- 2 days ago
John and Charles discuss the unraveling of a foundational supernatural claim within the William Branham movement: the mysterious 1963 Arizona cloud. They trace how early researcher Peter Doer uncovered evidence that contradicted the message’s narrative, discovering that the cloud was not divine but instead caused by a U.S. Air Force rocket launch. This sparked a cascading crisis of faith among leaders who privately acknowledged the deception but publicly denied it. The hosts explore how integrity—or the lack of it—determined how individuals responded to this revelation, contrasting those who changed course with those who doubled down on falsehoods to preserve power.
The conversation also examines the pattern of suppression and character attacks against whistleblowers, including a targeted harassment campaign that contributed to a scientist’s suicide. As more leaders began quietly conceding the hoax, the message evolved, gradually phasing out the cloud narrative and shifting its focus to “unique revelation.” But John and Charles argue that this evolution was built on compounded dishonesty. Ultimately, they call for transparency, highlighting how cult-like systems depend on hiding the truth and punishing those who expose it.
00:00 Introduction
01:17 When Leaders Realize They Were Lied To
03:05 The Origin and Collapse of the 1963 Cloud Doctrine
06:17 Peter Doer’s Discovery and the First Tracts
07:10 The Translation Problem and Doctrinal Censorship
09:56 Conflicting Accounts of the Angel Encounter
13:01 Ministers Face Inconvenient Evidence
16:59 Scientists Confirm Rocket-Caused Cloud
19:00 The Message Leadership’s Suppression Tactics
21:06 Harassment, Suicide, and Public Smear Campaigns
26:40 Perry Green’s Private Admission vs. Public Attacks
29:58 Integrity and the Selective Memory of Leaders
34:05 The Healer Prophet Book and Public Awareness
36:08 Rebecca Branham’s Timeline and the Breaking Point
40:03 The Cloud’s Disappearance from Sermons
42:48 Doctrinal Pivot to “Unique Revelation”
44:45 Relics of the Message and the Holy Trinity Imagery
46:12 Doctrinal Evolution and Revisionist History
48:04 Revelation Plagiarism and New Justifications
50:09 What Integrity Would Look Like in a Healthy Church
52:00 The Message’s Shifting Beliefs Without Acknowledgement
54:03 Perry Green’s Flip-Flops and Lingering Harm
56:10 Suppression of Historical Evidence
58:03 Why Suppressing the Truth Backfires
59:12 “Loving the Truth” vs. Hating the Facts
1:00:01 Transition of Leadership Around 1995
1:02:28 The Emperor Has No Clothes
1:04:05 Connections to the Charismatic Movement and Beyond
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
–
The conversation also examines the pattern of suppression and character attacks against whistleblowers, including a targeted harassment campaign that contributed to a scientist’s suicide. As more leaders began quietly conceding the hoax, the message evolved, gradually phasing out the cloud narrative and shifting its focus to “unique revelation.” But John and Charles argue that this evolution was built on compounded dishonesty. Ultimately, they call for transparency, highlighting how cult-like systems depend on hiding the truth and punishing those who expose it.
00:00 Introduction
01:17 When Leaders Realize They Were Lied To
03:05 The Origin and Collapse of the 1963 Cloud Doctrine
06:17 Peter Doer’s Discovery and the First Tracts
07:10 The Translation Problem and Doctrinal Censorship
09:56 Conflicting Accounts of the Angel Encounter
13:01 Ministers Face Inconvenient Evidence
16:59 Scientists Confirm Rocket-Caused Cloud
19:00 The Message Leadership’s Suppression Tactics
21:06 Harassment, Suicide, and Public Smear Campaigns
26:40 Perry Green’s Private Admission vs. Public Attacks
29:58 Integrity and the Selective Memory of Leaders
34:05 The Healer Prophet Book and Public Awareness
36:08 Rebecca Branham’s Timeline and the Breaking Point
40:03 The Cloud’s Disappearance from Sermons
42:48 Doctrinal Pivot to “Unique Revelation”
44:45 Relics of the Message and the Holy Trinity Imagery
46:12 Doctrinal Evolution and Revisionist History
48:04 Revelation Plagiarism and New Justifications
50:09 What Integrity Would Look Like in a Healthy Church
52:00 The Message’s Shifting Beliefs Without Acknowledgement
54:03 Perry Green’s Flip-Flops and Lingering Harm
56:10 Suppression of Historical Evidence
58:03 Why Suppressing the Truth Backfires
59:12 “Loving the Truth” vs. Hating the Facts
1:00:01 Transition of Leadership Around 1995
1:02:28 The Emperor Has No Clothes
1:04:05 Connections to the Charismatic Movement and Beyond
______________________
Weaponized Religion: From Christian Identity to the NAR:
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1735160962
Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DCGGZX3K
______________________
– Support the channel: https://www.patreon.com/branham
– Subscribe to the channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSpezVG15TVG-lOYMRXuyQ
– Visit the website: https://william-branham.org
–
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:30Hello, and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcast.
00:00:37I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research
00:00:41at william-branham.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend,
00:00:47Charles Paisley, the founder of christiangospelchurch.org, and the author of Come Out of Her, My People.
00:00:54Charles, it's good to be back and to talk all things message-related, and William Branham,
00:01:00and the main sect of the message, which is what I came from, and obviously all of its
00:01:07connections to what we see in the world today in Christianity.
00:01:12But I'm a little excited to get into this one because this is history that I should have known.
00:01:17It kind of happened during my lifetime, but there was a point in which people in the message
00:01:22and leadership began to realize, wait a minute, William Branham wasn't being honest with us.
00:01:28And it shows the integrity of people.
00:01:31Charles, if I am talking to somebody, and people who talk make mistakes, I make mistakes.
00:01:38If I'm talking and I make a mistake, I try to correct the mistakes because I want people
00:01:42to think of me as a person with integrity and with honesty.
00:01:46And you and I have had conversations where I'll back up and I'll say, I kind of messed
00:01:51up there.
00:01:52What I meant to say was, and then I would say the other thing that's true.
00:01:56But it shows the integrity of people when they discover that something that they have taught
00:02:01for decades, when they learn that it's false, a person with integrity will say, wait a minute,
00:02:07I'm sorry, people, what I taught you was false.
00:02:11And here's the correct thing that happened.
00:02:14A person without integrity, they'll try to cover it up.
00:02:17They'll try to skirt the issue.
00:02:19We can't let this get out, man.
00:02:21We do not want the people to know or otherwise, they'll know that everything that I've said
00:02:25has been false and everything that I built on top of that has been false.
00:02:29So today we get to talk through integrity.
00:02:32This is a podcast about integrity.
00:02:34And we're talking specifically through, we mentioned the cloud and all of the, John McKinnon
00:02:41and I just had a podcast discussing the cloud to refresh people's memories.
00:02:46We're talking through this and we're going to explain what happens whenever somebody who's
00:02:51in a leadership in a cult discovers the doctrine that is false.
00:02:56And we're going to look to the integrity and discuss what happens in a cult to people who
00:03:02are claiming to have integrity, but don't.
00:03:06We're looking forward to our episode today, John.
00:03:09This is going to be probably our last episode on the main sect of the message.
00:03:13There are, there's so many topics on the main sect we could talk about, John.
00:03:16I mean, we could do a whole 50 part series just on the main sect of the message, but
00:03:20we're trying to just cram in some highlights here.
00:03:24Um, you know, as we wrap through our post-Branham message years.
00:03:28One thing we're doing differently with, um, with the main sect than, than the others is
00:03:33I think we're only going to go up to about 1995 here on the podcast with the main sect
00:03:37of the message.
00:03:38And our, our, our listeners will probably understand why as we get to the end of this.
00:03:41However, my book does take the main sect up to 2005 if you want to look at that.
00:03:46And so what I'm doing, I'm in chapter nine in my book, John, just talking about some
00:03:49more stuff and you are correct.
00:03:51We are talking about an issue of integrity today, um, for the message.
00:03:56Now, the early message community believed that Jesus Christ came back to earth in some spiritual
00:04:07way during the ministry of William Branham.
