technology, a small New Age–oriented house then located in Sedona, Arizona, Behold a Pale Horse is something of a publishing miracle. With an initial press run of 3,500 (500 hardcover, 3,000 paperback), by the end of 2017, the book was closing in on 300,000 copies sold.
“Behold a Pale Horse is the biggest‐selling underground book of all time,” Cooper often told his audience. Yet sales figures represent only a fraction of the book’s true reach. For one thing, as its author often bragged, Behold a Pale Horse routinely topped lists of the most‐shoplifted books in the country. To this day, Barnes & Noble stores keep BAPH, as it is sometimes called, behind the cashier’s counter to reduce pilferage. This was because, as one clerk at the Barnes & Noble near my house in Brooklyn told me, “that book has a habit of walking out all by itself.”
There is also the captive audience. Since its release, Behold a Pale Horse has been among the most popular “prison books” (in that prisoners read them), a distinction it shares with Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power. During the crack epidemic of the 1990s, it was not unusual for a single copy of Behold a Pale Horse to go through enough hands in the cellblocks of places such as Attica to break the book’s spine.
Some of Cooper’s best‐known predictions appear in Behold a Pale Horse, which runs a densely typed 500 pages. Eight years before the Trench Coat Mafia murders at Columbine High School, Cooper wrote: “The sharp increase of prescriptions of psychoactive drugs like Prozac and Ritalin to younger and younger children will inevitably lead to a rash of horrific school shootings.” These incidents, he said, “will be used by elements of the federal government as an excuse to infringe upon the citizenry’s Second Amendment rights.”
For many, including those who would later claim that the seemingly endless series of school shootings were part of a plot by gun‐control advocates to take away America’s weapons, Cooper’s words took on the air of prophesy.
But Bill Cooper never claimed to be a prophet. He never imagined himself in the line of Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, the ancient Hebrew seers carried off by King Nebuchadnezzar II to a 70‐year captivity in Babylon. Neither did Cooper compare himself to John, an exile on the island of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation, which is where the title Behold a Pale Horse comes from. The phrase appears in chapter 6, verse 8, in which John is witness to the opening of the Seven Seals, the preview of God’s secret plan to once again destroy the world prior to its rebirth as the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
When the Fourth Seal was revealed, John wrote, “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”
“I am no Prophet, I am no Nostradamus, I have no crystal ball,” Cooper proclaimed. He was “just an ordinary guy.” There was nothing supernatural about his predictions. Anyone could do it. It was all in the methodology, summed up in what he called his “standard admonition,” the one rule every prospective Hour of the Time listener had to obey, “no matter what.”
“You must not believe anything you hear on this show,” Cooper declared. Nor was the listener to believe anything they heard from any other shortwave host, “or Larry King Live, Dan Rather, George Bush, Bill Clinton, or anyone else in this entire world, whether you hear it on radio, on television, or from the lips of someone standing right in front of you.
“Listen to everyone, read everything, believe nothing until you, yourself, can prove it with your own research,” Cooper told the audience. “Only free‐thinking, intelligent people who are prepared to root through all the crap and get at the truth should be listening to this show. Everyone else should just turn off their radio. We don’t even want you to listen.
“Listen to everyone. Read everything, believe nothing . . . until you can prove to yourself whether it is true or false or lies between the many shades of gray. If you don’t do this, if you cannot do this, or are just plain too lazy to do this, then I can assure you that you will march into the New World Order as a docile slave.”
Then Cooper made the sound of a sheep. “Baaa! Baaa! Baaaing all the way.”
Cooper’s most famous prediction was made during the June 28th, 2001, broadcast of The Hour of the Time. A little past his 58th birthday and drinking heavily, Cooper was doing his program from a studio he’d built in the den of his house at 96 North Clearview Circle, atop a hill in the small White Mountains town of Eagar, Arizona, 15 miles from the New Mexico line.
“Can you believe what you have been seeing on CNN today, ladies and gentlemen?” Cooper asked the Hour of the Time audience that evening.
“Supposedly, a CNN reporter found Osama bin Laden, took a television camera crew with him, and interviewed him and his top leadership, lieutenants, and his colonels, and generals…in their hideout!
“Now don’t you think that’s kind of strange, folks?” Cooper asked with his signature chuckle. “Because the largest intelligence apparatus in the world, with the biggest budget in the history of world, has been looking for Osama bin Laden for years, and years, and years, and can’t find him!
“But some doofus jerk‐off reporter with his little camera crew waltzes right into his secret hideout and interviews him!”
