Skull and Bones is the modern American institution the Mystery Babylon series points to as proof that its lineage thesis did not stop with the Freemasons. In MB13, aired March 8, 1993, William Cooper argued that the secret society founded at Yale College in 1832 is a direct American descendant of the same initiatory tradition he traced through Egypt, the Assassins, the Templars, and Freemasonry. This hub documents the episode itself, the society Cooper was describing, the researchers whose work he leaned on, and where the historical record supports or departs from his claims. As on every page of this site, the framing is documentary: these are the claims the broadcast made, not an endorsement of them. For the full series, start with the complete episode guide.
How the Series Frames Skull and Bones
Cooper’s argument in MB13 runs directly out of the Templars arc that precedes it. Having spent three episodes (MB10, MB11, MB12) building the case that the Knights Templar survived their 1307 suppression by dispersing into other institutions, Cooper opened MB13 by reading from John J. Robinson’s 1989 book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry, which argues that fugitive Templars formed early Freemasonry as a mutual-protection network. He then extended that lineage claim one step further, forward in time and across the Atlantic, to the Order of Skull and Bones at Yale University: founded in 1832, incorporated as a legal entity in 1856, and populated across nearly two centuries by a disproportionate number of America’s most powerful bankers, intelligence officials, judges, and three U.S. presidents. Cooper’s case rested less on documentary proof of an unbroken chain from Alamut to New Haven and more on structural analogy: a fixed, small membership; secret initiation rites; a shared meeting space (the society’s windowless clubhouse on High Street, known to members as “the Tomb”); and a pattern of graduates moving into positions of concentrated institutional power that Cooper read as the visible fruit of an invisible network. This hub belongs conceptually beside the secret societies hub, which covers the series’ full convergence thesis, and beside the Templars and Assassins hub, whose closing note flags MB13 as its direct sequel.
The Episode: MB13 and Its Air Date
MB13: The Skull and Bones (aired March 8, 1993)
The series’ best-known standalone broadcast. Cooper examined the Order of Skull and Bones at Yale, its 1832 founding by William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, its incorporation the following generation as the Russell Trust Association, and the concentration of its members (“Bonesmen”) in American government, finance, intelligence, and the Yale presidency itself. He drew heavily on the research of economist and Hoover Institution fellow Antony C. Sutton, whose self-published exposé of the society had circulated for a decade by the time of the broadcast, and treated Sutton’s membership rosters and institutional-linkage claims as the episode’s evidentiary backbone. The episode argues that the Order functions as an American chapter of the older secret-society network the series had spent twelve prior broadcasts constructing, and that its members’ rise to the presidency, the CIA directorship, and Wall Street’s largest banking houses is not coincidence but the visible output of a closed initiatory order.
Key Figures the Episode Discusses
William Huntington Russell (1809-1885) and Alphonso Taft (1810-1891)
The society’s two documented co-founders, both members of Yale’s class of 1833. Russell had studied in Germany in the early 1830s and, according to several accounts of the founding, modeled aspects of the new society on secret student fraternities he encountered there. Taft went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of War and Attorney General under President Grant and later as a minister to Austria-Hungary and Russia; his son, William Howard Taft, became the first Bonesman to reach the presidency. Cooper’s episode treats the pairing of a Germany-influenced founder and a future cabinet officer’s father as an early instance of the society’s pattern: recruit at Yale, place at the top.
Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002)
A British-American economist and Hoover Institution research fellow whose earlier work focused on Soviet and Western technology transfer. Sutton’s self-published 1983 book America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones, later reissued by TrineDay, compiled a membership roster running from the society’s founding into the twentieth century and argued that the Order functioned as a hidden coordinating body across banking, intelligence, and academia. Because Sutton was not himself a member and worked largely from leaked and pieced-together rosters rather than the society’s own (sealed) archives, his roster has been checked against other sources over the decades and found substantially, though not perfectly, accurate. Cooper reads Sutton’s central claims in MB13 as established fact; this hub records them as the episode’s source, not as independently verified history.
Key Concepts
“The Tomb” and the Russell Trust Association
The society’s clubhouse, a windowless stone building at 64 High Street in New Haven, is called “the Tomb” by members and outsiders alike. Its legal owner is the Russell Trust Association, incorporated in 1856 with William Huntington Russell as president and Daniel Coit Gilman (later the first president of Johns Hopkins University) as treasurer. Cooper’s episode treats the Trust’s separate legal existence, and its historic reluctance to disclose its finances, as evidence that the society is organized less like a college club and more like a standing institution built to outlast any individual class of members.