00:04:11Now the, the nuanced way in which the different sects of the message believe that vary.
00:04:17There's varying explanations.
00:04:18You know, some will say it started with the, uh, pillar of fire at the river in 1933, which
00:04:25we've been through as a hoax story.
00:04:27Some people, well, mostly though, the majority of people that I'm aware of in the message
00:04:31actually put it at the 1963 event where the cloud, the face of Jesus appeared from heaven.
00:04:37And here's what I can say for sure, John.
00:04:40It was only in 1963 that anybody started to believe this.
00:04:45Nobody really believed it before 1963.
00:04:48And so in 1963, some people began to rewrite it back, you know, backdate it to 1933 based
00:04:55on the 1963 sermons.
00:04:57And so whenever I talk about this, you'll notice I almost always refer to it as the 1963 belief
00:05:03because even if people backdate it to 1933, 1963 is when they started believing it, okay?
00:05:11So 1963, everyone believes that the face of Jesus, um, appeared over the Arizona desert, looked down upon his humble prophet,
00:05:23William Branham, and he said to him, and they gave him a commission, and they told him to return to Jeffersonville and preach the revelation of the seven seals.
00:05:36And William Branham, thus commissioned, returned to holy, blessed Jeffersonville to deliver to the Jerusalem of Laodicea the final last day revelation that might give his people the rapturing faith at long last.
00:05:53And so back he comes, and that all happens.
00:05:56Well, what started to happen, John, and what we're going to talk about today?
00:05:59In the late 1970s, everybody, well, I won't say everybody, certain people in the message started to discover that that whole thing was a hoax.
00:06:08And it never actually happened, and he made it all up.
00:06:13That started to be discovered in the late 1970s, John, and I think the person, to the best of my knowledge, that we credit with making this discovery was none other than Peter Doyser.
00:06:25Peter Doyser, who I think we could call the father of the X-Message community.
00:06:29He began to discover this in the late 1970s.
00:06:32He actually wrote about it in a book called Legend of the Fall.
00:06:35This was published about 25 years ago or so, I'd say.
00:06:40But he made the discovery, and he started to circulate that information in some tracks beginning in the late 1970s.
00:06:47And that was the start of the awareness, gradual awareness, that the most important supernatural event, which the entire message religion is based upon, was a hoax.
00:07:02When I started working with Peter Doyser, and I met him in person, we were collaborating on a few different things.
00:07:11But when I first met him, the Voice of God Recordings publications was in a really odd state.
00:07:18Almost 50 years had gone by since William Branham had died, and the organization established itself to spread the message, the quote-unquote message of William Branham.
00:07:30And how do you do this?
00:07:32So you've got people in other countries, other languages, you hire a staff, you get translators, you take the recordings, you translate them to text, you send them out.
00:07:42And I visited, I've went to the Easter meetings where we go visit the place, and they talk you through how all of this production works and how blessed it was to get the message out to the people.
00:07:55They equivalented the message of William Branham going out to the people in the same way Christians would consider the Bible going out to other nations.
00:08:05That's how weird this was.
00:08:06And as you're looking through this big process, and in your mind you're thinking how it works, you think, okay, so there's 1,200 sermons, they've had how many decades to go through those sermons, a translator going through a sermon, how long does that take?
00:08:23You've got multiple translators in multiple countries, and you honestly, I honestly thought that every single message of William Branham was translated and sent around the world.
00:08:33The problem is, it hadn't.
00:08:35And in some languages, there were only handfuls of recordings that had gone out.
00:08:41Spanish, I would say the most targeted region were the Spanish-speaking countries, and they had people like George Smith who spoke Spanish.
00:08:50They had many different translators.
00:08:52And I thought surely the Spanish sermons would all be translated, but they weren't.
00:08:56And I'm learning today, as you begin to understand the highly racist, highly anti-Semitic, highly problematic things that he said, translators just don't know what to do with this.
00:09:10How do you translate somebody who is calling, this is offensive, but this is what he says, who's calling Jewish people hook-nosed Jews?
00:09:19Paul was a hook-nosed Jew.
00:09:20How do you translate that, man?
00:09:22You're insulting the Apostle Paul.
00:09:25And there's many different things.
00:09:27I'm not going to go through the entire list, but there's a problem with translations.
00:09:31And so, the problem is, when you don't have the entire collection, and you're being brainwashed by the recordings, you're brainwashed in a different way than people who have all the recordings.
00:09:45I remember growing up, I had the entire collection.
00:09:48I had brainwashed myself with them.
00:09:51But there were series of recordings that we thought were of greater importance.
00:09:56So, I brainwashed myself in listening to the Seven Seals ministry.
00:10:02I would listen to that over and over and over.
00:10:04And I would hear them talk about, I knew nothing about this sermon until I walked in the room and the angel met me before every sermon and gave me the message.
00:10:13I brainwashed myself like this.
00:10:15He said, in my memory, I believe that a literal angel came down to earth, met William Branham in the office where my grandfather sat before he walked out to the platform, gave him the message, opened the Seven Seal right there in the room, and walked out into the platform.
00:10:33That's what he said.
00:10:34That's what I believed.
00:10:35I'll never forget when I met Peter Deiser, and he was talking about, well, did you know, John, that those angels were supposed to have given him these messages back in Arizona during this hunting trip, which he wasn't even there in the state at the time, and he was supposed to go back and preach what they told him out there.
00:10:57I was like, no, Peter Deiser, that's not how this works.
00:10:59He said he met him in the room in Jeffersonville.
00:11:03That's what I was brainwashed to believe.
00:11:05What's interesting is that was in the year 1963.
00:11:10If you look at the NAR today, by and large, they say William Branham was very, very in tune with the spirit.
00:11:17He was clearly listening from God as God's mouthpiece, and then he went astray.
00:11:24Well, the years in which they go astray, if you look at the timeline, 1963, he's not under the cloud because who's he working with?
00:11:32He's in Houston working with Joel Osteen's father.
00:11:36He's working with key figures in the full gospel businessmen to save the Leslie Douglas Ashley and his prostitute partner from death and execution in Texas.
00:11:49He's working with key figures who would evolve into either the word of faith, the prosperity gospel, all of these different movements that emerge from this.
00:12:00He's working with them, which means they don't yet think he has gone astray.
00:12:05And what's he teaching at this time?
00:12:07He's teaching that he himself worked with the angels to open the seven seals, and he did it in that room.
00:12:14And he's also saying that he didn't do it in the room.
00:12:19The angels gave it to him.
00:12:20How do you reconcile this?
00:12:22So the problem is, we've mentioned it a few times, if you get access to history and you understand history, your mind can kind of wake up from it.
00:12:30So I woke up from that brainwashing immediately when I saw, wait a minute, he's lying.
00:12:35Neither did he open it in this tabernacle room with the angel present.
00:12:41Neither did he open it in under this cloud, which he was not even there in the state at the time.
00:12:46None of it's true.
00:12:48So that's how my mind process worked.
00:12:50That's how the brainwashing kind of happened.
00:12:52But now take everything that I just said and apply it to ministers.
00:12:57There are ministers who have preached this for decades, and they suddenly come in contact with the fact that,
00:13:04A, he wasn't underneath this cloud when he said he was.
00:13:08B, he wasn't even in the state because hunting season hadn't started yet.
00:13:14C, the angel was supposed to deliver the message of the seven seal out in Arizona and continue on through, you know, D through Z,
00:13:24all of the other things that he said about it, none of which can be true.
00:13:29And that's the background for what we're about to get into.
00:13:31Leaders in the cult and leaders who were in ministries that emerged after the cult who believed this stuff
00:13:39suddenly came in contact with the fact that, wait a minute, nothing the man said about this story was true.
00:13:46You are correct, John.
00:13:47And what you're describing is the things that Peter Doyser began to discover in the late 1970s.
00:13:53And it was gradual.
00:13:55It was a gradual discovery of some of these pieces of information.
00:13:58I think the very first thing that they encountered, John, was somebody was looking at the hunting guides for javelina season in Arizona.
