The Cloud: A Timeline of Deception

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Brannum Historical Research Podcast. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Brannum Historical Research at William-Brannum.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend, Charles Paisley, the founder of Christian Gospel Church.org.

And together we're examining the history and the intersections in history between William Brannum and other key figures that either influenced or were influenced by the post-World War II healing revivals. Charles, we have today one of the most controversial episodes.

If you were in the message cult and you were aware of what was going on in the message cult, this was your controversy because there were so many ministers that knew this thing existed and they just danced around it.

And there were people sitting in the audience who knew. And they would always, you could sit and watch them, their ears would perk up. What are they going to say? How are they going to address this?

And then the minister would dance around it. And then they would go home thinking, I wish I would have learned more. Because there were people that knew, there were people who, like my grandfather, who had been aware that this was a problem because the problem was fully addressed by William Brannum's own daughter.

And I'll let you describe the significance of what we're about to talk about. Again, we're still in the cloud series. We're talking through the situation in which there was a mysterious cloud formation that is so key to the message cult.

And it's various splinter groups of the message. But let me set the stage just a little bit first. You have William Brannum, who likes to go on these long, expensive hunting trips. And... With homosexuals.

With homosexuals. And you know, when I use the word expensive, we've got photographs. And you can see them of African safaris and things that actually cost a lot of money. But I'm just talking in terms of what he claimed was his income.

Versus being able to take off work for weeks on end. Take off preaching. say from weeks on end, and then go sit out on the wilderness. And he would immediately prior to this, he would try to spiritualize where he's headed. In other words, he would say, God is going to give me this great thing. So I'm going to go hunting. And oh, by the way, if you could give me some offering to go hunting, there were people who left his church over this. Graham Snelling's son told me that that was one of the reasons why

they left because there were people starving. And he was, he was by no uncertain terms saying that there were people who were suffering because William Brannum would take all this money and go hunting for weeks on end while there were people suffering in his church. Well, William Brannum starts to claim that he's, he's got to go hunting from Jeffersonville to Arizona. And he starts giving this vision that he had that he was going to receive a revelation from God whenever he went to Arizona. And he said that there would be five angels. And he even said,

you know, he liked to do this. He would say, it was five because G-R-A-C-E-5. Because there's five letters if you are an elementary school student and understand grace that has five letters. And if you think about a pyramid, if you're looking at the pyramid, there's one at the top, and then there can be two in either side in the middle and two on either side at the bottom. So he's claiming that he sees really a triangle, not a pyramid. But this, this triangle of angels was coming to him. But there were specifically five in this triangle of a vision. And so he goes

out hunting and the problem becomes the timeline. And as long as I can, you know, I was a kid whenever all of this information was made known to the wide public in the message. But if you were in the message and you had any connection at all to any of these people who were talking about it, you knew that this was a problem. Yes, John. I mean, it is. It's something else with this story.

When you actually step back and look at all this from just a common sense perspective, it's very obvious. Something is wrong. You're right. When he originally predicted all this would happen in December, he predicted five angels that he would meet. And he predicted that they were in the shape of a pyramid constellation, right? Which that looked like a pyramid to you.

But this is what this is what he told us, right? And that's not a constellation. That's a cloud. That's a constellation in a cloud of two different things, right? So again, there's so much wrong.

with it. And here's the thing, John. When he did that, we know shortly after that, he had that vision. He talked to Lee Vale, and Lee Vale said, hey, do you think that had anything to do with the Seven Thunders in Revelation? And William Brannum says, why, you know what? It just might. And that's when they put out that they're going to publish the Seven Seals. They put out, he was preaching the seals before he ever even saw this, all this stuff happened, right? So he's very clearly setting this up, right? And the cloud is for two, this thing that happened, that he

later glommed on to. So here's the thing, we'll talk about where this cloud come from, more in our next episode. But in essence, William Brannum never even mentioned this cloud existed when he preached the Seven Seals sermons. You didn't even mention this. It was about two months after that sermon when this cloud appeared in a magazine. He's like, oh, yeah, hey, that's the cloud I was under that day when all that happened, right? So he retrofitted this cloud into all of this story, which is what, which is the real reason none of the timeline matches up, right?

That really is why the timeline don't match up because he was trying to retrofit this cloud into what happened in order to heighten the supernatural nature of what happened. And so in today's episode, we're going to especially be tackling the timeline around the events of the cloud that appeared in Arizona. But before we start diving into that, yeah, we do need to give a little bit of a summary about what the message people believe concerning this mystery cloud from Arizona, because it'll definitely help our listeners who are not in the message to understand why this cloud is so, so important, because this event is the singular most important supernatural

event in the entire message. This thing is so important that without it, the entire message unravels. And I think you'll see that as I explain what this means to the message. So in March of 1963, William Brannum preached a series of sermons on the Seven Seals of Revelation.

And we believed, because this is what William Brannum told us, was that no one anywhere ever understood what those seals meant before 1963. And the opening of those seals and the revealing of that true meaning of those seven seals in 1963 was a supernatural event of the highest order. And it signalled the return of Christ for the rapture was in progress. And there's a verse in Thessalonians that says the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with the shout, goes on to say we'll go up and meet him in the air. We believe that began to happen with these events surrounding this cloud,

surrounding the seven seals. And we believe in some way or another, and almost every sect of the messages this way, that Jesus was descending from heaven. and William Brannum's teachings, the message was the shout. We literally believed that was fulfilled in the ministry of William Brannum.

Let me read you a quote from William Brannum to this effect. He says here, this is from a sermon in the rapture. The first thing comes when he starts descending from heaven, there's a shout. What is it? It's the message. To get the people together.

A message comes forth first, now lamp trimming time, rise and trim your lamps. What? Watch was that? The seventh, not the sixth, the seventh. Behold the bridegroom cometh, rise and trim your lamps, and they did.

Some of them found they didn't have oil in their lampsy, but it's lamp trimming time. It's Malachi four time. So for 40 years after William Brannum died, she's been dead about 60 years now. For 40 years after he died, that was the central teaching of the message everywhere.