This meant one of two things, Cooper told the audience. Either “everyone in the intelligence community and all the intelligence agencies of the United States government are blithering idiots and incompetent fools, or they’re lying to us.”
The fact was, Cooper told the audience, no one in the U.S. intelligence services was really looking for Osama bin Laden. They knew where he was. They had since the beginning of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Bin Laden, along with his entire family, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Central Intelligence Agency.
“They created him. They’re the ones funding him. They supported him to make their new utopian worlds…and he has served them well.” There were rumors floating around the mass media that bin Laden was planning attacks on the United States and Israel, but this was just subterfuge, Cooper said. “If Osama bin Laden is an enemy of Israel, don’t you think the Mossad would have taken care of that a long time ago?” Cooper asked.
Something else was in the wind. There was no other reason for the government to allow the CNN report but to further stamp bin Laden’s bearded, pointy face upon the collective American mind‐set. Bogeyman of the moment, the Saudi prince was being readied for his close‐up.
“I’m telling you to be prepared for a major attack!” Cooper declared. The target would be a large American city.
“Something terrible is going to happen in this country. And whatever is going to happen they’re going to blame on Osama bin Laden. Don’t you even believe it.”
Two and a half months later, on September 11th, 2001, after two commercial airliners flew into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in a cataclysm that killed 2,996 people, including 343 New York City Fire Department personnel, Cooper’s prediction came to pass.
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/best-wireless-bluetooth-headphones-777800/
By the time Cooper got on the air that morning, the towers had already fallen. Several hours passed before the name Osama bin Laden surfaced on the BBC feed Cooper was monitoring. The British station, which Cooper regarded as marginally more reliable than the American networks, was doing an interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister General Ehud Barak and Richard Perle, chairman of George W. Bush’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.
Widely known as the Prince of Darkness, in part for his Reagan‐era support of Edward Teller’s $100 billion Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Star Wars, Perle said the attacks on New York and Washington were “clearly an act of war.”
“All our Western civilization is under attack,” Barak put in. The interviewer asked Perle if he thought the United States would be justified in firing cruise missiles at Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Perle, who along with fellow neocons Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld would soon push hard for the reinvasion of Iraq, answered in the affirmative.
The Afghani authorities had “allowed Osama bin Laden to operate in their territory,” Perle said. That alone was reason enough for a military strike. Bin Laden was involved, no doubt about it. Yes, Barak agreed, there was “every reason to believe” bin Laden was behind the attack.
It was then Cooper interrupted the transmission, shouting, “How do they know who did it?
“If the United States government had no warning like they say, if they didn’t know who was going to mount these attacks, and there are no survivors from the people in these planes, how do they know Osama bin Laden is behind it?”
So, yet again, Cooper was right. Events were transpiring exactly as his research had indicated. Osama bin Laden, the Saudi mama’s‐boy prince, was about to be officially blamed for the most spectacular foreign attack on America since Pearl Harbor.
Not that Cooper was gloating about his latest successful prediction. What had happened in New York City — thousands dead, their bodies crushed beneath tons of twisted rubble, a toxic cloud rising over the metropolis — was just the beginning of a new torrent of death. On the radio feed, Perle and Barak were discussing logistics; Afghanistan would be a target, possibly, Iraq as well.
“How can they determine that they should bomb Afghanistan?” Cooper shouted with alarm. “Who are we going to be bombing? The terrorists, or the innocent people of Kabul?”
https://www.rollingstone.com/product-recommendations/electronics/best-compact-sound-bars-1012643/
Cooper made another prediction. “Folks, I can assure you that 72 hours from now we will be at war. We will be bombing two or maybe three countries….Because that’s how it works. When governments are attacked, they lash out. Thousands of people who had nothing whatsoever to do with what is happening at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are going to die.
“Nothing will be the same after today,” Cooper said grimly.
“Get ready for it, folks, because that’s what you’re going to be hearing in the next weeks and months on radio and television: Nothing will be the same after today….Because I’ll tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what the people who really did this want you to think, that nothing, nothing, will be the same after today.
“And you know what? They’re right. They’re telling the truth about that. Within weeks the Congress will pass draconian legislation aimed at restricting the rights of American citizens. You’re going to have surveillance cameras on every street corner. You think your phones are being tapped now, just wait.
“No one is going to gain from this except a very small group of people. Everyone else will lose. No one will lose more than the American people.” This would be the most grievous casualty of the 9/11 attacks, Cooper told the audience, the nation itself, the America that could have been.
Freedom, the most elusive of qualities, best distilled in the inspired documents of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, had been dealt a fatal blow: “From now on, freedom will be whatever the law allows you to do.”
