Collapse of Integrity: How the Cloud Hoax Exposed the Message Movement

Music Hello and welcome to another episode of the William Branham Historical Research Podcasts. I'm your host, John Collins, the author and founder of William Branham Historical Research at William-Branham.org, and with me I have my co-host, researcher, minister, and friend Charles Paisley, the founder of christiangospelchurch.org, and the author of Come Out Of Her My People.

Charles is good to be back and to talk all things message-related and William Branham and the main sect of the message, which is what I came from, and obviously all of its connections to what we see in the world today in christianity. But I'm a little excited to get into this one because this is history that I should have known. It kind of happened during my lifetime, but there was a point in which people in the message and leadership began to realize, wait a minute, William Branham wasn't being honest with us. And it shows the integrity of people.

Charles, if I am talking to somebody and people who talk make mistakes, I make mistakes. If I'm talking and I make a mistake, I try to correct the mistakes because I want people to think of me as a person with integrity and with honesty. And you and I've had conversations where I'll back up and I'll say, I kind of messed up there. What I meant to say was, and then I would say the other thing that's true. But it shows the integrity of people when they discover that something that they have taught for decades. When they learn that it's false, a person with integrity will say,

wait a minute, I'm sorry people, what I taught you was false. And here's the correct thing that happened. A person without integrity, they'll try to cover it up. They'll try to skirt the issue.

We can't let this get out, man. We do not want the people to know or otherwise, don't know that everything that I've said has been false and everything that I built on top of that has been false.

So today we get to talk through integrity. This is a podcast about integrity. And we're talking specifically through, we mentioned the cloud and all of the John McKinnon and I just had a podcast discussing the cloud to refresh people's memories. We're talking through this and we're going to explain what happens whenever somebody who's in leadership and occult discovers the doctrine that is false. And we're going to look to the integrity and discuss what happens in occult to people who are claiming to have of integrity, but don't.

We're looking forward to our episode today, John. This is going to be probably our last episode on the main sect of the message. There are, there's so many topics on the main sect we could talk about, John.

I mean, we could do all 50 part series just on the main sect of the message, but we're trying to just cram in some highlights here, you know, as we wrap through our post-Branum message years. One thing we're doing differently with, with the main sect than the others is I think we're only going to go up to about 1995 here on the podcast with the main sect of the message. And our listeners will probably understand why as we get to the end of this. However, my book does take the main sect up to 2005 if you want to look at that. And so what I'm

doing, I'm in chapter nine in my book, John, just talking about some more stuff. And you are correct. We are talking about an issue of integrity today for the message. Now, the early message community believed that Jesus Christ came back to earth in some spiritual way during the ministry of William Branum. Now, the, the nuanced way in which the different sex of the message believe that very, there's varying explanations, you know, some will say it started with the pillar of fire at the river in 1933, which we've been through the hook story. Some people will mostly, though, the majority of people that I'm

aware of in the message actually put it at the 1963 event where the cloud, the face of Jesus appeared from heaven. And here's what I can say for sure, John. It was only in 1963 that anybody started to believe this. Nobody really believed it before 1963. And so in 1963, some people began to rewrite it back, you know, backdate it to 1933 based on the 1963 experiments. And so whenever I talk about this, you'll notice I almost always refer to it as the 1963 belief because even if people backdate it to 1933, 1963 is when they started believing

it. Okay. So 1963, everyone believes that the face of Jesus appeared over the Arizona desert, look down upon his humble prophet, William Brannum, angels descended from heaven. And William Brannum talks about how they caught him up the little bit. And they gave him a commission. They told him return to Jeffersonville and preach the revelation of the seven seals. And William Brannum thus commissioned return to Holy blessed Jeffersonville to deliver to the Jerusalem of Leo to see the the final last day revelation that might give his people the rapturing faith that long last. And so back he

comes and that all happens. Well, what started to happen, John, and what we're going to talk about today in the late 1970s, everybody, well, I will. Everybody, certain people in the message started to discover that that whole thing was a hoax and it never actually happened and he made it all up. That started to be discovered in the light 1970s, John, and I think the person to the best in my knowledge that we credit with making this discovery was none other than Peter Doyser. Peter Doyser, who I think we could call the father of the ex-message community, he began to discover this in the late 1970s. He actually

wrote about it in a book called Legend of the Fall. This was published, this was published about 25 years ago or so, I'd say, but he made the discovery and he started to circulate that information in some tracks beginning in the late 1970s and 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. When I started working with Peter Doyser and I met him in person, we were collaborating on a few different things, but when I first met him, the voice of God recording's

publications was in a really odd state. Almost 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. How do you do this? 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. I've went through 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. They equivilated the message of William Branham going out to the people in the same way, Christians would consider the Bible going out to other nations. That's how weird this was. And as you're looking through this big process and you're in your mind, you're thinking how it works, you think, okay, so there's 1200 sermons they've had, how many decades to go through those sermons, that translator going through a sermon, how long does that take? You'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. The problem is it hadn't and in some

languages, they're only handfuls of recordings that had gone out. Spanish, I would say the most targeted region where the Spanish-speaking countries and they had people like George Smith who spoke Spanish, they had many different translators. And I thought surely the Spanish sermons would all be translated, but they weren't. And I'm learning today, as you begin to understand the highly racist, highly anti-...