Every sect of the message believed that Jesus descended from heaven in 1963 in some form or another. It varies from sect to sect to sect, how they interpret it. And that, they also believed the message that William Brannum preached was the shout of 1st Thessalonians in the Midnight Cry in Matthew 25.

And claiming that William Brannum was fulfilling those two prophetic things is the biblical rationale that William Brannum and all the other leaders in the message used to give the message its power. We literally believe the message was the Midnight Cry and it was the shout. And so each sect of the message does have their own unique spin on just the nuanced way of how this works and how it will unfold.

But universally it's the cloud, it's the opening of the seals, and it's the things that happened in 1963 that formed the genesis of all of those beliefs. And so if Jesus did not descend from heaven in 1963, and if the seals were not really opened in 1963, the message unravels.

The core distinctives of the message fall apart for almost every single sect of the message. And that is exactly what we have here that we're looking for with this last episode, with this one, with the next ones.

We have a reality that the event which kicks off the message end of day's rapture scenario is a hoax. And the people in the message have been stuck in limbo since 1963. They're in this phase of getting ready for the rapture, waiting for the next shoe in that scenario to drop.

And it has everything to do with this hoax that William Brannum perpetrated in 1963. There's one thing that you said that I really want to go a bit deeper into Charles, especially since we're talking about the timeline.

William Brannum was talking about a constellation, and if you were brainwashed in this message culture person. and you hear the word constellation and you see the cloud, your mind automatically merges those two. Through cognitive dissonance, you know they're two separate things, but because that's the way the theology was presented as it was twisted to fit the cloud, you merge them in your mind.

And a normal person is looking at the cloud thinking, well, that's not a constellation. Constellation is you see at black night, you see the series of stars. And remember William Brannum tied all of these different quote unquote supernatural events to lights shining from the heavens.

He said that as a Baptist minister, a star shown down and strange light above Baptist minister, right? And he claimed that he would see these fortune tellers and they would say, did you know the stars and the planets align whenever you were born?

And the cult in general, you know, William Brannum's cult of personality thought of constellations as he described them as constellations of stars, not a cloud. Like you said, he's preaching this thing about the constellation and remember it started as five angels with it comes a point in time whenever he realizes almost mid-sentence if you line up what he says chronologically.

He realizes that wait a minute, if I'm going to have five angel messengers and I've got seven who these angel messengers are representing their seven church ages and dispensationalism, I've got a problem. There are two missing angels.

And so he inserts two angels, almost mid-sentence, you can watch him do it. And suddenly his constellation of five becomes a constellation of seven. But still, until he sees the actual photograph of the cloud, it is still a constellation, which again, if you know what a constellation is, in the black of night, you see stars and he is describing a pyramid.

And remember, a pyramid, if you've got five, you can have one at the top, two in the sides, two at the bottom. We can also insert two more pretty easily and keep it the shape of a triangle.

So he's painting the picture in their minds of a triangle of a constellation. But it goes even deeper than this because in 1962, the year before the cloud, there was a constellation event in the heavens that was sending all kinds of religious fanatics into end of day's weirdness.

There was an alignment of five stars, five planets aligned. And all of these people, I mean globally, people in India were seeing this alignment of five planets. though the end of the world was coming. In America, the religious mixture of religious preachers and politics were claiming that because Kennedy had just been put in office and there was an alignment of the stars, Kennedy had been voted in. There's this alignment of the stars, this must be the end of days. And a huge concentration of them, believe it or not, was in Arizona.

So you've got this event leading up to the cloud wherein there was, there was an actual five planets aligned. And William Brandt was trying to hone into that as his, you know, as his tie into the spiritual realm, so to speak, that these five were signifying his coming message.

Then he goes to Arizona and he realizes, wait a minute, five, there's two missing. So he inserts two angels to this five. And then over time, this transitions to the cloud. But if you go back and look at the timeline of how these things are lined up in his sermons, it's a constellation. Then the cloud is inserted long after the fact. And then suddenly the cloud becomes the constellation.

And so, you know, an average normal person who's never been indoctrinated with this, will look at the cloud and let's say, number one, this looks absolutely nothing like a trying or a pyramid. And this, you know, this is not a constellation. This is a cloud. So what happened even later is they began to claim that the face of Jesus was in the cloud and that the cloud was in fact Jesus. So transitioned in this weird strange way from the five planets aligned to this quote unquote message coming from five angels to let's add two angels to it to these angels were

actually the cloud instead of a constellation. And then the constellation, which is a cloud, becomes Jesus. Yes, the way we ran told this story changed quite a bit from as it developed. So, you know, like we've talked about before how William Brown of stories are like fishing stories, right? And every time he tells the story, the fish gets a little bigger.

This is all the same thing, right? This started out. He had a vision that he was going to be with Joseph out west. And, you know, the five, five angels would come to him in the shape of that constellation, right? Then the next week he tells the story, right? And he's changed it in it transitions to seven angels, right? Joseph is still with him, right? When all of this has happened, there's the blast, right? And every time he tells it, it changes. And by the time it actually happens this thing out in Arizona, Joseph wasn't there. It was seven angels, not five, right?

By the time this thing actually happens, there's not a shred of it that actually resembles this original that he told when all this was supposed to happen, right? So, you know, so there he just monkeys with stuff so badly, right?

And it's like people don't listen. It's like they don't even pay attention to what he said. And hey, he changed this 10 times. And now what's finally happened, don't even match the original it.

It's really unfortunate what happens and how the people have been hoodwinked by this. It's a shame. And so because what this is so important in the message, I mean this is the foundational elements that prove that the Midnight Cry and the Shout happened in William Brown's Ministry in 1963, right?

This is that, this is that important of evidence to the message, right? And so there's two pieces of evidence that really is used to try and establish that, to prove the Midnight Cry and the Shout happened in William Brown's Ministry.

And one of them is this cloud, okay? And this cloud is important for that. We generally believe that this cloud was a supernatural sign that had something to do with the Lord descending from heaven to vindicate the message.