00:14:11And if you're familiar with William Branham's story, one of the key, when he saw the face of Jesus come down to him,
00:14:18one of the key elements is he was out hunting javelinas, right?
00:14:21And he had shot, I think he had shot his javelina the day before, and he was out that day and his buddies were going to try and get their javelinas that day when this thing all happened.
00:14:32And so this thing happening in the middle of a javelina hunt season is just very central to the story.
00:14:39And so someone, and I believe Peter Doyser was looking at the hunting regulations and realized, wait a minute, javelina hunting season doesn't line up with the dates that this cloud actually appeared.
00:14:54And so you've got a contradiction there.
00:14:56And so this is how it started.
00:14:57It started with them discovering, wait a minute, the hunting season dates don't line up with the cloud.
00:15:04And so they start digging in more to try and figure out what's this discrepancy.
00:15:10Because they couldn't possibly believe their blessed prophet was poaching, right?
00:15:14Because that was the implication back then.
00:15:16I mean, that was really the worst of it was at the beginning is maybe the prophet was poaching.
00:15:20Oh, no.
00:15:21But no, obviously that's not what it was.
00:15:24So they started digging into it.
00:15:26And as they dug into it, yes, that's when they started to line up the sermon tapes.
00:15:31And there's a sermon that William Branham preached in Houston, Texas on March the 4th.
00:15:36And he said he was going to come back and be hunting his javelinas after March the 4th, which puts him out hunting after the cloud appeared.
00:15:45So now you've got the hunting dates don't line up.
00:15:48You've also got William Branham on tape admitting, yes, he's coming like the week after the cloud appeared to go hunting.
00:15:55And as things go on and more evidence comes up, yeah, I mean, it begins to become very apparent that William Branham was actually in Texas on the day that the cloud appeared.
00:16:06The cloud he said he was standing underneath hunting that day.
00:16:09And so it starts to unravel that really important thing.
00:16:15Because if William Branham wasn't underneath the cloud that day, John, how did that happen?
00:16:20And William Branham even said in one statement that it was the mist under his feet while he was hunting that went up into the sky and created the cloud.
00:16:30So if he was in Texas, you know, how did the mist come up under his feet?
00:16:34It just doesn't make any sense, right?
00:16:36It just becomes obvious it's a made-up story.
00:16:40And so as that's beginning to come to light, they start digging in even more.
00:16:47And at a certain point, Peter Doyser starts working with some cult awareness people.
00:16:53And they start to dig in to try and figure out where did this, what is this cloud anyway?
00:16:58What really happened?
00:16:59So if you go back into those days, John, the cloud was investigated by a man named James McDonald.
00:17:06He was a scientist at the atmospheric or the Arizona Institute for Atmospheric Science.
00:17:12And he and a team of scientists there collected evidence and looked at it to try and figure out what made that cloud in the sky that William Branham claimed to be underneath.
00:17:24And the reason they looked at it is because it was a really unusual cloud.
00:17:27It was 50 miles wide.
00:17:29It was like 5 miles high in the sky, I believe, something like that.
00:17:33It was a very, very unusual cloud that had formed right at the very edge of space where water vapor shouldn't exist.
00:17:39And so there was a scientific interest to understand why that cloud appeared.
00:17:44So they investigated that cloud and they discovered that a rocket had launched from Vandenberg Air Force that day.
00:17:51In fact, there had been two.
00:17:52And there were two clouds.
00:17:54Of course, the one main larger cloud is the one we always focused on in the message.
00:17:58Well, as that happened, they also got wind speed measurements between Vandenberg Air Force Base in Arizona and Peter Doyser, or rather, James McDonald found that the airspeed of wind speed between the two sites was very close to account for the natural drift of the cloud from Vandenberg Air Force Base over to Arizona that day.
00:18:21And by the time it was all said and done, they interviewed people who would help launch the rockets.
00:18:27They got statements from the United States Air Force and different things.
00:18:31And they confirmed, you know, all the way back in the 60s when it happened, that the cloud had been made by these rockets.
00:18:37And the United States Air Force even took credit for creating the clouds.
00:18:40Well, as you fast forward into the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, Peter Doyser is discovering all this and getting letters and things of the same evidence.
00:18:52And he puts together a tract, John, that begins to circulate in a few places out in Arizona to tell people the cloud was man-made.
00:19:01And William Branham was in Arizona that day.
00:19:04And so that forces the early message community back in those days to react to that information coming out.
00:19:11And this presents another crisis, really, for message leaders as you come into the early 1980s.
00:19:18The 1980s was an era of laden crises for message leaders, wasn't it, John?
00:19:23But a lot of the people in the rank and file never understood, never heard.
00:19:27This was never communicated to rank and file in the message, John.
00:19:30Did you hear about it in the 80s?
00:19:32I never heard about it in the 80s.
00:19:33Very few people found out about it in the 80s in the rank and file.
00:19:37But I'm telling you, by the end of the 80s, we'll show you why here in a few minutes, pretty well all of the senior leadership were aware of these problems by the late 80s.
00:19:45And I want to take a minute to pause and talk about how all of that played out.
00:19:50Because there's a pattern here.
00:19:52It's not just one or two people.
00:19:54There is a pattern.
00:19:55I had long conversations with Peter Doyser.
00:19:58He actually came to my house and we had dinner and discussed many, many things.
00:20:03But he was talking about when he first discovered it.
00:20:06Suddenly, he had to come to terms with the fact that he had, in many ways, isolated himself from his family because he had joined the message.
00:20:17And his family knew the message was a cult.
00:20:19And he kind of distanced himself.
00:20:22And he had huge regrets.
00:20:24But whenever he discovered that it was false, he said, John, my biggest desire was just to be a Christian, to serve God.
00:20:32He was a minister.
00:20:34He had a ministry helping people who were off the streets with drugs and alcohol and many, many different things that he had going on.
00:20:42And he said, I just suddenly realized that, wait, this is false.
00:20:46This is nonsense.
00:20:48And what's interesting is his actual belief set wasn't really that far from the fundamentalist set that's in the message.
00:20:56He had some variations and he had some things that he'd moved, progressed away from.
00:21:00But if you take some of the more liberal ministers in the message, take away William Branham, you had what Peter Deiser was teaching.
00:21:08Very, very, very similar.
00:21:11He, for example, he said he had long conversations with Ern Baxter.
00:21:16Baxter's the guy who was Branham's campaign manager.
00:21:18Baxter's the guy who started the shepherding movement, one of the guys.
00:21:21And he said, Baxter's theology was spot on, John.
00:21:26And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I don't know about that, Peter.
00:21:30But that was Peter.
00:21:32So here's a man who's not that far distant from the belief set of the message who comes in contact with the fact that parts of the message was complete fiction.
00:21:43And his biggest desire was to get people out of the fiction and into the true.
00:21:48So he made this pamphlet.
00:21:49And he goes church to church and he's passing these things out.
00:21:52What did the cult do?
00:21:54They tried to brand him as a, not just a heretic, but they wanted to assassinate his character.
00:22:00They wanted to brand him as a bad, vile person.
00:22:04Because if you brand the person who has the truth as an enemy of God or a retrobate, however they want to say it,
00:22:13and you can convince the people that you can't trust the reprobates, then they won't trust the information that came out.
00:22:21So what they did is just like they did with you, like they did with me, many, many other people.
00:22:26A long line in history of people who are spreading just facts.
00:22:31Here's the truth.
00:22:32They branded him, and they wanted to silence him by attacking his character.
00:22:38And that established a pattern that has just continued on and on.
00:22:42I think, Charles, they probably saw the power of how that worked.
00:22:46If they could brand Peter Deiser as a bad person and silence him, even though he's got clear, undeniable evidence that William Branham was lying.
00:22:56Well, that works so well.
00:22:58Let's continue that pattern, brothers.
00:23:00And so they have these minister meetings.
00:23:03You probably were involved in some of these.
00:23:05Gathered together.
00:23:06How do we suppress these people who are coming up with the truth about our ministry?
00:23:11Well, we brand them as bad guys.