a Semitic, highly problematic things that he said, translators just don't know what to do with this. How do you translate somebody who is calling, this is offensive, but this is what he says, who's calling Jewish people, hook-nosed Jews, Paul was a hook-nosed Jew.

How do you translate that, man? You're insulting the apostle Paul, and there's many different things. I'm not going to go through the entire list, but there's a problem with translations. The problem is, when you don't have the entire collection and you're being brainwashed by the recordings, your brainwashed in a different way than people who have all the recordings.

I remember growing up, I had the entire collection, I had brainwashed myself with them, but there were series of recordings that we thought were of greater importance. I brainwashed myself in listening to the Seven Seals Ministry, I would listen that over and over and over, and I would hear him 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.

I brainwashed myself like this, and in my memory, I believe that a literal angel came down to earth, met William Brattam in the office where my grandfather sat before he walked out to the platform, gave him the message, opened the Seven Seals right there in the room, and walked out into the platform.

That's what he said, that's what I believed. I'll never forget when I met Peter Dyser, and he was talking about, what did you know, John, that those angels were supposed to have given him these messages back in Arizona during this haunting 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.

I'll say, no, Peter Dyser, that's not how this works. He said he met him in the room in Jeffersonville. That's what I was brainwashed to believe. What's interesting is that was in the year 1963, if you look at the NAR today, by and large, they say, William Brattam was very, very in tune with the spirit.

He was clearly listening from God as God's mouthpiece, and then he went astray. Well, the years in which they go astray, if you look at the timeline, 1963, he's not under the cloud, because who's he's working with?

He's in Houston, working with Joel Osteen's father. He'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. He's working with key figures who would evolve into either the word of faith, the letter reign, not letter reign, the prosperity gospel, all of these different movements that emerge from this.

He's working with them, which means they don't yet think he... is going astray. And what's he teaching at this time? He's teaching that he himself worked with the angels to open the seven seals. And he did it in that room. And he's also saying that he didn't do it in the room. The angels gave it to him. How do you reconcile this?

So 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. So I woke up from that brainwashing immediately when I saw, wait a minute, he's lying. But neither did he open it in the stabernacle room with the angel present. Neither did he open it in under this cloud, which he was not even there in the state at the time. None of it's true. So that's how my mind process worked. That's how the brainwashing kind of happened. But now take everything

that I just said and apply it to ministers. There are ministers who have preached this for decades. And they suddenly come in contact with the fact that, A, he wasn't underneath this cloud when he said he was, B, he wasn't even in the state because hunting season hadn't started yet. C, the angel was supposed to deliver the message of the seven seal out in Arizona. And continue on through, you know, D through Z, all of the other things that he said about it, none of which can be true. And that's the background for what we're about to get into leaders in the cult and leaders who were in ministries that emerged

after the cult, who believed this stuff suddenly came in contact with the fact that, wait a minute, nothing the man said about this story was true. You were correct, John. And what you're describing is the things that Peter Doyser began to discover in the late 1970s.

And it was gradual. It was a gradual discovery of some of these pieces of information. I think the very first thing that they encountered, John, was somebody was looking at the hunting guides for Havillina season in Arizona. And if you're familiar with William Brownham's story, one of the key, when he saw the face of Jesus come down to him, one of the key elements is he was out hunting Havillinas, right? And he had shot, I think he had shot his Havillina the day before. And he was out that day and his buddies were going to

try and get their Havillina's that day when this thing all happened. And so this thing happening in the middle of a Havillina hunt season is just very central to the story. And so someone, and I believe Peter Doyser was looking at the hunting regulations and realized, wait a minute, Havillina hunting season doesn't line up with the dates that this cloud actually appeared. And so you've got a contradiction there. And so this is how it started. It started with them discovering, wait a minute, the hunting season dates don't line up with the cloud and so they start digging in more to try and figure out what's this discrepancy because they

couldn't possibly believe their blessed profit was poaching right because that was the implication back then I mean that was really the worst of it was at the beginning is maybe the profit was poaching oh no but no obviously that's not what it was so they started digging into it and as they dug into it yes that's when they started to line up the sermon tapes and there's a sermon that William Brennan preached in Houston, Texas on March the 4th and he said he was going to come back and be hunting his havelinas after March the 4th which puts him out hunting after the cloud