And the second piece of evidence has to do with the divine revelation of the seals themselves, which William Brown preached a couple weeks later. We generally believed that the uniqueness and the newness of the revelation of the seals was also evidence that Christ was speaking to the church in some new and dynamic way, which of course we know that's not true, right?

Because he copied it all. We just didn't realize it at the time. So when we peel back the layers of those two things, you know, this is nothing but a hoax, right? I mean, there was no Midnight Cry.

That never happened. Not certainly not the way the message taught it. There was no shout. Jesus is not descended from heaven with the shout. That's never happened yet. I mean, this is a pure hoax that William Brown appropriated.

And certainly for my sect and for most of the sects of the message that totally collapses the core of message theology, right? And that's the thing to focus on like a laser, you know, within this theology.

This, this, this takes away the very genesis of the messages and time scenario beliefs and pretty well every sect. And in some groups, they have, they have been trying to reinvent their doctrines. But those who do, those who to take the emphasis away from this are basically repudiating the teachings of the past 50 years of the message, right?

And coming up with a whole new basis to justify and continue to believe the message. And so that is what we're tackling today as we look at this timeline lens. And as we walk through it, would you show you William Brownham was not out hunting on February 28, 1963, when this cloud appeared?

And the reinventing of the doctrines that came after this. Honestly, Charles, it's almost worth another episode in of itself because remember. He had William Brannum who sold the people this notion that he's going to receive a message from God, from these five angels in a constellation.

And so these people, you know, give him the offering so he can go live out in Arizona for a while and his family can be fed. He goes out there to receive this message, which was really to become the message.

This was the reason why William Brannum was sent if you're in this cult of personality. And then he goes there and, you know, over time the five angels become seven so that he can line it up to the seven church ages in dispensationalism.

And what happens there gets really weird because he's supposed to go out there to get the message from these five angels. And then he comes back, it transitions into seven angels and he makes these weird statements like, I never knew anything about this until this morning when the angel met me in this room.

So people are scratching the head thing, well, why did he have to go out there if they're going to give them the message here? And again, they're still thinking constellation because at this point in time, when he starts preaching the sermons, when he comes back, he's not yet seen the cloud.

And people are still thinking in the blackness of night, there are five stars that came down and these five would, you know, talk to William Brannum. I think he may have said seven just slightly in between this timeline to fit the seven church ages.

But then when he gives the quote unquote message from the angels, he suddenly says that, you know, this is the message that these angels gave me. But what he's saying, if you have your Bible open, you can almost, you know, he's saying things that aren't quite in the Bible, but he's referencing revelation.

And every single person sitting there could have just opened their Bibles and read the book of Revelation because what he introduces is Clarence Larkin's commentary on the book of Revelation. So the mystery, so to speak, was Clarence Larkin.

And what Larkin said about the book of Revelation. And because there was nothing new, there was nothing of substance. After William Brannum died, there's this additional series of timelines wherein all of these ministers started fighting to try to explain, well, what was this message because everything he said, there's nothing of substance.

So then each central figure of each sect started saying, I have the message of what was behind these seven seals and these seven angels. And they started claiming that they were the one, they were basically the messengers.

So each messenger became the central figure. of their sect, and then now they're elevated onto this platform, where they become cult leaders. Yeah, and there's a whole lot there, John, and we've got lots more to tackle on that.

I can understand, so in the message, obviously, they would object to a lot of that. If we said that he just purely copied Clarence Larkin, that's a bit of a simplification because really, it was more complex than that.

He copied multiple people, and so when they, I know when sometimes when people in the message here, it's simplified, right, in that way they cannot grasp, you know, they just assume we don't know what we're talking about, right, but we know what we're talking about.

William Brannum copied these pieces out of multiple books. We've already did the plagiarism episode, you can go back and you can look at some of the references on that. So let me jump back to the timeline, okay.

So as we continue trying to peel back the layers here, what happened in 1963, you know, it can be easy to get lost going all down the different rabbit holes of deception, right? There's so many layers to this, right?

And when you, if you try to look at all of them simultaneously, it is way too confusing to even try to start to wrap your mind around, right, like you, because you'll, you'll just go down one hole after another after another, right?

And so you've got to just focus on the key elements, right, that that really will help you get to the bottom of it. And element number one, which we've kind of already talked about is, yes, William Brannum did copy these sermons on the seals from other people.

None of it is original, every stitch of it is copied. It's not from a single source, it's from multiple sources. There's good books out there and different resources out there you can find where he did copy each piece of it.

The other piece, though, which we're especially trying to focus on today is that he was not there on February 28th, 1963 when this cloud appeared, right? And this, this is, this is black and white, right?

Like people can, people can argue in the weeds over doctrine and, and things like that. And so I, I tried to not even bother to get that, and especially because every sect has its own different spin on all this, you know, there's, there's, there's literally a dozen different ways to look at all this.

You know, some people look at this and they go with the perusia doctrine. Some people take this, they go with the brides coming, doctrine other, they go with the mystical coming dot, like there's, there's a dozen different ways in the message to interpret all of these events.

And so I try not to focus too hard just on any one of those because obviously then the other 90% of the people say, well, we don't believe that anyway, well, we know you don't, right?

You've, you've got your own spin on it. And that's why I try to keep it as generic as I can. I know that everyone has their own spin on it. But the point is, this is the genesis for all of those spins.

This, this event over the cloud and the opening of the seals is what kicks off all of the theological underpinnings for every sect of the messages, um, end of day. rapture scenario. As I mentioned earlier back, right now the message every sect is kind of in this limbo where the rapture scenario started with the stuff in 1963 and they're still trying to get ready for the rapture. They're trapped in this intermediate space. And so when you realize that this never happened that the seals were never actually open in 1963, that Jesus never actually descended from heaven in 1963, like that these things never happened. The whole supernatural thing

is a hoax, right? You almost don't even have to go down the road of trying to analyze all the rest of this stuff because it breaks at the root, right? And as I, as we just go a little further, let's just look at the proof we have that William Brannum was not out hunting on February 28, 1963 because we know beyond a shadow of doubt. That's the day that the cloud appeared. It's that, it's that's date in every magazine and every article there and this is in all kinds of stuff.