That wasn’t going to stop him, Cooper told listeners. He’d stay behind his microphone up in his hilltop studio. He’d keep sending out The Hour of the Time, speaking truth to the ultimate power, if it was the last thing he did.
It was soon after that Cooper’s final prediction came true.
“They’re going to kill me, ladies and gentlemen,” he told the audience. “They’re going to come up here in the middle of the night, and shoot me dead, right on my doorstep.”
And, around midnight on November 5th, 2001, less than two months after the 9/11 attacks, that’s exactly what happened.
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JFK assassination witness offers new details that undermine 'magic bullet theory': 'Beginning to doubt myself'
Ex-Secret Service agent Paul Landis has spoken out after 60 years and provided new details about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
www.foxnews.com
JFK assassination witness offers new details that undermine magic bullet theory: ‘Beginning to doubt myself’
The new account of John F. Kennedy's assassination breaks with the Warren Commission's findings
By Nikolas Lanum Fox News
A former Secret Service agent who witnessed the assassination of John F. Kennedy has broken his silence about the tragic event and is now casting doubt on findings from the commission that investigated the late president’s death.
Paul Landis, who admitted he long believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy, said he is beginning to wonder if additional shooters may have been involved.
"I’m beginning to doubt myself," Landis told The New York Times. "Now, I begin to wonder."
Landis’ said his newfound skepticism results from discrepancies between the Warren Commission and his own experiences on the day Kennedy was shot in the head and killed while riding inside a Lincoln Continental convertible through Dallas, Texas.
At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Landis was in a car following Kennedy when he heard several gunshots ring out.
Several elements of Landis’ recent account of that day in Dealey Plaza contradict his official statement just after the shooting. While he stressed that he never believed in conspiracy theories, he was adamant to tell what he saw and did.
The Warren Commission, following an investigation, found no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby were part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to kill the president. They stated at the time that one bullet that struck Kennedy passed through him and collided with then-Texas Governor John Connally. The bullet allegedly hit his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
Critics of the commission’s findings call it the "magic bullet theory."
Their conclusion was based on a bullet found on a stretcher Connally was placed on as he was transported around the Parkland Memorial Hospital following the attack.
However, Landis told The New York Times that he initially discovered the bullet found on the stretcher. He recalled that the bullet was lodged in the limousine seat behind where Kennedy was seated after the president was brought to the hospital.
"It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important," Landis said. "And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it."
To stop souvenir hunters, Landis grabbed the bullet, entered the hospital and placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher. He had hoped the evidence would help doctors determine what happened. He surmised that the stretchers must have been pushed together at one point and the bullet fell near Connally.
Landis speculates the bullet had lost velocity in Kennedy’s back and was burrowed into the limousine seat.
He had always thought Oswald acted alone, but now he is unsure.
Landis will soon release his memoir, "The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years."
Over the last several years, Landis has told his story to prominent figures, such as former Secret Service Director Lewis C. Merletti and Cleveland layer James Robenalt.
"If what he says is true, which I tend to believe, it is likely to reopen the question of a second shooter, if not even more," Mr. Robenalt said.
"If the bullet we know as the magic or pristine bullet stopped in President Kennedy’s back, it means that the central thesis of the Warren Report, the single-bullet theory, is wrong," he added.
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Former Secret Service Agent Makes Startling Claim About Bullet Found After Kennedy Assassination
Former Secret Service Agent Makes Startling Claim About Bullet Found After Kennedy Assassination
An upcoming book by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis raises questions about the bullets fired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963
By Liz McNeil
and
Virginia Chamlee
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():format(webp)/IMG_4737-8b5b28d8b0e4469cbec8fe71e041ff12.jpeg)
Virginia Chamlee
Virginia Chamlee is a Politics Writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE for three years. Her work has previously appeared in The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, Eater, and other outlets.
People Editorial Guidelines
Published on September 12, 2023 10:14AM EDT
Sixty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a former Secret Service agent is offering a startling revelation about that day, claiming that he tampered with evidence and put one of the bullets believed to have killed the president in his pocket before placing it on a hospital gurney.
Paul Landis, now 88, was assigned to the security detail of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and was traveling with the motorcade when the then-president was struck by two bullets — one in the head and one in the neck — while riding in a parade through downtown Dallas.
"I didn't think about it at all for about 45 years, and at that point it was March 2014 and I started thinking that maybe it was time that I told my story," Landis tells PEOPLE in a new interview ahead of the release of his book, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years.
"That was really the beginning. Up to that point I had no thoughts about writing. Everything was just kind of buried. I didn't think about it. Nobody ever asked me," he says.