00:23:13And that's what they did with Peter.
00:23:15Yes.
00:23:15They find ways to attack a character, you know.
00:23:20And, John, you know, people like me, you know, not to brag or anything, but I was pretty squeaky cling, you know.
00:23:26They'll find ways to just make stuff up, even, right?
00:23:30If they don't got nothing, they'll just make something up.
00:23:32They'll just make stuff up about you, even.
00:23:34Crazy stuff.
00:23:35You know, I saw ministers and things people leave.
00:23:38They would just accuse them of crazy, off-the-wall stuff just to get the people to not pay attention to them anymore, right?
00:23:47But Peter Deiser, fortunately, I mean, his information was able to get out.
00:23:51You know, a few people got a hold of it, but not very many.
00:23:54The leaders did an incredibly effective job of suppressing what Peter Deiser found in the late 70s and into the 80s, you know, managed to keep the people from finding it out.
00:24:06And one thing that also happened in those years, John, that goes right along with this.
00:24:10So as the truth that the clouds were made by rockets came out, well, what happens in Arizona?
00:24:20Perry Green of the Tucson Tabernacle orchestrated a harassment campaign against James MacDonald, okay?
00:24:30The scientist who had investigated all of this.
00:24:34And they would go confront him at his work.
00:24:37They would confront him at the university.
00:24:39They would confront him at his home.
00:24:41They would hunt him down in public restaurants and confront him in restaurants.
00:24:45Perry Green, one time, John, managed to book a plane ticket and sat next to James MacDonald on a long flight and harassed him the whole way on the flight.
00:24:56I mean, I'm telling you, they harassed James MacDonald over this stuff.
00:25:01And they ran articles in the state newspapers in Arizona attacking him.
00:25:07I mean, they did a public harassment campaign against James MacDonald.
00:25:11And we know James MacDonald was going through a divorce at a certain point in his life.
00:25:18And in the midst of that divorce with all that harassment happening alongside, James MacDonald committed suicide.
00:25:24He did.
00:25:25And then after he committed suicide, they had his funeral.
00:25:28Perry Green took several of the leaders of the message and members of the Tucson Tabernacle to James MacDonald's funeral.
00:25:37And they made a big mockery of him at his own funeral, John.
00:25:40And then they proclaimed this is the wrath of God poured out on James MacDonald for saying, you know, that the cloud was made by, you know, was not supernatural.
00:25:51I mean, it's absolutely outrageous, outrageous what message people in Arizona did to James MacDonald through all of that.
00:25:59But yeah, I mean, the truth is the truth.
00:26:01And even though James MacDonald did commit suicide and everything, he's not the only scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Science in Arizona that put out the findings.
00:26:14The director of that institution was a man, I believe his name was Louis Vuitton.
00:26:19I think that was his name.
00:26:20And he put out a statement saying, yes, we, me personally, the director of the Institute of Atmospheric Science here at Arizona, me and our other colleagues and James MacDonald were all convinced by the evidence that, yes, the cloud was made by the rockets.
00:26:39So this isn't like one scientist against the message community.
00:26:44It's the whole team at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics out in Arizona that came to the belief through looking at the evidence that the cloud was made by the rocket.
00:26:57And so the message was whole scale responding to this information in honestly a very radical way, John, because the suicide and everything of James MacDonald and the harassment all happened in the same years that Peter Doiser had uncovered this information.
00:27:14And was publishing it in some tracks of the early message community.
00:27:18So let's talk a little bit about integrity, Charles.
00:27:21So you got Perry Green, who's orchestrating this whole attack on a person who simply was the scientist who was studying this cloud event.
00:27:32The scientist who discovered, wait a minute, this came from rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
00:27:39There's no way this is a UFO.
00:27:41So take aside the fact that the guy was a UFO scientist for a minute and just think that all this guy is really doing, all he's doing is studying the atmosphere.
00:27:51And he's studying, he's trying to find something that can prove the claim or disprove the claim that this is a rocket launch.
00:27:59That's all he's doing.
00:28:01And Perry Green attacks him.
00:28:03And let's talk about integrity for a minute.
00:28:06Perry Green is one of the people who later admitted, nope, William Branham wasn't there.
00:28:11There's no way that he was there.
00:28:13And so he's orchestrating this attack on this guy.
00:28:17And anybody else who wants to align with the fact that William Branham was making all of this up, Perry Green would attack him.
00:28:25But Perry Green himself knew that this was false and later admitted it.
00:28:29I don't know how you probably know, but how many years later he finally admitted that he knew this.
00:28:33All of these men, my grandfather is one.
00:28:37These men have one job, Charles.
00:28:39They study the message of William Branham more than they study the Bible.
00:28:43They walk out onto the platform every twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday night, a few nights in between.
00:28:49And they talk about the things that William Branham said.
00:28:52Usually it's things like this, things like the cloud, because those were Branham's most boisterous claims.
00:28:59They had to have come in contact with all of the information that when I first saw it, like I mentioned, I snapped out of it instantly.
00:29:07I mean, instantly, I knew that you can't lie about an angel telling you to go walk out of a little room in your church and go preach the opening of the seal when the angel was supposed to have already told you this.
00:29:21You don't forget when an angel of God comes down and sees you, it's going to scare the life out of you, man.
00:29:28You're going to be scared because here's this being that's not of this world who's giving me the message of the seven seals or whatever.
00:29:35You know, he claimed all kinds of different nonsensical claims.
00:29:40You're not going to forget this.
00:29:42And so the ministers who study it and they want to know what they were doing when they were trying to pinpoint the details of the javelina hunt.
00:29:50It's not enough that we know that William Branham made this claim.
00:29:54We want to know exactly the specifics.
00:29:57That's more important to us than the Bible.
00:29:59We want to know the minute.
00:30:00What was the minute whenever the angel came down to see me?
00:30:03What was the second?
00:30:05Can I get the second out of it?
00:30:07What are all the details?
00:30:09Because, man, I can write a book on that.
00:30:12I can make money by selling books.
00:30:13I can preach sermons.
00:30:15I can hold conventions for the message people.
00:30:18We're going to make everybody excited because I learned the exact moment that angel came down.
00:30:24And then they look and wait a minute.
00:30:27Hunting season wasn't even during the time the cloud came.
00:30:31And he said he was hunting.
00:30:33What do I do with this?
00:30:35So that's what was happening in the message community.
00:30:39Well, Perry Green knew this.
00:30:40Perry Green, like my grandfather, studied the message.
00:30:43He would have known when Branham said that the angel gave it to him in Jeffersonville.
00:30:48And then he walked out on the platform and he knew nothing of it before that room.
00:30:53He also would have known, Branham said, that angels came down from the heaven.
00:30:58It was in the form of this cloud.
00:31:00A mist came up, like you said.
00:31:02And they gave me the message of the seals in Arizona, not in Jeffersonville.
00:31:07These guys knew this.
00:31:09So Perry Green knew it.
00:31:11He attacks the people.
00:31:13Attacks all of the people who have any information to silence the information.
00:31:18And that, for me, Charles, that is the opposite of integrity.
00:31:22Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started?
00:31:26Or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic,
00:31:32and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?
00:31:36You can learn this and more on William Branham Historical Research's website,
00:31:41william-branham.org.
00:31:43On the books page of the website, you can find the compiled research of John Collins,
00:31:48Charles Paisley, Stephen Montgomery, John McKinnon, and others,
00:31:53with links to the paper, audio, and digital versions of each book.
00:31:57You can also find resources and documentation on various people and topics related to those movements.
00:32:04If you want to contribute to the cause,
00:32:06you can support the podcast by clicking the Contribute button at the top.
00:32:10And as always, be sure to like and subscribe to the audio or video version that you're listening to or watching.
00:32:17On behalf of William Branham Historical Research, we want to thank you for your support.
00:32:22You know, John, when you think about how they responded to the initial wave of information
00:32:28outing the cloud as a hoax, it's incredibly telling,
00:32:33because it really defines the pattern that message leaders follow to the present day on all of this stuff.