It's February 28th beyond a shadow of a doubt is the day that that cloud appeared and we know also beyond a shadow of a doubt William Brannum did not go out hunting that day. We know for sure he was not standing under this cloud. He never met seven angels and he never received a commission to go preach the seven seals that day. It is a total hoax. And so again, let's, let's try to look at that evidence. And the first piece of evidence is actually what we already talked about in our last episode, which is on February 28, 1963, Leslie Douglas actually was actually scheduled to be executed

that day. And during that period and the days afterward, William Brannum traveled to Houston to participate and help getting him off death row. And we have conclusive proof that that is true. We even have William Brannum's own words and multiple eyewitnesses and based on their own testimony and all of their testimonies, William Brannum came back and went hunting after the prayer vigil involving Leslie Douglas Ashley. And let me read you a quote from William Brannum.

And there's, there's multiples you can get like this. Here's a trying to do God of service. You can also find quotes like this in the sermon. What's the attraction of the mountain? But William Brannum gives us the timeline of events. William Brannum said, so I said, all right, I'll come over to Houston. And they had the meeting and the court, of course, they never killed them.

They just, they give them life and sins. So he's talking about going to Houston. Then he says, so then going back, I went up into the mountain and I went with brother Fred Sothman. And so he's now talking about, he's come back from his hunting, he's come back from Houston and now he's going on his hunting trip. And then he says, brother Jean Norman, one day and the second day was setting there and the angel of the Lord came down into the camp where we was at. And then he goes on, if you jump over to the next page, he says,

In there, I watched until that circle went up and started sweeping up and turned into like a mystic light, like a fog, just exactly that way. How many seen the pictures of it taken in Houston?

I'll jump down another paragraph, says, and it went up, and I didn't know that the observations and things plummed to Mexico was taking pictures of it. Life magazine packed the articles of it as it went up, and many of you, here's Life magazine packing the picture of it, a mysterious thing, and they said they don't know where it come from.

It's too high. So, there's a quote from that. One, let me give you just one more quote on this. This is from his sermon of the attraction of the mountain. William Brownham says in this one, I had to go to Houston about his son, for he was going on death row and was going to be killed in a few days.

And he met me in there, threw his arm around me and said, think, that very man I criticized come to save my son, the Humane Society gives me what they call an Oscar or whatever you want to call it for saving a life.

Then we went back, and I went up the mountain to hunt. So again, he's explicitly clear when he tells this over and over, he went to save Leslie Douglas Ashley, and when that was over, he went to save, he went up in the mountain.

And here's the sermon he preached, an absolute, when he went to help Leslie Douglas Ashley, you'll find this and all the other evidence. This was preached on March the 4th. The cloud was February 28, okay?

So he went hunting after the cloud had already appeared. And so the timeline don't match up. The timeline of William Brownham's own tellings of the story is very clear. He went to Texas to get the boy off death row, then he came back and went to Arizona and went hunting.

That's when he supposedly met the angels under that cloud. But as you can see, what William Brownham says is impossible. The dates don't add up because the cloud appeared on February 28. He went and preached in Houston on March 4th, and then he went hunting.

So how did he, how did he after March 4th out hunting see the cloud that appeared on February 28, right? So as you can see, it's just impossible. William Brownham's story is false on that point.

And again, the reason this is is because several months later, he tried to retrofit this cloud into the picture after the fact. I'll never forget Charles, whenever I first came in contact with the information that the timeline of the hunting didn't really line up with the timeline for the cloud.

I was floored like this, this fully took the ground underneath me because this is like you said, the most fundamental part of the message. is this, and if you can't fit with the timeline, then there becomes this problem, and you have to either adjust the timeline, or you say that the whole thing was false. I took the pathway of trying to find out what is true. Well, there are ministers in the message who took the path of trying to change the timeline. And we have an example of this George Smith, who was, you know, William Branham's son-in-law, who also came in contact with this information that William

Branham just simply could not have been there on this date. And we've got it on the website, but there's this audio clip, which I'll try to play here, where he, he says that basically, William Branham could not have been there hunting, but instead the timeline was shifted because he went to another dimension in time. So when he has the experience on what I believe would be March the 8th, it's in the other dimension. He didn't say that you guys see that, did you hear it?

So when he sees the picture, oh, somebody took the picture. So the picture could have been taken a month, a year before, but the experience didn't happen till after Houston, after March 4th. So John, there's more evidence that William Branham was not out hunting on February 28th.

Back in the late 1970s, that's when people started to actually figure out that this cloud story was a hoax. And I believe that the best of my knowledge, Peter Dozier, the man who wrote Legend of the Fall, he is the man who started unearth all this way back then, as far as I know.

And by the time you get into the late 1980s, you know, it's so well known that this cloud story is fake. It actually makes Doug Weaver's 1987 biography of William Branham. And when it gets in the 1987 biography of William Branham, I want to know every leader in the message read this book, okay? And as you come into the late 1980s and early 1990s, everybody is aware of the discrepancies with the stuff in the cloud, okay? It made William Branham's first official, reputable biographies in 1987. And so by then, all the message leaders started to become aware of the problem. And as

that happened, Rebecca Branham, William Branham's daughter, she started to address the issue. And she was with William Branham while all of this happened. She's an eyewitness and she knew the timeline. And she published the timeline and only believe magazine. I've got a copy of it right here. And in this magazine, she clearly states that William Branham was not out hunting on February 28th. She published a detailed timeline trying to address, you know, the issues. And as you look through this magazine on the timeline, she's very clear in here. February 28th is when the cloud appeared. March the fourth is when

William Brannum was in Houston. March the sixth is when he went out hunting and March the eighth is when the seven angels appeared. So she very clearly as an eyewitness of where William Brannum was in those days tells us he was not out hunting. The dates do not line up the way that William Brannum told us, right? And she's again being forthright and honest about that in this magazine. And the thing is, John, she got a whole lot of attacks for doing this back when this happened. She was attacked for this quite heavily. And now she's passed away now, but the message leaders have largely

eradicated all evidence of this edition of Only Believe magazine. If you look through the online archives, this magazine edition has been purged out almost everywhere because Rebecca told the truth. Yeah, her testimony in Only Believe magazine and the timeline was so problematic that it created even more controversy because there were ministers who knew that this timeline could not have added up. And then once she published it, now the general public in the message quote, we're all suddenly aware that, wait a minute, there's a problem here. And then everybody started opening up to this. And, you know, a con man will try to take the actual problem that exists. The thing that

people would suddenly realize that this is a con. And they will try to distract you with another question. So that your mind focuses in on this other question, rather than the real underlying question.