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Paul Landis, former Secret Service agent and author of "The Final Witness".
Courtesy of Paul Landis
In the book, Landis offers a first-hand account of the moments during, and after, the assassination — and a shocking revelation about a bullet he now says he found that day in the presidential limousine and later placed on Kennedy's hospital gurney.
It's a moment that changed history and a story that still fascinates.
'Without Any Warning, Mrs. Kennedy Begins Crying': Witness Remembers Jackie After the JFK Assassination
The Kennedy assassination has given rise to endless conspiracy theories in the years that followed— theories that will no doubt be boosted by the revelations made in Landis' new book, which at least one historian says are difficult to believe.
Speaking to PEOPLE in a recent interview, Landis recalls how Kennedy's motorcade had "just completed the hairpin turn in front of the book depository, and the cars were straightening out" when he heard the first shot.
"I recognized it immediately as the sound of a gunshot, turned to look over my right shoulder, and I saw nothing," he says. "I was scanning forward."
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(999x0:1001x2):format(webp)/john-f-kennedy-papers-assassination-2000-913aa6d5bbe24f55b174efe620fcdeab.jpg)
The Kennedys on Nov. 22, 1963.
Landis says he saw President Kennedy sitting in the limo and leaning slightly to his left, though it was unclear at that point if he had been hurt. That's when the former agent turned to scan the surrounding areas, including the now-infamous "grassy knoll," long a focus of conspiracy theorists who have claimed that there was a second shooter involved in the attack.
"I had just finished scanning the overpass and ahead of the car, and I heard this second shot, and still no reaction from President Kennedy," Landis recalls. "I couldn't see anything else in the limo. It still appeared that everything was okay."
Then, the third shot rang out. Landis describes how one agent immediately rushed to Kennedy's side before the motorcade raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
"It was like a flash of white, and then the air just filled with a cloud of blood and brain, flesh, bone matter — and I ducked so I wouldn't get splattered as we drove through it," he says.
Jackie Kennedy's Secret Service Agent Opens Up About His Suicide Attempt After JFK Assassination: New Book
Once at the hospital, Landis says he ran to the president's limo, where Jackie was sitting with her husband's head laid in her lap. As other agents and hospital staff descended on the car, Landis took in the scene.
Blood and bone fragments, he says, were "everywhere," including in a pool on the seat next to the first lady. Landis says he also noticed two bullet fragments in a puddle of blood, picking them up and then placing them back in the seat as the chaos unfolded.
Meanwhile, a fellow agent, Clint Hill, removed his suit coat to wrap the president's head and torso and lift him onto a gurney. The first lady then stood up to follow the group inside.
That's when Landis says he noticed a fully intact bullet "sitting on the back seat ledge, where the cushion meets the metal on the car."
"I picked that up," he says. "I looked at it and I started to put it back. I didn't see anybody in the vicinity, I was wondering where all the agents were. And they all seemed to be over looking for the president or to help remove the president. So I put the bullet in my pocket."
It was "a quick decision," Landis says, one he debated "just for a second," deciding that he ultimately "didn't want that bullet to disappear."
Once inside the hospital, Landis and the others raced down a hallway, landing at a trauma room.
By then, he recalls, "it was just a mad push to get into the trauma room. I was kind of behind Mrs. Kennedy at this point. She was right there holding onto the gurney. I just got pushed in. It was like being trapped."
Landis was in the hospital room, he now says, when doctors and nurses removed Kennedy's body from the gurney, transferring it to an examination table.
"So all the time I've been standing there, I've been kind of fumbling with the bullet in my pocket," he continues. "I took it out and I set it by the president's left foot, and it was like a white cotton blanket on the table, and the bullet started to roll off the table, and I reached out and grabbed it, and there was a little wrinkle in the blanket. So I put the bullet so that it wouldn't roll off. It stopped in that blanket."
Amid the confusion and chaos, Landis says, "I figured this was the place the bullet it needed to be. They would find it. And I felt a great relief that I had saved an important piece of evidence."
In the days and weeks that followed, the shooting took its inevitable mental toll on the agents, including Landis.
"I just kept telling myself, 'Paul, you've got to hang in there. You have to hang in there,'" he says. "I didn't want to be an embarrassment to the Secret Service and in my job."
But he tried not to remember the horror of what he'd witnessed that day.
"We were kept so busy the whole weekend. For me, it became just a blur of activities. We were sleep-deprived, working long hours," he says, noting that he was assigned to the first lady's detail after she moved out of the White House the following week.
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Paul Landis with Jacqueline Kennedy.