00:32:38You know, at the very first, deny, deny, deny, and harass, harass, harass, harass,
00:32:45and discredit, discredit, discredit, right?
00:32:47You know, dig in the heels, do not give an inch,
00:32:50and even if we have to do very questionable things like harass people until they commit suicide,
00:32:55that's what we're going to do in order to keep this thing going, right?
00:32:59They reveal the radicalness, right, with that initial, those initial pieces.
00:33:05And, of course, Peter Doiser was right.
00:33:09And, of course, James MacDonald was right.
00:33:13They were right, John.
00:33:15They were correct.
00:33:16And even though they responded so terribly to the point that they contributed to death and destruction of people's lives, John,
00:33:24that's what they did.
00:33:25I mean, there's, hands down, the message contributed to death and destruction of people's lives
00:33:29in order to deny these things.
00:33:32They still do the same thing to this day, you know, when they're confronted with this sort of information.
00:33:38Well, give it some time, John, and they're going to be forced.
00:33:42They've gradually become forced to deal with the reality of the situation.
00:33:47Now, as it starts, the leaders are able to effectively suppress the whole thing.
00:33:51But as you come up into the mid and late 1980s, they lose their suppression effect, John.
00:33:59And their ability to suppress that initial bit of information is in large part because of this book by Doug Weaver,
00:34:06The Healer Prophet.
00:34:08This book was originally published in 1987.
00:34:11Doug Weaver came around and he interviewed.
00:34:13He interviewed Perry Green.
00:34:14He interviewed Billy Paul.
00:34:15He interviewed quite a few people when he wrote this book.
00:34:17And this is the first real scholarly biography that was published on William Branham, The Healer Prophet.
00:34:24And when he published this book, John, he included in passing that the Arizona cloud was created by a Thor rocket.
00:34:35And that William Branham was in Arizona, okay?
00:34:38He put it in the book.
00:34:39And he got it from Peter Doiser.
00:34:41So, thank you, Peter Doiser, for talking to our dear friend, you know, Mr. Doug Weaver so this could get into the book.
00:34:47Well, John, I'm telling you, this book was read by every significant leader of the message in the late 80s.
00:34:54By the early 90s, everyone in the message had read – everyone in senior leadership had read this book.
00:35:00Now, a lot of the rank and file had not, okay?
00:35:02But by the time this book comes out, Raymond Jackson is aware of it.
00:35:06Floyd Patterson is aware of it.
00:35:08Billy Paul is aware of it.
00:35:10Your grandfather – everyone is aware of it, you know, in the immediate aftermath of this book coming out in leadership.
00:35:16What do they do, John?
00:35:18It's an emergency.
00:35:19Something has to be done.
00:35:21The timeline don't match up.
00:35:22The cloud might be fake.
00:35:24Might be, you know, man-made.
00:35:25Like, well, that is when this magazine, Only Believe Magazine, is published, is in direct response to these things.
00:35:33Only Believe Magazine is published by William Branham's daughter, Rebecca.
00:35:37Rebecca Branham, who's married to George Smith.
00:35:39And I really wish – you know, I'm sure – George, next time you watch this podcast, what I'd hope you do is you could put this back up on your website.
00:35:45I'd really appreciate that.
00:35:47But we have printed copies if you want.
00:35:48But anyway, the – inside of this book, Rebecca – and thank you, Rebecca.
00:35:55God bless you, Rebecca, for doing this.
00:35:56This is one of the best things Rebecca ever did.
00:35:58Rebecca was a nice lady.
00:36:00I don't have nothing bad to say about her.
00:36:02She was a nice lady.
00:36:03And look, she made the timeline in here to respond.
00:36:07Sarah Branham was – Rebecca was living with her dad in Arizona when all of these things happened.
00:36:13She knew where he was, what he was up to.
00:36:15And she made this nice timeline of all the dates so that everybody could, you know, understand what to do with this new information about the cloud and the hunting and all of that.
00:36:26And what ends up happening, John, is that Rebecca basically tells us in this book, yeah, my dad was lying about it all.
00:36:36That's what you take away from it.
00:36:39He wasn't there when the cloud appeared.
00:36:42You know, Charles, a person with integrity would simply say, yeah, my dad said he was there.
00:36:49He wasn't.
00:36:50My dad said it was on this date.
00:36:52It wasn't.
00:36:54But we believe the facts that he presented to us the opening of the seven seals, the substance of the message was good.
00:37:03A person with integrity could do that.
00:37:05And you could, you know, you could stretch it and you say, yeah, he over-spiritualized things.
00:37:11He exaggerated.
00:37:12He outright lied about a few things.
00:37:14But God was giving him a message.
00:37:17And so we want to focus on the message.
00:37:18We don't want to focus on the lies that the man said.
00:37:22A person with integrity would just simply do this, right?
00:37:26Yeah, we discovered he wasn't being truthful.
00:37:28He lied.
00:37:29He lied through his teeth.
00:37:30But the problem is, what has happened, people in leadership in not only this cult, but every other cult we've examined, whenever there is a means in which the rank-and-file members can come in contact with something that defies a supernatural claim, rank-and-file members will suddenly start to snap out of the brainwashing.
00:37:55They'll start to realize, wait a minute, if he lied about this supernatural claim that he had, an angel, did an angel really come down?
00:38:04That's what the logical next step in the deprogramming process happens.
00:38:08Did an angel really come down?
00:38:10Was the message that he gave to us, was that message really from God?
00:38:14Because if you take away the cloud, you have to take away the angel.
00:38:17If you take away the angel, you have to take away God's interaction in the whole thing.
00:38:22Did it even happen?
00:38:23Is any of it real?
00:38:24Well, and your mind starts to go through that cycle, cult leadership does not want people to think.
00:38:31That's the bottom line.
00:38:32They do not want people to think.
00:38:33So if we can take away the information, if we can take this book off the website, because now we have a whole generation of people who don't realize that the timeline that he gave is false.
00:38:45If we can take that off the web, then any person who's growing up who's not yet come in contact with this, they won't go through that same process.
00:38:54We can actually eliminate the fallout.
00:38:55We can actually eliminate the fallout.
00:38:56That's what's happening.
00:38:58I agree with you, John.
00:38:59You know, what happened after Sarah published Road to Sunset and gave that date, this came out.
00:39:06I want to say, yeah, this came out in June of 1992.
00:39:10So by the time you get to June of 1992, there is no longer any ability to deny this anymore.
00:39:19Because unlike this book, John, which basically the leaders read and forbid their congregations from reading, Rebecca had, like, how many people in the rank and file on her mailing list?
00:39:34This went to the rank and file.
00:39:36This is the moment the rank and file started to find out about it, okay?
00:39:40And the leaders cannot ignore it anymore when it comes out in Only Believe magazine.
00:39:47Thank you, Rebecca.
00:39:48And so, as that comes out, John, every group comes up with maybe nuanced ways to deal with the problem.
00:39:58You know, I can say the way that the groups that I come from, the way we dealt with it, Raymond Jackson just stopped talking about the cloud.
00:40:07You will not find Raymond Jackson.
00:40:09Mention the cloud again after this magazine, okay?
00:40:12It never happened.
00:40:13He just quit talking about it.
00:40:15And most of the leaders in our sect, that's just what happens.
00:40:18We're not going to talk about the cloud no more.
00:40:20And so, you do have, you have a whole generation of people who grew up after John that has never even heard, really, of the cloud.
00:40:27We had, so I'll throw this in.
00:40:29We have a very elderly preacher who started to lose his mind shortly before I left the message, and he started talking about the cloud again.
00:40:38Like, he forgot all of this stuff.
00:40:41And so, the younger generation got to hear about the cloud from him, because he forgot that he was supposed to quit talking about it.
00:40:48But anyway, the, as that happens, you know, the people just lose awareness of it over time.
00:40:58But when you actually step back into the ideology, you're like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait.
00:41:02Why do we think William Branham had this great authority to preach the seven seals to us?
00:41:10How did, how did he, how did this ever come about?
00:41:14And if you take away the cloud, you, you, you take away William Branham's authority to preach the seals.