And the real question here is the timeline because William Brannum could not have been there on the date that he said he was there. And so these ministers will raise the question, well, was he really there under the cloud? Was he really there under that date? Like George Smith said, was he in another dimension? Which gets really crazy. But some of these, I've heard the argument made that William Brannum actually met with these angels and they left, but they left slowly. And so what happened was he was there. Then these angels met with him and then they slowly left while he

was in Houston. And the photograph that was captured came after the fact. But William Brannum himself on several occasions said that he was standing right there. One example, I'll read you from 1963 in the sermon standing in the gap. He said, brother Fred Soff, And I know he's here, and I'm pretty sure Brother Norman is here.

These are the two witnesses, alleged witnesses that were there with him. He said, we was up. I had to go to Houston about getting the little boys say from the electric chair, and then I went back and went hunting up there.

Now remember, we have the dates on when the Houston thing was. It was the same date as the cloud. So he's saying, here, I went to Houston, then I had to go back. And he said, I was standing there picking cuckoo birds or what they call goat heads, birds off my trouser leg, and the blast did exactly what it said it was.

And then he says, that right, brother, Fred, he said, I must have jumped off the ground. And just above me was the angels of the Lord that sent the message back for me to break these seals.

Now if you dissect what he's saying here, he's saying that he went to Houston, which we know we have the date, it was the same date as the cloud. And then he came back afterwards.

And then I was standing there and they were above me. So he is putting himself right in the scene of this, of this cloud event. And, and again, it's all morphing and it's very confusing.

But if you just break it down like Charles said very simply, here's the timeline. Here's what we know. Here's what we can establish because we have confirmed dates. William Brannem is not saying that he went before the cloud.

And he's not saying that he went into a new dimension. He's saying, I was standing there and I looked up and there, there it was. You're exactly right. And there's times that he is literally holding this very magazine article that I'm holding here and he said, and he's saying, and right there was where, and he's pointing at the picture right there is a picture where I was under it.

Like he's literally pointing at the picture and saying, basically, I had the belief, John, that he was in this photograph in some little way. Like one of these little ridges was him in the picture as he painted it.

Like he was in this picture in the magazine with the cloud. Right. It's, it's, it's just, it's bizarre. Now you mentioned their gene Norman, who gene Norman was out hunting with William Brannem that day.

He is another direct eyewitness of this, John. And gene Norman actually has a about an hour long recorded testimony of his, of, of everything. And he includes in that testimony his hunting trip with William Brannem on this day.

I hunted, uh, well, probably about a half an hour and a half blast went on. And it, it sounded like it was just right above my head. And, uh, I looked up and I didn't, I didn't see nothing.

Uh, and I didn't, I didn't see the cloud. They're, they're all in agreement that this thing did not happen February 28th. So there's two eyewitnesses, two eyewitnesses, um, who knew. William Brannum's whereabouts during this period.

William Brannum was not under this cloud getting a commission to preach the seven seals on February 28th. Jean Norman tells us that. Rebecca Brannum tells us that. There's not a single person who cooperates William Brannum's stories.

And let me tell you, there's plenty of eyewitnesses. There is not a single person to cooperate William Brannum's story of being out hunting the day this cloud appeared to be under it. Nobody. Yeah.

And keep in mind, again, it was a constellation. It was supposed to be five lights coming down and these five lights were these angel messengers. And then he's supposed to receive the message. And then as he has his message, you know, he says, I was standing right there.

So he's putting himself into the timeline before this cloud, which is supposed to be this constellation of angels. If you think about what's happening, you have a triangle coming down of these lights and they meet William Brannum, he gets the message which he says is on February 28th because he's holding that picture like you said.

Well, then they would have to go back up. And he, that's the point in which he says, I looked, they were going back up. I saw the cloud, which he calls a constellation. Well, if you think about it, it would have then created a constellation.

If they went back in the same way in which they came, their lights, if you believe in this fantasy world, he's created. So it becomes problematic in that he's actually inserting himself in the timeline slightly before the cloud because that's when they were ascending into heaven.

And so his date comes before the cloud. The witnesses, the eyewitnesses who were there give the date after he's made his trip to Houston to save Leslie Douglas Ashley. And then his own daughter puts it out a date further than that.

Yeah, let me, let's give another witness here. So you noticed in Gene Norman's statement that they were hunting Havillina pigs when all this happened, right? So we know William Brannum's stories tell us they was hunting Havillina pigs.

And here we have a copy of the 1962 and 1963 hunting regulations for the state of Arizona. And hunting Havillina pigs in 1963, here's the page of that in the regulations. That Havillina pig hunting season started on March 1st, which is yet another witness to us that William Brannum was not under that cloud on February 28th, because here's the thing.

If he was out hunting in February, these pigs, well, that would mean he would have been poaching, John. And poaching is a felony with a 10-year prison sentence. So if William Brannum... Adam's cloud story is true the way he told it.

It would actually make him a felon who should have went to prison for poaching, right? And it's really though just one more witness that William Brannum was not out hunting on February when that cloud appeared.

Yeah. And again, a con man will take an actual problem, the thing that they're trying to con you with, and they'll try to throw up a distraction to a new problem that they say is a problem.