Courtesy of Paul Landis
Landis says he did write two reports in the wake of the incident, but that they were brief and he doesn't remember the details. He says he planned to detail the bullet during the larger investigation, known as the Warren Commission.
"I just figured, well, I'm going to be questioned by the Warren Commission and I can tell my whole story then," Landis says. "And that time never came."
It wasn't until 2014, when Landis read the book Six Seconds in Dallas, that he saw mention of a bullet being found on a gurney — though in the book, it's described as being found on the gurney of Texas Gov. John Connally, who was seriously wounded but survived the shooting.
"They showed a picture [of the bullet] in the book, and my reaction was, 'Well, wait a minute. That's the bullet that I put on President Kennedy's stretcher.' And that triggered some thoughts and I wondered what to do. How do I straighten this all out?"
Over the next several years and after conversations with fellow agents, Landis decided to come forward with his story.
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A young Paul Landis.
Photo by Paul Kirby, courtesy of Paul Landis
Speaking to PEOPLE 60 years after the assassination, Landis describes the bullet he found that day as having "no sign of really blood on it."
"All I saw were the striations and knew that it had been fired," he says.
Still, he's quick to note that he has no theories about the significance of the bullet or how its existence might change the way some people think about the assassination, which the presidential commission determined was the result of a lone gunman: former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Plans of Champagne and Horses Shattered by Gunfire: How the Kennedys' Fateful Trip to Texas Became a Nightmare
Historian Steve Gillon, who has studied the assassination and wrote a book on the subject, questions the veracity of Landis' account, which he says contradicts the findings of the Warren Commission.
"[Landis'] account and the Warren Commission can't both be right," Gillon says. "So if what he remembers is true, then the Warren Commission is wrong ... It all revolves around the magic bullet. "
According to the Warren Commission, there were three bullets fired. The first one missed its target, and most likely hit a nearby sign, with scattered fragments found nearby.
The second bullet to be fired is the one known as the so-called "magic bullet," and has been determined to have hit Kennedy in the back and exited his his throat before then hitting Gov. Connally, breaking a rib, exiting his body and entering back in his wrist and then thigh.
"According to the Warren Commission, that [magic] bullet was found on a gurney by a hospital employee in the hallway," Gillon notes. "And no one is certain what gurney it was and whether it was the one Connally came in or not. That was the speculation."
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The Zapruder Film of the JFK assassination. ZAPRUDER FILM 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
The third bullet is the one that proved fatal to Kennedy, and entered into his head.
That second bullet, Gillon believes, couldn't have been found by Landis on the ledge of Kennedy's limo, behind where the first lady was sitting, as he recounts in his book. "It makes absolutely no sense if it's behind Jackie because how did it get behind her without hitting her?" he questions.
The existence of a bullet — one found behind Jackie Kennedy and pocketed by Landis before being placed on Kennedy's hospital gurney — would also raise another possibility debated in conspiracy circles for decades: the potential of a second shooter.
"If Kennedy and Connally are hit by different bullets, or if there's a mysterious bullet behind Mrs Kennedy as he claims in the book, then it means there has to be another shooter because Oswald was shooting from the sixth floor," Gillon says, "There's just no way of explaining that. The Warren Commission has made very clear what each bullet did."
The Biggest JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories and How They've Been (Mostly) Debunked
Gillon raises additional questions about Landis' recollections, noting that in Secret Service testimony taken after the assassination, no one placed Landis in the operating room that day, as he now descrbies in his new book.
Gillon adds that, in Landis' own initial statements after the assassination, he never said he went into the operating room.
"Now [in his book], he's in there, and he's in there long enough to take a bullet out of his pocket and put it next to JFK's foot. I mean, there's lots of people in that room. They would've seen him. And then why did he not say this in his statement?" Gillon adds.
As gripping as Landis' account may be, Gillon worries the details may have been lost to time and faded memory: "Historians are always taught to believe contemporaneous accounts over memory, which fades over time. It is difficult to accept that Landis remembers things 60 years later that he did not remember at the time. There are too many contradictions for this account to be credible."
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer.
Landis, meanwhile, says that his first statements after the assassination were made during a time of great distress — week- and month-long stretches that, while there wasn't a word for it at the time, would now be known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I think I became more quiet and reserved. I was fairly outgoing prior to [the assassination]," Landis tells PEOPLE. "I lost my self-confidence for a while there."
Landis left his post six months after the assassination, and now, six decades later, says he feels a weight has been lifted after writing his new book and telling his story.
"It is just a different level of relief for me that I carried this with me for so long," he tells PEOPLE.