00:41:19If you take away the cloud, you take away William Branham, I mean, you, it, it, you can't even have it anymore.
00:41:26It don't work anymore.
00:41:27The angels didn't come down and say, go back to Jeffersonville and preach the seals.
00:41:32You don't have the face of Jesus.
00:41:34You don't have the Lord sending from heaven with a shout anymore if you take away the cloud.
00:41:38If you don't got the shout, you don't got the message, because the message is the shout.
00:41:42Like, the, the logic of the message collapses without the cloud.
00:41:46If you take away the cloud, the message collapses.
00:41:48And so, I would just highly encourage you, if you have grown up in the years after they quit talking about the cloud,
00:41:55for goodness sakes, ask yourselves, how do we get the Lord descending from heaven with a shout without the cloud?
00:42:01How do we get William Branham giving permission to preach the seals?
00:42:04If, if, you know, how does this happen?
00:42:06So, anyways, that's how my sect responded to it.
00:42:09I know others responded the same way, John.
00:42:10Um, and, and gradually they just moved the rank and file's attention away from this obvious hoax cloud.
00:42:19And I know one other thing, too, that I'll add in here, John, is this is when they started to really focus on, well, the really important thing is this revelation.
00:42:28Oh, signs and wonders, eh, we've got this wonderful revelation.
00:42:34This is really where it's at.
00:42:36This is what proves that this is divine.
00:42:40Nobody ever preached anything like this ever before.
00:42:45No one ever had the revelation of the seals before.
00:42:48No one ever had any understanding of these things before.
00:42:52So, you know, the signs and wonders, eh, but the real evidence that this message is from God is the uniqueness of this revelation of the seven seals.
00:43:02That's where they went next.
00:43:03I know in my sect of the message and in several others to, to kind of vindicate it.
00:43:09Um, and we'll talk about the problem with that next.
00:43:12You know, I'll take it a step further than you did.
00:43:15If you take away the cloud, you take away the holy trinity of the message.
00:43:20When I was growing up, it was probably this way for you to also, whenever you went into somebody's house, they had the holy trinity on their wall.
00:43:27You had the halo picture, the photograph from William Branham in Houston, Texas, with the halo of his head.
00:43:33You had the cloud picture and you had Hoffman's head of Christ.
00:43:36Every single, I can't think of a single message person who displayed the things on the wall, the relics on the wall.
00:43:44I can't think of a single person who didn't have the holy trinity.
00:43:47And then after this comes out, trinity turns into dualism.
00:43:52I actually just, uh, I think it was yesterday.
00:43:55I saw the photographs inside of a messenger's message person's home and they had dualism because they had Hoffman's head of Christ and the halo photo.
00:44:04They didn't have the cloud because the cloud isn't that important in the message today.
00:44:09But when I was growing up, before all this information was widely available, as it is today, before this, people had the holy trinity.
00:44:17And keep in mind, as I mentioned earlier, William Branham was a key figure in what would evolve into the charismatic movement.
00:44:27When all these charismatic leaders are there in Houston with William Branham headlining the event for this convicted duo, John Osteen's right there with him in the prison cell talking to the guy.
00:44:39These guys were all believing that William Branham was communicating directly with God.
00:44:45And this is the same exact time he's starting to say seven angels came down from heaven.
00:44:50So did they believe the holy trinity too?
00:44:52I would love to know if you went into John Osteen's home, Joel Osteen's father, if they had photographs of Branham and the halo and the cloud, all that.
00:45:01I don't know if they did or not, but what I can say is that did happen in the message sect.
00:45:07And those people did go visit leadership in the message who would have had the things on the wall.
00:45:14So John Osteen likely would have come in contact with the holy trinity of the message.
00:45:19And then what happened later?
00:45:21You know, if John Osteen did his due diligence and started studying and realized, wait a minute, William Branham lied about this.
00:45:27Was that, Charles, the reason why that the charismatic movement by and large said William Branham went astray in the later years?
00:45:34Did they also discover this lie?
00:45:36As you come into the 1990s with this information, most of the message community successfully weathers the storm, right?
00:45:45They're either able to suppress the information or come up with alternate explanations in order to keep the message coherent.
00:45:54But the ideology of the message went through a very key evolution with the information from Peter Doyser initially, then published through the Healer Prophet, and then made aware to everybody by Rebecca Branham.
00:46:11These three things in that cascade caused really significant evolution in message thinking about these things.
00:46:20Now, if you were from the message after that, you probably think that the way you believe the message is the way it has always been believed.
00:46:28No, absolutely not.
00:46:30They changed it after these things, right?
00:46:33And they changed it because there were things that just could no longer work.
00:46:40And so they changed the message.
00:46:43And here's what they do.
00:46:44It's so dishonest, John, is they change it and then they say, but this is what we believed all along.
00:46:49Did you experience that in the message, John?
00:46:51They would change it and tell you, no, this is what we believed all along.
00:46:56And if you say, no, this isn't what we believed all along.
00:46:59In fact, this is the exact opposite of what you said three weeks ago.
00:47:02They'll throw you out of the church.
00:47:04Like you can't question the narrative even.
00:47:07So they change it.
00:47:09They say this is what we always believed.
00:47:11And you can't even question the narrative or you will have discipline and be thrown out.
00:47:14So they change the narrative in order – because they've got to keep up this facade that they have the blessed truth and they've always believed it right and they will always believe it right.
00:47:26But the message changed.
00:47:28And the big emphasis at that point came in, like I said, the uniqueness of the seals was really – became a really important justification.
00:47:36But as time rolls on, John, and this is where I get a tad fuzzy, people started to also discover that William Branham actually copied the seals out of his library books.
00:47:48And this then undermined the new rationale that a lot of people had come up with to continue to justify it.
00:47:57So now the cloud has fallen.
00:47:59The uniqueness of the revelation of the seals falls next.
00:48:03And this is where a lot of groups are at today.
00:48:06A lot of groups are unaware still that William Branham copied the sermons on the seals primarily out of his library books, right?
00:48:14And then the ones, though, that have kind of embraced that, they then have been backed up to a new backup position.
00:48:21Well, yes, he did copy them out of his library books, but God gave him the inspiration of which book to copy out of, right?
00:48:28So this thing has evolved from angels came down from heaven and commissioned William Branham to come back to Jeffersonville
00:48:37and gave him all the divine revolution in a room to let's not talk about the cloud anymore.
00:48:42Angels came to the room and gave him the revelation.
00:48:44To now, he copied it out of his library books by divine inspiration.
00:48:49Like, that is the official answer in certain sects of the message now.
00:48:53Yes, he copied it out of his library books by divine revelation.
00:48:56And that is a massive, massive shift from the universal belief of the early message community, right?
00:49:04And they want to say, no, this is the way it was all along and we believed it this way.
00:49:07No, you're a bunch of liars.
00:49:08You're a bunch of liars.
00:49:09You did not believe it this way all along.
00:49:12Good.
00:49:12Give me a break.
00:49:13Give me a break.
00:49:14So you lied when you told us his lies, repeated his lies to begin with.
00:49:19You lied when you changed it the first time.
00:49:21You lied when you changed it the second time.
00:49:23And you're still lying to us today, Helen, as you believed it this way all along, right?
00:49:26You have compounding lies.
00:49:28How can you trust people who can't tell you the truth, John?
00:49:31How do you trust people that don't know how to be honest?
00:49:34So let's go back to integrity, Charles.
00:49:36So you are a Christian who's not involved with any of this and you walk into a church and I've done this.
00:49:45I've gone to several different churches now and there's different ways in which they do this.
00:49:49I think the most common is the pastor will give you some little pamphlet or handbook that says, what do we believe?
00:49:56And they'll tell you what they believe and you go through the handbook and you're either in agreement with it or you're not.
00:50:02You either like it and you want to stay or maybe this is not the church for me.
00:50:06That's how open and honest many of the churches are if you're not in a cult, if you're in mainstream Christianity.
00:50:14I remember clearly opening one of these books and what we believe and they had an explanation of the gospel.
