What this site is

Mystery Babylon Guide is an independent research archive and study companion for the Mystery Babylon radio series, 42 broadcasts William Cooper aired on his shortwave program The Hour of the Time between February 1993 and September 1996. The series is a significant artifact of American media history: a multi-year, on-air reading program through centuries of literature on mystery religions, secret societies, and occult history, delivered over WWCR to a national shortwave audience in the years before the internet made such material easy to find.

This site exists to make the series studyable. For each episode we publish an original summary, a list of the key claims made in the broadcast, the primary sources Cooper read from with links to public domain scans, air dates and factual context, discussion questions, and an embedded player for the archived audio. Topic hubs trace the series’ major threads across episodes, and the complete episode guide indexes all 42 broadcasts.

What this site is not

This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the estate of William Cooper or with hourofthetime.com, which is the official home of Cooper’s work. If you want official materials, transcripts, or products connected to The Hour of the Time, that is the place to go. We link to it as the authoritative source and we do not mirror or reproduce its content.

This site is also not an advocacy project. We do not promote the series’ claims, and we do not sell or distribute Cooper’s recordings or transcripts.

Editorial stance

Our voice is that of a research archivist. We document what the series claimed; we do not assert those claims as fact. You will see framing like “Cooper claimed,” “the series asserts,” and “according to the broadcast” on every page, and that wording is deliberate. Where the series’ account conflicts with mainstream historiography, we say so in plain terms, usually in a “historians’ view” section, with references to academic sources. Some of what the series covered is solid history; much of its connective argument is not supported by evidence accepted by scholars. A study companion that cannot tell you which is which would not be worth reading.

We approach the material the way a media studies or history-of-religion course would: as a primary source about 1990s American shortwave culture, conspiracy literature, and the long afterlife of nineteenth-century occult publishing, worth understanding regardless of whether one accepts a word of it.

Sources and copyright

Everything published here is original prose, written from study of the broadcasts, never reproduced from them. Our content policy:

• No transcript republication. We never reproduce transcript text beyond short quotations, and any quotation is limited to roughly 50 words, attributed to the specific episode and air date, and used only for commentary and criticism.
• Audio stays at the Internet Archive. We embed the archived recordings from the archive.org Mystery Babylon collection and never host, re-upload, or offer downloads of the audio ourselves.
• Public domain primary sources. Many of the books Cooper read from on air, such as Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma (1871), are in the public domain. We link directly to scanned originals so readers can verify quotations in context. Works still under copyright are treated as quoted sources only. The full cross-reference lives in our sources and bibliography hub.
• Verification notes. Where we have checked a quotation against the original edition, the episode page says so.

If you hold rights in any material referenced here and believe something on this site exceeds fair use, contact us and we will address it promptly.

Corrections

Factual accuracy is the whole product. If you find an error, a wrong air date, a misattributed quotation, a broken source link, a claim summarized inaccurately, tell us. Corrections are made directly on the affected page, and substantive ones are noted there.

Contact

Email contact@mysterybabylonguide.com for corrections, source suggestions, rights questions, or anything else. For background on the broadcaster himself, see Who Was William Cooper, and for the biblical passage the series took its name from, see Mystery Babylon in Revelation.