Former Secret Service Agent Makes Startling Claim About Bullet Found After Kennedy Assassination
An upcoming book by former Secret Service agent Paul Landis raises questions about the bullets fired in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963
By Liz McNeil
and
Virginia Chamlee
Virginia Chamlee
Virginia Chamlee is a Politics Writer at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE for three years. Her work has previously appeared in The Washington Post, Buzzfeed, Eater, and other outlets.
People Editorial Guidelines
Published on September 12, 2023 10:14AM EDT
Sixty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a former Secret Service agent is offering a startling revelation about that day, claiming that he tampered with evidence and put one of the bullets believed to have killed the president in his pocket before placing it on a hospital gurney.
Paul Landis, now 88, was assigned to the security detail of first lady Jacqueline Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963, and was traveling with the motorcade when the then-president was struck by two bullets — one in the head and one in the neck — while riding in a parade through downtown Dallas.
"I didn't think about it at all for about 45 years, and at that point it was March 2014 and I started thinking that maybe it was time that I told my story," Landis tells PEOPLE in a new interview ahead of the release of his book, The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years.
"That was really the beginning. Up to that point I had no thoughts about writing. Everything was just kind of buried. I didn't think about it. Nobody ever asked me," he says.
Paul Landis, former Secret Service agent and author of "The Final Witness".
Courtesy of Paul Landis
In the book, Landis offers a first-hand account of the moments during, and after, the assassination — and a shocking revelation about a bullet he now says he found that day in the presidential limousine and later placed on Kennedy's hospital gurney.
It's a moment that changed history and a story that still fascinates.
'Without Any Warning, Mrs. Kennedy Begins Crying': Witness Remembers Jackie After the JFK Assassination
The Kennedy assassination has given rise to endless conspiracy theories in the years that followed— theories that will no doubt be boosted by the revelations made in Landis' new book, which at least one historian says are difficult to believe.
Speaking to PEOPLE in a recent interview, Landis recalls how Kennedy's motorcade had "just completed the hairpin turn in front of the book depository, and the cars were straightening out" when he heard the first shot.
"I recognized it immediately as the sound of a gunshot, turned to look over my right shoulder, and I saw nothing," he says. "I was scanning forward."
The Kennedys on Nov. 22, 1963.
Landis says he saw President Kennedy sitting in the limo and leaning slightly to his left, though it was unclear at that point if he had been hurt. That's when the former agent turned to scan the surrounding areas, including the now-infamous "grassy knoll," long a focus of conspiracy theorists who have claimed that there was a second shooter involved in the attack.
"I had just finished scanning the overpass and ahead of the car, and I heard this second shot, and still no reaction from President Kennedy," Landis recalls. "I couldn't see anything else in the limo. It still appeared that everything was okay."
Then, the third shot rang out. Landis describes how one agent immediately rushed to Kennedy's side before the motorcade raced to Parkland Memorial Hospital.
"It was like a flash of white, and then the air just filled with a cloud of blood and brain, flesh, bone matter — and I ducked so I wouldn't get splattered as we drove through it," he says.
Jackie Kennedy's Secret Service Agent Opens Up About His Suicide Attempt After JFK Assassination: New Book
Once at the hospital, Landis says he ran to the president's limo, where Jackie was sitting with her husband's head laid in her lap. As other agents and hospital staff descended on the car, Landis took in the scene.
Blood and bone fragments, he says, were "everywhere," including in a pool on the seat next to the first lady. Landis says he also noticed two bullet fragments in a puddle of blood, picking them up and then placing them back in the seat as the chaos unfolded.
Meanwhile, a fellow agent, Clint Hill, removed his suit coat to wrap the president's head and torso and lift him onto a gurney. The first lady then stood up to follow the group inside.
That's when Landis says he noticed a fully intact bullet "sitting on the back seat ledge, where the cushion meets the metal on the car."
"I picked that up," he says. "I looked at it and I started to put it back. I didn't see anybody in the vicinity, I was wondering where all the agents were. And they all seemed to be over looking for the president or to help remove the president. So I put the bullet in my pocket."
It was "a quick decision," Landis says, one he debated "just for a second," deciding that he ultimately "didn't want that bullet to disappear."
Once inside the hospital, Landis and the others raced down a hallway, landing at a trauma room.
By then, he recalls, "it was just a mad push to get into the trauma room. I was kind of behind Mrs. Kennedy at this point. She was right there holding onto the gurney. I just got pushed in. It was like being trapped."
Landis was in the hospital room, he now says, when doctors and nurses removed Kennedy's body from the gurney, transferring it to an examination table.