00:50:20I think I've mentioned this to you.
00:50:22I was shocked, man.
00:50:23Wait a minute.
00:50:24The gospel is that simple?
00:50:25Why would anybody want to add anything to this?
00:50:28That's what hit me.
00:50:29But they were very open, honest.
00:50:31They showed integrity.
00:50:32This is what we believe.
00:50:33The entire duration of us being with them, they didn't really deviate from that.
00:50:39And I suspect, I never got to witness this, but I suspect if they were to have deviated, they would gather everybody into a room and say, look, we give new people who come to our church this pamphlet.
00:50:51It says what we believe and we've learned new information.
00:50:55We've changed a little bit in what we believe.
00:50:57Would you all vote that we update this pamphlet?
00:50:59And by and large, everybody in the room would say, yes, let's do it because that's no longer what we believe.
00:51:05We want to be open and we want to show integrity to people who are coming to our church.
00:51:10Now take the message, Charles.
00:51:12You have people.
00:51:14My family was like this.
00:51:16We wandered from church to church.
00:51:17I went to all kinds of different churches.
00:51:19You go in one church.
00:51:20You go in the next church.
00:51:21And picture if they were to show integrity and have this little thing that says what we believe.
00:51:28And you go to it and you're there for a few years.
00:51:30You go somewhere else.
00:51:31You come back and you get the same pamphlet.
00:51:35And suddenly, wait a minute.
00:51:36This church doesn't believe at all like the last time we were here.
00:51:40You would start to ask, well, why is this?
00:51:43Why did you guys change so much?
00:51:44And a church with integrity would just simply say, well, we discovered that William Branham wasn't honest about almost everything that he said.
00:51:53So we decided we don't want to talk about the cloud anymore because that man was lying.
00:51:59That's integrity.
00:52:00But what happens is they don't publish this paper.
00:52:03You go and you listen to the sermon.
00:52:06They're talking about God showed his face through the heavens and then he sent his angels down.
00:52:12And William Branham was right there and this mist came up.
00:52:15And there's all kinds of weird things that they – I've listened to many of these sermons.
00:52:20And then I never really thought about it until you said it.
00:52:24We'd go visit some other church.
00:52:25We'd move around.
00:52:26We might come back.
00:52:28We come back and they're not talking about it at all.
00:52:30And why?
00:52:31There's no integrity because they don't tell you that they completely shifted in what they believed.
00:52:36And, Charles, we're talking about the cloud today, but you can almost go through doctrine for doctrine.
00:52:43Whenever they discovered that the man was lying, they just stopped talking about it.
00:52:47And why did they stop, man?
00:52:48You never really, as a rank and file member, you never stop and think, wait a minute.
00:52:53The cloud was one of the most important fundamental elements of what they preached every Sunday about.
00:52:59Why did they stop?
00:53:00You never asked that question.
00:53:02It's so dishonest and deceptive, John.
00:53:05And you're right.
00:53:05I mean, can you imagine if an average message church created a little handout, what we believe?
00:53:11Boy, that would be so expensive because they have to revise it every other week.
00:53:15And they'd have to have some means to destroy the old ones to get rid of the evidence of what they believed before.
00:53:19Because at the very end of it, they would have to say, and we always believed it this way.
00:53:24They couldn't actually make that.
00:53:26You know, because they'd revise it so often, and then there'd be an easier paper trail that they're changing all this stuff all the time.
00:53:33It's really sad and unfortunate stuff, John.
00:53:35So, you know, as that came out, John, the information that the cloud was a hoax, that the revelation of the seals was copied primarily from other people,
00:53:49Clarence Larkin being by far the most important source on the whole thing, you know, it just blows away the mystique of William Branham.
00:53:58And there has been, in many sects of the message, an evolution in the ideology and the way they look at William Branham and the message because of these things, right?
00:54:11You take Perry Green as just a fantastic example of it, right?
00:54:14And he ends up flip-flopping. He flip-flops.
00:54:17There are things that he drove people to suicide over and split churches over in the 70s that he's completely changed his mind,
00:54:25and now he's on the opposite side of the issue by the time you get to the early 2000s.
00:54:29He'd be on the side of the guy he committed suicide.
00:54:32He'd be on the side of the church he split against if, you know, a few years later, right?
00:54:37And this is the thing I think a lot of people in the message don't recognize, the incredible harm that they do in the name of their beliefs, right?
00:54:46While they were in the radical state of mind, look what they did to James MacDonald.
00:54:50While they were in the radical state of mind, look at the churches they split.
00:54:54Look at the homes they destroyed.
00:54:55Look at all of the horrendous, horrible, horrible things that you did in that radical state.
00:55:00You divided churches and homes and families and even drove people to suicide back in the day that you were going crazy over this stuff.
00:55:09And then at a certain point, let's just not talk about this anymore.
00:55:13And then time goes on and people...
00:55:15No, you did terrible things in the name of this.
00:55:18The message did terrible things in the name of this stuff, John.
00:55:20And you can't just, you know, move along like none of this matters.
00:55:24It matters.
00:55:25And the truth is, John, a lot of the things that they've done since, you know, Rod Bergen left the message, since other people left the message and more information has come out.
00:55:35You, other people, they did the same thing.
00:55:38They come harassment campaigns, attack people, viciousness, hatefulness, attack homes, destroy lives, right?
00:55:45All in the name of this stuff.
00:55:46And give it a few more years, a lot of them will be not talking about it anymore, John.
00:55:51And they'll end up believing a lot of the very things that these people have been saying the last number of years, right?
00:55:57But they'll never be accountable for all of the harm and destruction they did by refusing to admit the truth in all these intervening years, right?
00:56:04You know, and it's really a shame that it has to be this way.
00:56:07It's really a shame that they will go to all those radical extremes and then, let's pretend that never happened.
00:56:14Let's just kind of, you know, move along, move along and never admit we were wrong and never admit we caused all the harm.
00:56:20And, you know, find some way to continue to perpetuate this system of false religion.
00:56:27It's awful, frankly.
00:56:28It's awful.
00:56:29It is awful.
00:56:30And keep in mind, people like my grandfather, they came in contact with this information.
00:56:35Like you said, the book, I'm certain my grandfather read it.
00:56:38When my grandfather came in contact with the fact that Jim Jones of People's Temple had worked directly with William Branham
00:56:45and that Branham is the one who basically lifted Jones into fame, they were putting that book in, I think it's called The Raven.
00:56:52They were putting that in the public library.
00:56:54I'm told by people who were involved in that whole situation that my grandfather fought to keep the book out of the public library
00:57:01because if you can keep the information away from the people, they don't ask questions.
00:57:06And if they don't ask questions, they don't snap out of the brainwashing.
00:57:09So people like this were involved.
00:57:12And you have to wonder to what extent, because my grandfather, he worked closely with Billy Paul.
00:57:17We've seen pictures of it.
00:57:19I mean, I knew how grandfather worked.
00:57:21You have to understand that these men knew that there were critical flaws with the message,
00:57:28and they were working with the direct heads of the organizations, which also knew.
00:57:34And you have to wonder what extent was it a strategy?
00:57:38What extent did they initiate campaigns of suppression of information?
00:57:44I have to believe that my grandfather, sadly, was involved in some of those campaigns
00:57:48because he himself, he knew these things.
00:57:52He had to have known.
00:57:53In fact, he told me his exact words were,
00:57:56people have known these things for years, John.
00:57:58What does it hurt you to believe it anyway?
00:58:00That is a statement testifying to the suppression of facts
00:58:04because I didn't know that information for years.
00:58:08I was one of the new people who discovered it.
00:58:10I was like, Grandpa, come on, man.
00:58:13So it is a suppression campaign, and it all goes back to integrity.
00:58:18If you have integrity, you don't try to suppress the truth
00:58:21because the truth will stand for itself.
00:58:23You don't even have, whether it's good or bad, you own your history.
00:58:27You have integrity.
00:58:28You own your history.
00:58:30And because you show integrity, people would stay believing what you said.