Whenever we publish this information on our website, there was this onslaught of people who suddenly started contacting us because apparently one of the ministers, I won't give his name, one of the ministers who's respectable in this cult, started claiming that we cannot trust the dates that the Arizona government has for the timeline of hunting.

In other words, the question becomes the dates of hunting season, not this big, huge problem of the cloud timeline. And so people were actually believing this and they became intently focused on that. And they started attacking, we've got a page for the government records.

They started attacking the government records of hunting season, which is fully documented. You yourself can contact Arizona hunting and fishing and I think you can get these dates just by writing in. So the focus was put onto a new distraction to take people's minds off the problem that this is a actual problem that exists.

This is critical information and the cult leaders are withholding it. But what they did not tell these people that were contacting us is William Brantum himself said that he was there hunting when this cloud occurred.

Yeah, so John, we have several more witnesses we could read from, but I'll just mention them. Perry Greene, who was living in Tucson at the time, he knew William Brantum was not hunting on February 28th too.

We have Perry Greene on tape admitting that William Brantum made up the story. I personally think that the cloud, that Brother Brantum, the angels appeared to Brother Brantum on March the 7th, the third month, the seventh day of 63.

Well, then those that believed that the rapture took place on February the 28th, you can't make it fit. Now, Brother Brantum makes this out like this. If you don't get it right, you'll get a cow eating grass out of top of a tree.

Right. Well, that sounds pretty ridiculous. But if you got Brother Brantum seeing something on February 28th when he wasn't even there and he hadn't been there, but then he went a week later and an event happened, you got something that looks stranger than a cow eating grass out of top of a tree.

And Lee Vail, he was in close contact with William Brantum during 1963 because they were working on the church age book together. And Lee Vail knew he was not out hunting that day too.

Well. The actual fact of the matter is the brother Brannum was in Houston, Texas at that time appearing before a judge pleading for the life of a young man who actually, according to the law, should have been taken from off this earth for the callous butchery he perpetrated upon a couple when he was with a young woman whom I presume was his wife and brother Brannum turned the sentence around and this boy was a stepson of Kipperman the man who took that picture who was literally as he portrayed himself a foe of brother Brannum and what brother Brannum stood for

and he said just think he said the man that I was against came and saved the life of my son now that was two days before the havelina hunting season opened so now I asked a gene norm and about it and he just shook his head and knew nothing so there is witness after witness after witness on top of hard evidence on top of hard evidence that William Brannum was not out hunting on February 28 William Brannum was totally deceiving us when he said he was underneath this supernatural cloud which wasn't supernatural it's such a problem and you know Charles I look back at the names you mentioned

many of these men made massive amounts of money by doing this thing by preaching the message and you know people giving them ties and offerings and some of them have book ministries and outreach programs and these men their entire livelihood was based on this and I look back at Rebecca Brannum William Brannum's own daughter published this timeline and suddenly the whole general public and the messages now aware that this cannot be this this is a problem and it cannot be and you see each one of these men after it was published start changing their story no he couldn't

have been there had she not published that I can almost assure you that every one of these men would say still to this day he was standing right there and they all know that it's not true yeah that that is what kind of forced their hand on this stuff same in my sec John so like I mentioned the truth that William Brannum actually made the story up started to come out in the late 1970s which if you're here in 2023 that probably shocks you, right?

If this is the first time you're hearing about this, what do you mean they knew this since the late 70? But gradually all the leaders in the message came into contact with evidence that we're talking about here today.

And as that happened, they've come up with a variety of responses to the issues of the date not lining up, okay? Some people in the message just outright, William Brannum made up being under the cloud, right?

The just outright admit it, right? My sect of the message, for example, Raymond Jackson and several other preachers, they figured this out. My sect, I'm fairly confident based on the things I know, they figured this out in the early 1990s that it was fake.

Not long after Doug Weaver's book came out. So I think it was between Doug Weaver's book and the Road to Sunset magazine that the leaders in my sect found out about it. And for the most part, the preachers in my sect just stop talking about the cloud.

We're just not gonna talk about this no more. And hopefully people will forget about it. That was the tact I looked back now and I realized our leaders took. But as I started to figure this out, John, when I was leaving, I asked one of the preachers in my sect of the message.

I just asked in point blank, I said, did William Brannum just make this whole story up? And he said to me, yeah, that's pretty much how it is.

And John, that just floored me when he said that to me. They know William Brannum just made this story up. And somehow they go on and it's not really a big deal to them, right?

Some people though, some people though, they'll hold on to the cloud no matter what, right? Their position is basically evidence to be damned. We're going to believe William Brannum was under the cloud no matter what because William Brannum said it, right?

You have that hardcore people in there. And then you get a group of people, different groups who do some really weird stuff. They start inventing these bizarre explanations, you know? Some of them will say, well, William Brannum got the dates mixed up.

He wasn't out hunting on February 28th, but he was really hunting in March 8th. And there was another cloud on March 8th, which was identical to the one in the magazine. And it happened on March 8th and just nobody saw it, but William Brannum, right?

So they go with, they go something like that. And people will get really creative to try and invent ways to harmonize these obvious dishonesty with William Brannum, right? And like you've already said, John, the most bizarre, whack-a-doodle explanation of all comes from George Smith.

William Brannum's son-in-law, okay? According to him, yeah, William Brannum was in another dimension. And somehow on March 8th, he time traveled back to February 28th and somehow was in two places that once simultaneously on different dates, really, really hard to wrap your mind around some of that stuff, John.

But some of the message leaders have come up with really, really creative ways. is to try and make this story work. And I think that alternate dimension story is actually accepted by quite a few people, John.

I mean, I know people in Africa it's a fairly well accepted thing that William Brannum traveled through the alternate dimension to go back in time to February 28 from March the 8th. Oh my goodness, it's something else.

When the truth is, when the simple truth is, William Brannum told a fake story. William Brannum faked the most important supernatural event of his ministry. That's the truth. That's what all the evidence indicates.

There is fact, after fact, establishing that and there's not actually a single shred of evidence to verify William Brannum's story. Not a shred of evidence to verify William Brannum's story. Not even the eyewitness men who are hunting with him in March said they saw the cloud or the angels or that they were even out on the day that he said, right?