"So all the time I've been standing there, I've been kind of fumbling with the bullet in my pocket," he continues. "I took it out and I set it by the president's left foot, and it was like a white cotton blanket on the table, and the bullet started to roll off the table, and I reached out and grabbed it, and there was a little wrinkle in the blanket. So I put the bullet so that it wouldn't roll off. It stopped in that blanket."
Amid the confusion and chaos, Landis says, "I figured this was the place the bullet it needed to be. They would find it. And I felt a great relief that I had saved an important piece of evidence."
In the days and weeks that followed, the shooting took its inevitable mental toll on the agents, including Landis.
"I just kept telling myself, 'Paul, you've got to hang in there. You have to hang in there,'" he says. "I didn't want to be an embarrassment to the Secret Service and in my job."
But he tried not to remember the horror of what he'd witnessed that day.
"We were kept so busy the whole weekend. For me, it became just a blur of activities. We were sleep-deprived, working long hours," he says, noting that he was assigned to the first lady's detail after she moved out of the White House the following week.
Paul Landis with Jacqueline Kennedy.
Courtesy of Paul Landis
Landis says he did write two reports in the wake of the incident, but that they were brief and he doesn't remember the details. He says he planned to detail the bullet during the larger investigation, known as the Warren Commission.
"I just figured, well, I'm going to be questioned by the Warren Commission and I can tell my whole story then," Landis says. "And that time never came."
It wasn't until 2014, when Landis read the book Six Seconds in Dallas, that he saw mention of a bullet being found on a gurney — though in the book, it's described as being found on the gurney of Texas Gov. John Connally, who was seriously wounded but survived the shooting.
"They showed a picture [of the bullet] in the book, and my reaction was, 'Well, wait a minute. That's the bullet that I put on President Kennedy's stretcher.' And that triggered some thoughts and I wondered what to do. How do I straighten this all out?"
Over the next several years and after conversations with fellow agents, Landis decided to come forward with his story.
A young Paul Landis.
Photo by Paul Kirby, courtesy of Paul Landis
Speaking to PEOPLE 60 years after the assassination, Landis describes the bullet he found that day as having "no sign of really blood on it."
"All I saw were the striations and knew that it had been fired," he says.
Still, he's quick to note that he has no theories about the significance of the bullet or how its existence might change the way some people think about the assassination, which the presidential commission determined was the result of a lone gunman: former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.
Plans of Champagne and Horses Shattered by Gunfire: How the Kennedys' Fateful Trip to Texas Became a Nightmare
Historian Steve Gillon, who has studied the assassination and wrote a book on the subject, questions the veracity of Landis' account, which he says contradicts the findings of the Warren Commission.
"[Landis'] account and the Warren Commission can't both be right," Gillon says. "So if what he remembers is true, then the Warren Commission is wrong ... It all revolves around the magic bullet. "
According to the Warren Commission, there were three bullets fired. The first one missed its target, and most likely hit a nearby sign, with scattered fragments found nearby.
The second bullet to be fired is the one known as the so-called "magic bullet," and has been determined to have hit Kennedy in the back and exited his his throat before then hitting Gov. Connally, breaking a rib, exiting his body and entering back in his wrist and then thigh.
"According to the Warren Commission, that [magic] bullet was found on a gurney by a hospital employee in the hallway," Gillon notes. "And no one is certain what gurney it was and whether it was the one Connally came in or not. That was the speculation."
The Zapruder Film of the JFK assassination. ZAPRUDER FILM 1967 (Renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
The third bullet is the one that proved fatal to Kennedy, and entered into his head.
That second bullet, Gillon believes, couldn't have been found by Landis on the ledge of Kennedy's limo, behind where the first lady was sitting, as he recounts in his book. "It makes absolutely no sense if it's behind Jackie because how did it get behind her without hitting her?" he questions.
The existence of a bullet — one found behind Jackie Kennedy and pocketed by Landis before being placed on Kennedy's hospital gurney — would also raise another possibility debated in conspiracy circles for decades: the potential of a second shooter.
"If Kennedy and Connally are hit by different bullets, or if there's a mysterious bullet behind Mrs Kennedy as he claims in the book, then it means there has to be another shooter because Oswald was shooting from the sixth floor," Gillon says, "There's just no way of explaining that. The Warren Commission has made very clear what each bullet did."
The Biggest JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theories and How They've Been (Mostly) Debunked
Gillon raises additional questions about Landis' recollections, noting that in Secret Service testimony taken after the assassination, no one placed Landis in the operating room that day, as he now descrbies in his new book.
Gillon adds that, in Landis' own initial statements after the assassination, he never said he went into the operating room.