appeared so now you've got the hunting dates don't line up you've also got William Brennan on tape admitting yes he's coming like the week after the cloud appeared to go hunting and as things go on and more evidence comes up yeah I mean it begins to become very apparent that William Brennan was actually in Texas on the day that the cloud appeared the cloud he said he was standing underneath hunting that day and so it starts to unravel it starts to unravel that that's really important thing because if William Brennan wasn't under underneath the cloud that day John

how did that happen William Brennan even said in one one statement that the it was the mist under his feet while he was hunting that went up into the sky and created the cloud so he was in if he was in Texas how you know how did the mist come up under his feet it just doesn't make any sense right it just becomes obvious it's a made up story and so as that's beginning to come to light

they start digging in even more and at a certain point Peter Doyser starts working with some cult awareness people and they start to dig in to try and figure out where did this what is this cloud anyway what really happened so if you go back into those days John the cloud was was investigated by a man named James McDonald he was a scientist at the atmospheric or the Arizona Institute for Atmospheric Science and he and in a team of scientists they're collected evidence and looked at it to try and figure out what made that cloud in the sky that William

Brennan claimed to be under underneath and the reason they looked at it because it was a really unusual cloud it was 50 miles or it was 50 miles wide it was like five miles high in the sky I believe something like that it was a very very unusual cloud that had formed right at the very edge of space where water vapor shouldn't exist and so there was a scientific interest to understand why that cloud appeared so they investigated that cloud and they discovered that a rocket had launched from Van Verk Air Force that day in fact there had been two and there were two clouds

of course the one main larger cloud is the one we always focused on in the message well as as that happened they also got wind speed measurement between Vanneberg Air Force Base and Arizona, and Peter Doyser, or rather James McDonald, found that the air speed of wind speed between the two sites was very close to account for the natural drift of the cloud from Vanneberg Air Force Base over to Arizona that day.

And by the time it was all said and done, they interviewed people who would help launch the rockets. They got statements from the United States Air Force and different things. And they confirmed, you know, all the way back in the 60s when it happened, that the cloud had been made by these rockets. And the United States Air Force even took credit for creating the clouds.

Well, as you fast forward into the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, Peter Doyser discovered is discovering all this and getting letters and things of the same evidence. And he puts together a track to John that begins to circulate in a few places out in Arizona to tell people the cloud was man-made. William Brannum was in Arizona that day. And so that forces the early message community back in those days to react to that information coming out. And this presents another crisis really for message leaders as you come into the early 1980s. 1980s was an era of

late in crisis for message leaders. Wasn't it, John? But a lot of the people in the rank and file never understood, never heard. This was never communicated to rank and file in the message, John.

Did you hear about it in the 80s? I never heard about it in the 80s. Very few people found out about it in the 80s in the rank and file. But 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. And I want to take a minute to pause and talk about how all of that played out.

Because there's a pattern here. It's not just one or two people. There is a pattern. I had long conversations with Peter Dyser. He actually came to my house and we had dinner and discussed many, many things. But he was talking about when he first discovered it.

Suddenly, 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. And his family knew the message was a cult.

And he kind of distanced himself and had huge regrets. But whenever he discovered that it was false, he said, John, my biggest desire was just to be a Christian, to serve God. He was a minister. He helped, he had a ministry helping people who were off the streets with drugs and alcohol.

Many, many different things that he had going on. He said, I just suddenly realized, wait, this is false, this is nonsense. And what's interesting is his actual belief set wasn't really that far from the fundamentalist set that's in the message. He had some variations and he had some things that he'd progressed away from. But if you take some of the more liberal ministers in the message, take away William Brannum, you had what Peter Dyser was teaching, very, very, very similar.

He, for example, he said he had long conversations with Earn Baxter. Baxter's the guy who was Brannum's campaign manager, Baxter's the guy who started the shepherding movement, one of the guys. And he said, Baxter's theology was spot on, John.

And I'm sitting there thinking, well, I don't know about that, Peter, but that was Peter. So 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.

And his biggest desire was to get people out of the fiction and into the true. So he made this pamphlet. He goes church to church and he's passing these things out. What did the cult do?

They tried to brand him as a not just a heretic, but they wanted to assassinate his character. They wanted to brand him as a bad, vile person. Because if you brand the person who has the truth as an enemy of God or a retribute, however, they want to say it, and you can convince the people that you can't trust the reprobates, then they won't trust the information that came out.

So what they did is just like they did with you, like they did with me, many, many other people, a long line in history of people who are spreading just facts, here's the truth.