“322” and the presidential pattern
Society emblems and correspondence use the number 322, generally read by outside researchers as a reference to 322 BCE, though the society itself has never confirmed an official explanation. Cooper’s episode does not dwell on numerology so much as on outcome: three Bonesmen have reached the U.S. presidency (William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush), and for roughly a century, from the mid-1800s through 1950, all but one Yale president was also a member. Cooper reads that concentration, alongside Bonesmen’s documented presence at the founding of the CIA and at senior levels of major investment banks, as the pattern his broader lineage thesis predicts: a small initiatory body reliably producing outsized institutional power for its members.
Primary Sources Cooper Read From in This Episode
- Antony C. Sutton, America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (1983, reissued 2002 by TrineDay) — Not public domain; the episode’s primary source for the society’s membership roster and institutional-linkage claims. A scanned copy circulates on the Internet Archive; treated here as a quoted source only.
- John J. Robinson, Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry (1989) — Not public domain; read at the start of MB13 to bridge from the Templars arc into the Skull and Bones material. Already cited on the Templars and Assassins hub for its Templar-to-Freemasonry lineage argument.
- Alexandra Robbins, Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power (2002, Little, Brown) — Published nine years after MB13 aired, so Cooper could not have read from it on-air; included here for readers who want the most detailed independent journalistic account, built on interviews with dozens of Bonesmen willing to speak on the record. Robbins is herself a Yale graduate and a member of a different Yale senior society.
The full cross-reference of every source to every episode is in the sources and bibliography hub.
The Historians’ View
The documented outline of Skull and Bones is not in serious dispute: the 1832 founding, the co-founders’ identities, the 1856 incorporation of the Russell Trust Association, and the roster of prominent Bonesmen (including the three presidents) are all confirmed by university records, biographical sources, and the society’s own tax filings as the Russell Trust. Yale’s own chief research archivist has written that the society’s membership was never as secret as popular accounts suggest; keeping member names confidential was a later, 1970s-era innovation, while the society’s rituals and meetings have always been closed.
Where the series departs from mainstream scholarship is in the interpretive leap from “a small, well-connected alumni network exists” to “the network is the modern vessel of an unbroken Babylonian mystery religion.” Historians of American elite institutions generally treat Skull and Bones as a real, influential, and secretive alumni network, comparable in kind (if not always in scale) to other exclusive collegiate societies and old-boy networks, rather than as evidence of religious or occult continuity stretching back to antiquity. The Templar-to-Freemasonry-to-Skull-and-Bones chain that Cooper builds across MB10 through MB13 rests on the same contested Robinson thesis discussed on the Templars hub, and most historians of Freemasonry do not accept a documented institutional line running from medieval military orders to a nineteenth-century Yale society.
Where This Hub Connects to the Rest of the Series
In the series’ chronology, MB13 arrives as the modern capstone of the Templars arc (MB10-MB12) and sits alongside the series’ broader American-institutions material collected on the secret societies hub, which also covers the Roshaniya lineage claim. For the full genealogy Cooper proposes, from ancient sun worship through the Mystery Schools and Freemasonry to modern secret societies, see the Mystery Schools hub and the Freemasonry hub.
Further Reading: Behold a Pale Horse
Cooper’s own book, Behold a Pale Horse (1991), the volume he is best known for outside the Hour of the Time broadcasts, covers Skull and Bones directly as part of its wider survey of secret societies and elite networks, alongside the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group. Readers who want Cooper’s own written treatment of this material, rather than the broadcast transcript, can find it there.
Listen to the Episode
All surviving audio is preserved at the Internet Archive: Mystery Babylon audio collection on archive.org. This site embeds and links the archive.org copies and never hosts or distributes the recordings. For Cooper’s biography and the context of the Hour of the Time program, see Who Was William Cooper.
Frequently Asked Questions
What episode of Mystery Babylon covers Skull and Bones?
MB13: The Skull and Bones, aired March 8, 1993, is the series’ dedicated episode. It follows directly on the three-part Templars and Assassins arc (MB10–MB12).
Who founded Skull and Bones and when?
William Huntington Russell and Alphonso Taft, both members of Yale’s class of 1833, founded the society in December 1832. It was later incorporated as the Russell Trust Association in 1856, with Russell as president and Daniel Coit Gilman as treasurer.
What book did Cooper rely on for the Skull and Bones episode?
Primarily Antony C. Sutton’s America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones (1983), a self-published roster-and-analysis book compiled from leaked and pieced-together membership records rather than the society’s own sealed archives.
Is the Skull and Bones membership list documented?
Yes, in substantial part. Sutton’s roster and later independent research, including Alexandra Robbins’ 2002 book Secrets of the Tomb, have confirmed most of the historical membership record, including the three Bonesmen who became president: William Howard Taft, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. What remains genuinely disputed is not membership but Cooper’s interpretive claim that the society is a living link to an ancient mystery religion rather than a secretive, but otherwise conventional, elite alumni network.