"Now [in his book], he's in there, and he's in there long enough to take a bullet out of his pocket and put it next to JFK's foot. I mean, there's lots of people in that room. They would've seen him. And then why did he not say this in his statement?" Gillon adds.
As gripping as Landis' account may be, Gillon worries the details may have been lost to time and faded memory: "Historians are always taught to believe contemporaneous accounts over memory, which fades over time. It is difficult to accept that Landis remembers things 60 years later that he did not remember at the time. There are too many contradictions for this account to be credible."
Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer.
Landis, meanwhile, says that his first statements after the assassination were made during a time of great distress — week- and month-long stretches that, while there wasn't a word for it at the time, would now be known as post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I think I became more quiet and reserved. I was fairly outgoing prior to [the assassination]," Landis tells PEOPLE. "I lost my self-confidence for a while there."
Landis left his post six months after the assassination, and now, six decades later, says he feels a weight has been lifted after writing his new book and telling his story.
"It is just a different level of relief for me that I carried this with me for so long," he tells PEOPLE.
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JFK assassination witness offers new details that undermine 'magic bullet theory': 'Beginning to doubt myself'
Ex-Secret Service agent Paul Landis has spoken out after 60 years and provided new details about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
JFK assassination witness offers new details that undermine magic bullet theory: ‘Beginning to doubt myself’
The new account of John F. Kennedy's assassination breaks with the Warren Commission's findings
By Nikolas Lanum Fox News
A former Secret Service agent who witnessed the assassination of John F. Kennedy has broken his silence about the tragic event and is now casting doubt on findings from the commission that investigated the late president’s death.
Paul Landis, who admitted he long believed Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed Kennedy, said he is beginning to wonder if additional shooters may have been involved.
"I’m beginning to doubt myself," Landis told The New York Times. "Now, I begin to wonder."
Landis’ said his newfound skepticism results from discrepancies between the Warren Commission and his own experiences on the day Kennedy was shot in the head and killed while riding inside a Lincoln Continental convertible through Dallas, Texas.
At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, Landis was in a car following Kennedy when he heard several gunshots ring out.
Several elements of Landis’ recent account of that day in Dealey Plaza contradict his official statement just after the shooting. While he stressed that he never believed in conspiracy theories, he was adamant to tell what he saw and did.
The Warren Commission, following an investigation, found no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby were part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to kill the president. They stated at the time that one bullet that struck Kennedy passed through him and collided with then-Texas Governor John Connally. The bullet allegedly hit his back, thigh, chest and wrist.
Critics of the commission’s findings call it the "magic bullet theory."
Their conclusion was based on a bullet found on a stretcher Connally was placed on as he was transported around the Parkland Memorial Hospital following the attack.
However, Landis told The New York Times that he initially discovered the bullet found on the stretcher. He recalled that the bullet was lodged in the limousine seat behind where Kennedy was seated after the president was brought to the hospital.
"It was a piece of evidence that I realized right away [was] very important," Landis said. "And I didn’t want it to disappear or get lost. So it was, ‘Paul, you’ve got to make a decision’ – and I grabbed it."
To stop souvenir hunters, Landis grabbed the bullet, entered the hospital and placed it on Kennedy’s stretcher. He had hoped the evidence would help doctors determine what happened. He surmised that the stretchers must have been pushed together at one point and the bullet fell near Connally.
Landis speculates the bullet had lost velocity in Kennedy’s back and was burrowed into the limousine seat.
He had always thought Oswald acted alone, but now he is unsure.
Landis will soon release his memoir, "The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years."
Over the last several years, Landis has told his story to prominent figures, such as former Secret Service Director Lewis C. Merletti and Cleveland layer James Robenalt.
"If what he says is true, which I tend to believe, it is likely to reopen the question of a second shooter, if not even more," Mr. Robenalt said.
"If the bullet we know as the magic or pristine bullet stopped in President Kennedy’s back, it means that the central thesis of the Warren Report, the single-bullet theory, is wrong," he added.
I'm pretty skeptical of this. Why didn't he come forward in the previous 60 years?
But he stands to profit from this now, since it'll sell more books.
I don't find his story - 60 years later at 88 years old - compelling.
Genghis Khan
The worst version of myself
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Chocolate Lab
Mere Commoner
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That doesn't look like paper-mache at all.
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One of the pictures looks like a few bull testicles.
NoDak
Hotlinking' sonofabitch
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Retarded.
Did they somehow also script the camera catching it in HI-DEF the exact moment the tendon would snap and you could see the calf muscle springing up towards the back of his knee?
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