00:58:36So I'm going to flip this upside down just a bit, Charles.
00:58:39I'm going to actually help the leaders of these cults.
00:58:42If you just show integrity and be honest about your past,
00:58:46people might stay in your cult.
00:58:48But if you don't, people are probably going to leave you.
00:58:51You know, John, the great irony is the message is a religion that claims to love the truth.
00:58:59I mean, the message worships the truth.
00:59:02Certainly the churches I come from, I mean, you worship the truth.
00:59:05You're all about the quote-unquote truth, right?
00:59:08In fact, where I come from, the word truth was used to describe the message
00:59:12just as much as the word message.
00:59:14The truth, the message is almost interchangeable in our parlance.
00:59:19But the sad thing is, is the message really doesn't love the truth.
00:59:23In fact, a lot of people in the message hate the truth.
00:59:25And a lot of people in the message will destroy people if they try to tell them the truth, right?
00:59:29I really hope, John, that one day the people in the message develop a real love of the truth
00:59:35and are actually willing to look at the truth and follow it out to its conclusions
00:59:39rather than carry out campaigns of destruction against people who try to tell them the truth.
00:59:44It's very, very sad that they do that.
00:59:46Unfortunately, it is widespread across the message that they do that sort of terrible, wicked behavior.
00:59:52Now, one last thing I want to say, too, John, before we wrap up.
00:59:57You know, as I mentioned, we're really, we're just going to talk about the main sect up to about 1995.
01:00:01But my book, like I mentioned, goes up to 2005.
01:00:04And these events that we're talking about right here, the final evolution of this event,
01:00:10it was about 1995, roughly.
01:00:12You know, when the clouds stopped being talked about
01:00:15and slowly phased out in a lot of groups as far as being a focal point.
01:00:20It still remained there in the background.
01:00:21It still was there, but people just stopped talking about it as much.
01:00:25And it became de-emphasized for a lot of people.
01:00:28And not every group, but some of them.
01:00:31And it was in large part to this fallout, you know, around the information that it was all a hoax.
01:00:38It was all a great big hoax.
01:00:39And I think the fact that the leaders stopped talking about it,
01:00:42even the ones who didn't put anything on record,
01:00:44the fact they stopped talking about it is evidence that they internalized the fact that it was a hoax, right?
01:00:51They were, and they kept that information to themselves.
01:00:53It was okay for Raymond Jackson to internalize and believe the cloud was a hoax.
01:00:59It was okay for him to stop talking about it.
01:01:01It was okay for this and that other preacher to internalize that information.
01:01:05But it wasn't okay for the people in the benches and the rank and file to have the same information.
01:01:09I mean, that's really, what can you call that, but deceptive.
01:01:13It is deceptive, is what that was.
01:01:14Now, one other thing also was happening right in this time frame, John, of 1995-ish.
01:01:22And I'm not going to talk about this very much,
01:01:24but this is maybe just also help our listeners understand why we're cutting it off here.
01:01:28But 1995 is the point that Billy Paul, what I would call the decline of Billy Paul,
01:01:34he started to take steps to elevate his successor in these years and move towards retirement.
01:01:42By the time you get to the early 2000s, Billy Paul went into retirement,
01:01:45and his successor has taken charge by the early 2000s.
01:01:49But it was really roughly 1995 that this transition really started.
01:01:54His successor had been around since the mid-90s or the mid-80s,
01:01:59but his successor really wasn't in any real authentic leadership capacity until about 1995.
01:02:05It was 1995 that he actually began, his successor began pulling the levers of power.
01:02:09And it was on the other side of that that you really see the copyright wars explode.
01:02:15So it was right in the same period of time that Billy Paul is beginning his march towards retirement,
01:02:22and his successor is coming into power.
01:02:26And so here, I think, John, is where we will end this episode today.
01:02:30And there's so much more we could say about the main sect, isn't there?
01:02:33But this is a good stopping point.
01:02:35The transition of leadership point in the main sect that happened roughly began in 1995.
01:02:41And it's an interesting transition when you think about it, Charles.
01:02:44So if you use the allegory, the emperor who had no clothes.
01:02:49So as this information is starting to get out, and Billy Paul is starting to be exposed,
01:02:55and he's exposed as the emperor who has no clothes,
01:02:59he passes the no-clothes robe to his successor.
01:03:04So what do you do with this, man?
01:03:06You've got all of these people who,
01:03:08they realize that some of the things that he said was complete lies,
01:03:13that some of the things William Branham claimed as supernatural were not.
01:03:17They were lies.
01:03:18Because the new emperor began with no clothes at all,
01:03:22if you actually follow it out to its conclusion.
01:03:26But now take it even further than that.
01:03:28Take it to the new apostolic reformation.
01:03:31You have people like Benny Hinn who sang,
01:03:33William Branham had an angel who followed him around in his meetings.
01:03:39Well, he's not telling you that, yes,
01:03:41but we also realized that William Branham was lying about other angels,
01:03:45seven of the other angels.
01:03:47He's not telling the people that.
01:03:49When you have, oh, I could go through the names.
01:03:52I won't go through all of them, but Paul Cain, one of the bigger ones.
01:03:55Paul Cain and Todd Bentley and all of these, Mike Bickle,
01:04:00all these figures were saying that Branham's angel came and sparked the
01:04:03International House of Prayer revival,
01:04:06sparked the, oh, there's different, the Lakeland revivals,
01:04:09all of these things.
01:04:10They're saying that Branham's angel was there and they're telling all these
01:04:13people this.
01:04:14Well, they're also not telling them that, well,
01:04:16we also figured out that Branham lied about seven other angels and he might
01:04:21have been lying about the big angel,
01:04:23the one that we're claiming is in our ministry.
01:04:26Well, the people who are listening might say, well, wait a minute.
01:04:28Are you lying about the angel too?
01:04:32So in the New Apostolic Reformation,
01:04:34they're not going to tell you that Branham lied about all these things.
01:04:36What they're going to say, Charles, is exactly what they say.
01:04:40Branham was a good man, but he went astray in the later years.
01:04:44We're not going to tell you how that happened.
01:04:46We're not going to tell you what we believe was his going astray.
01:04:50We're just going to stop it there because if we can suppress the information,
01:04:55you will stay in our cult.
01:04:58And with that, that's in a nutshell.
01:05:00That is the history of what sparked William Branham's decline of fame in the
01:05:05charismatic and the New Apostolic Reformation movements.
01:05:08So thank you for walking through this.
01:05:11It was a great episode, John.
01:05:12I've enjoyed doing this with you.
01:05:13You know, there's so much there, you know,
01:05:15and you're right about the emperor's no clothes comments there.
01:05:20I really appreciate that.
01:05:21You know, I think, too, just maybe one last parting word for our listeners.
01:05:27I am not certain.
01:05:29In fact, I lean towards confident that Billy Paul's successor has a lot of
01:05:35unawareness of all of the things we're talking about because he really was
01:05:38that disconnected from the goings-on before 1995.
01:05:44And so, you know, he's coming.
01:05:45He may not even realize the mess that he was inheriting at that moment.
01:05:49It's entirely, I would say, very probable that he did not even understand the messy state of the message
01:05:57when he was moved into the successor position in 1995, which, again, explains a lot of what followed.
01:06:05So, anyways, I'm going to end it there.
01:06:07Thank you, John.
01:06:07There's very little I could add to that, but I'm just trying to picture a prophet junior
01:06:14who suddenly inherits the emperor with no clothes religion, and suddenly, well, it looks like it.
01:06:21It smells like it.
01:06:22We're feeding it to the people, and they know it tastes like it.
01:06:25What do you do with this?
01:06:26And with that, I'll end it.
01:06:28If you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web.
01:06:33You can find us at william-branham.org and christiangospelchurch.org.
01:06:37For more about the history of William Branham and the healing revivals, read Come Out of Her, My People.
01:06:42And for more about the dark side of the New Apostolic Reformation, read Weaponized Religion,
01:06:47From Christian Identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.
01:06:58And for more about the history of William Branham, read Weaponized Religion,
01:07:28The NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.