It's something else, John. It's something else. There is only one place that I can think of where this even fits in a timeline, especially given George Smith's testimony. We just, our family just finished going through the Stranger Things series.

And it might fit if William Brannum went into the upside down. I just, I don't know if you're familiar with the show, but none of that makes any sense. I mean, if you are critically thinking about a religion that's supposed to be based on Christianity and you're being taught that the only way in which your faith can be real, is if somebody stepped into another dimension, came out into the real world in a different timeline, went back into the dimension, and then came back out.

This is science fiction, man. This is not Christianity. And nothing like that in the Bible. Nothing. And then like you said, they started just, they stopped talking about the cloud because in a cult, if there is critical information and you talk about it, people will eventually think about it.

And when they think about it, they will escape. In the main sect of the message, Charles, I will never forget this. You hear the, you read in the Bible about the people who were caught in idolatry and they converted it to the true God.

And even in the message, you talk about the Catholics and their relics. And, you know, I was like this. I had relics. I had idols. In my bedroom, as a child, I had a photograph of the cloud, man.

I had the cloud and the halo. I was the perfect message kid because I believed this hook, line, and sinker. I believed it. And then when I moved to Jeffersonville, I still believed it hook, line, and sinker.

But there came a point in which, for me, I came across, the book, a logical refutation of William Branham in his message. And that was the first time I had seen a timeline established. And I realized that there was no way possible that William Branham could have been there like he said. And I knew the sermons backwards and forwards. I listened to those sermons over and over and over. I listened to them when I woke up in the morning at 5 a.m. whenever I was on the way on my school bus going to school.

I had a walkman, Sony Walkman, I would play him in between classes during lunchtime. I literally brainwashed myself with these things. But it's a gift and a curse. I know what's on them. And I knew the cloud. I had it hanging in my bedroom. I knew what this represented. And for me, this was the greatest thing because it represented our message. And then when I realized that this cannot be. I'd seen the timeline. I would never forget. I took a person who was a younger deacon in one of the churches. I took him out to launch to talk about it. And I was like,

man, there's a real problem here. William Branham was not there during the cloud. This person actually looked at me and said, what cloud? And I know that they've seen the cloud, right? I mean, it's hanging everywhere. If you're in the message, you've seen this photograph.

But they talk about it so little. This person who is an elder in a church and still today, I believe, is elder in a church. He said, what cloud? And that was the point in which I realized something is wrong. Because if you don't know that and you're in the cold and this is the message, you don't believe them. You don't believe the message at all. And what it is.

And that statement alone was enough to make me just suddenly explode into other avenues of research. Because if they're covering this up, what else are they covering up? So for me, this was just so problematic. And like you said, it is the reason why a message cult exists.

Yes, yes. There would be no message cult. And certainly the way it exists today without this cloud. You know, I can remember as a kid, John, my grandparents had a copy of this. My grandparents who attended the tabernacle had a copy of this picture. And I can remember as a little kid, basically going cross-eyed looking at this picture, trying to make out angels and trying to make out William Brannum. And I would look at each little, is that little, is that William Brannum in the picture? And I can remember staring at this picture as a child trying to see the angels

in it and stuff. But I never could. I never could see them in it. And of course, that makes you feel dumb because I knew people who said, yeah, I see the angels in that picture. Yeah, right.

Now I realize they're just a bunch of... So, what was that? Come on, you guys never saw no angels in that picture. Give me a break. And here I would go cross-eyed trying to figure it out.

But the truth is, the dis-the-simple truth is, William Brownham has a lifelong history of making up stories. We caught him faking visions. We've caught him faking miracles. We've caught him faking supernatural experiences. We've shared solid evidence for that in our prior episodes.

And this cloud is just par for the course. This is William Brownham's single greatest hoax. William Brownham was not standing under that cloud on February 28, 1963. That's a lie. Seven angels did not come to him and give him a commission to preach the seven seals that day.

Did not happen. It is a hoax, a plain and simple hoax, right? And to believe otherwise is just to believe lies. To believe lies contrary to facts, contrary to evidence, contrary to truth, right?

And so I believe all of the evidence proves to us that William Brownham was beyond a shadow without deceiving us when he claimed to be standing under that cloud on February 28. And what William Brownham did with this story is very, very wicked.

It's evil. I mean, it's just wicked and evil what he did with this. This is actually a very clear red flag that someone is a false prophet. According to the words of Jesus Christ in Matthew 24, William Brownham is guilty of faking an appearance of Jesus.

Of Jesus, I mean, good to say and people in the message, especially leaders of the message, they'll very casually dismiss all of this as if it doesn't really matter. It's not really something that they think should be taken serious, right?

And I have to say, I find it very hard to take you serious, right, when you don't take this serious, right? People who are willing to dismiss or go along with deception like this, they are not people you can trust and people who lack the moral integrity to verify the validity of their beliefs are certainly not people that you can respect and trust.

I'll leave it at that. Yeah, for me, Charles, it's as simple as some advice from a friend. I have some very deep regrets of many things in my life. And just to open up just a little bit too, you're probably more than I should, but I had one of these photographs of the cloud in a wallet side.

I don't know if they made this for you and your sect, but they had these wallet size images. You could get one of the Halo photograph in the cloud and they were laminated. You could put them in your wallet.

I had these things. And even in high school, I'm trying to think it might have even been middle school, but I know it was in high school. I used to use that photograph to witness, quote unquote.

witness to other people. And I'll never forget this. It's one of my deepest, deepest regrets. I was trying to witness to this person who this was a kid who knew his Bible and he just he looked at this photograph. I'm holding it up this cloud and he scratches head and he said, you know, John, I'd like to believe you, but my question is just this. What does that have to do with Jesus Christ? And we parted ways. We actually parted ways because he thought I was a freak and I thought, well, okay, I've done my message Christian duty and I've gave him the opportunity

to learn about our prophet and he rejected it. So now he's I'm past him. That's your mentality when you're in these cults. You witness to them and if they don't suddenly get excited, oh, boy, that's a cloud. Well, now you move on. You try to recruit the next person and recruit the next person after this. I could have made a good, solid, healthy friendship with this person.

But because I was in a cult and because I was trying to witness with this ridiculous thing that I thought was a constellation. You mentioned you kept staring at it trying to see seven angels.

Well, I knew the whole story, man. I remember I remember staring at this photograph and I'm looking at it trying to picture, okay, how did that transition from this into a constellation and how on earth did it did it morph from that shape back into a pyramid, which I knew was a triangle.

And my mind is like taking this cloud thing and trying to transition into something that it wasn't even to begin with. It's bizarre, John. It's bizarre. So as we wrap up this episode, I do want to make sure we acknowledge all the people who have spent a lot of time accumulating all this evidence where William Brennan was on February 28th, right? People, like I said, have been piecing this together since the late 1970s and in that way we're certainly standing on the shoulders of a lot of people who've went before us. And I'm very thankful for the efforts they took to publish

their findings and to publish their evidence because that's how we know a lot of this today. Peter Doyser, John McKenna, they were at the tip of the spear investigating this stuff up into the early 1990s. And over the past 10 years, this information is just becoming very easily found through the internet. And I think it's safe to say that this event concerning the cloud and the seven seals is by far the most investigated event in the history of the message. And it's this way because it is so critical to the message, right? If William Brennan was not under the cloud on

February 28th, 1963, then he never actually got the commission to preach the seven seals, right? And that means one of the key pillars holding up the message. Colle- And in our next episode, we're gonna continue to examine this stuff from 1963 because there are people out there who will say, and I was in this camp myself, John.

Well, William Brandon was not under the cloud. He made that up, not a big deal. There's nothing to see here, right? Move along. It's not a critical issue. Because even if he was not under the cloud, the cloud was still the supernatural face of Jesus, right?

So that's the easiest fallback position when you realize he wasn't there that day. Well, William Brandon was mistaken or confused about being under the cloud, but the cloud itself was still supernatural vindication of the message.

And so come back next time. We'll walk through where that cloud came from. And it definitely did not come from the portals of glory. It actually flew off a launch pad from Vanneberg Air Force Base.

And we have conclusive evidence on that too. For me, you know, my escape was somewhat sudden. And I look back at the timeline of my escape from this call. It was very rapid and it was just like, you know, night and day.

One time, one moment I just suddenly woke up. Well, I remember one of the key moments of my escape was we had gone down to some labor day meetings down in Macon, Georgia. And it was a big convention.

William Brandon's son was to be there. And there were all these numerous speakers and music. And on the way down, I really, I can't even remember how I stumbled upon it. But I stumbled on this book, which used to be you could download it free off the Internet.

It's a logical reputation of Brandon's message written by Nathan Rivera. And my wife was driving and I said, what's this? And I opened it up and I look and again, I mentioned it before in this episode.

It had the timeline, you know, laid out when the cloud occurred. When William Brandon, you know, the sermons he preached where he never mentioned it. And he's talking about this constellation to when he suddenly sees the photograph that's in the magazine.

And oh, yes, that's it. I was there. I'll never forget. It was like for me in the matrix, you know, you've got the red and the blue pill. And you take the one that wakes you up and suddenly nothing in this false world is real.

You can see right through it. After reading this book, I could suddenly see through all of these men because these men knew this. And sadly, for me, I mean, not sadly. I'm very pleased now, but at the time, it's very sad for me because I read that on the way to this series of meetings.

And I took the pill, man. I suddenly woke up and I'm sitting there in the meetings. And I know I'm looking at the faces of these men who are speaking to me. and suddenly I can see through them because these men have to know this. The details that are in this book, every single person who is speaking had to have been aware of this. And suddenly, you see their smiles and this fake smile that you can just suddenly see through and it's sick into me. I was sick to my stomach. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. It went on for days.

And that was in the Labor Day meetings in 2011. Our family made the decision shortly after that. And then I publicly announced it January 1st, 2012. But it was because of this cloud. And more specifically, it was because of the timeline of this cloud that when you take this cloud away from the message, you take the message away from the message, what do you have left?

There's really nothing of substance because this was supposed to be the quote unquote messenger for our age, giving us the message, preparing us for Jesus to come. And while he was alive, there were several doomsday dates, but this was all supposed to happen before 1977.

And when you take the cloud away and you realize that none of that was real, every single thing that he says from 1963 forward is really built on top of this as the foundation.

And if you take the foundation away, it's like the Bible talks about sinking sand. If you build your house on sinking sand, it's all going to fall. Well, if you build the message on the cloud, which he did, what do you have? It's all gone. There's nothing left.

And so when I realize this, for me and my family, I realize that I've got to get them out of this because this is so badly wrong that men will actually try to change history to make it fit so that they can continue what they're doing. And I can't look, I took the pill in the matrix, man.

I can't look at a single person this way anymore because if they're lying to me about this, then what else are they lying to me about? That's well said, John. And you're just spot on, you know.

Every message sect has a little different spin on this, but almost universally, we believe that this cloud thing in the midnight cry, this is what starts the separation of the wise virgins and the foolish virgins, right? This is the event that separates the wise versions and the foolish virgins and the bride of Christ, the message of believers, the wise virgin, right?

And everybody else who might go to heaven and be cannon fodder is the foolish virgin, right? This is what this is the genesis for that separation. If this never happened, the separation is illegitimate, right? So we need to go back and be friends with with our friends, right?

I could put it that way, right? The set, the midnight cry never happened. The commission to preach the seals never happened. This is a hoax. This is a hoax. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a hoax.

Come back next time. We'll expose more of the hoax. Absolutely. And if you've enjoyed our show and you want more information, you can check us out on the web. You can find us at William-Pranum.org and ChristianGospelChurch.org.

For an overview of the historical research of William-Pranum and his healing revivals, read preacher behind the white hoods, a critical examination of William-Pranum and his message, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible. Join us again next week.

We've got a great episode coming.