They branded him and they wanted to silence him by attacking his character. And that established a pattern that has just continued on and on, I think Charles, they probably saw the power of how that worked if they could brand Peter Dyser as a bad person and silence him, even though he's got clear undeniable evidence that William Brannum was lying.

Well, that works so well. Let's continue that pattern, brothers. And so they have these minister meetings, you're probably were involved in some of these. Gather together, how do we suppress these people who are coming up with the truth about our ministry?

Well, we brand them as bad guys, and that's what they did with Peter. Yes, they find ways to attack a character, you know? And John, you know, people like me, I don't, not to brag or anything, but I was pretty squeaky clang, you know?

They'll find ways to, they just make stuff up even, right? If they don't got nothing, they just make something up. They just make stuff up about you, even. Crazy stuff, you know? I saw ministers and things people leave, they would just accuse them of crazy off the wall stuff just to get the people to not pay attention to them anymore, right?

But Peter Dyser, fortunately, I mean, his information was able to get out, you know, a few people got a whole of it, but not very many. The leaders did an incredibly effective job of suppressing what Peter Dyser found in the late 70s and into the 80s, you know?

Managed to keep the people... from finding it out. And one thing that also happened in those years, John, that goes right along with this. So as the truth that the clouds were made by rockets came out, what happens in Arizona, Perigreen of the Tucson Tabernacle orchestrated a harassment campaign against James McDonald, the scientist who had investigated all of this. And they would go confront him at his work. They would confront him at the university. They would confront him at his home. They would hunt him down in public restaurants and confront him in restaurants. Perigreen, one time, John,

managed to book a plane ticket and set next to James McDonald on a long flight and harassed him the whole way on the flight. I mean, I'm telling you, they harass James McDonald over this stuff.

And they ran articles in the state newspapers in Arizona attacking him. I mean, they did a public harassment campaign against James McDonald. And we know James McDonald was going through a divorce at a certain point in his life. And in the midst of that divorce with all that harassment happening alongside James McDonald committed suicide. He did. And then after he committed suicide, they had his funeral. Perigreen took several of the leaders of the message and members of the Tucson Tabernacle to James McDonald's funeral. And they made a big mockery of him at his own funeral, John. And then

they proclaimed this is the wrath of God poured out on James McDonald for saying, you know, that the cloud was made by, you know, was not supernatural. I mean, it's absolutely outrageous, outrageous, what message people in Arizona did to James McDonald through all of that. But yeah, I mean, the truth is the truth. And even though James McDonald did commit suicide and everything, he's not the only scientist at the atmosphere at the Institute of Atmospheric Science in Arizona that put out the findings. The director of that institution was a man. I believe his name was

Louis Baton. I think that was his name. And 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 and James McDonald were all convinced by the evidence that yes, the cloud was made by the rockets. So if this isn't like one scientist against the message community, it's the whole team at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in in out in Arizona that came to the belief through looking at the evidence that the cloud was made by the rocket. And so the message was whole scale

responding to this information. And it honestly a very radical wage on because the suicide and everything of James Macdonald and the harassment all happened in the same years that Peter Doyser had uncovered this information and was publishing it in some tracks of the early message community.

So let's talk a little bit about integrity, Charles. So you got Perry Green who's orchestrating this whole attack on a person who simply was the scientist who was just who was studying this cloud event.

The scientists who discovered, wait a minute, this came from rocket launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base. There's no way this is a UFO. Take a side 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 and he's studying he's trying to find something that can prove the claim or disprove the claim that this is a rocket launch.

That's all he's doing and Perry Green attacks him and let's talk about integrity for a minute. Perry Green is one of the people who later admitted, no, William Brannum wasn't there. There's no way that he was there.

And so he's orchestrating this attack on this guy and anybody else who wants to align with a fact that William Brannum was making all of this up, Perry Green would attack him. So Perry Green himself knew that this was false and later admitted it.

I don't know how you probably know but how many years later he finally admitted that he knew this. All of these men, my grandfather's one, these men have one job Charles. They study the message of William Brannum.

More than they study the Bible, they walk out onto the platform every twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday night, a few nights in between. And they talk about the things that William Brannum said, usually it's things like this, like the cloud because those were Brannum's most boisterous claims.

They 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. I 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.

You don't forget when an angel of God comes down and sees you, it's going to scare the life out of you, man. You'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 what, you know, he claimed all kinds of different nonsensical claims.

You're not going to forget this. And 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 Havelina hunt. It's not enough that we know that William Branham made this claim.

We want to know exactly the specifics. That's more important to us than the Bible. We want to know the minute. What was the minute whenever the angel came down to see me? What was the second?

Can I get the second out of it? What are all the details? Because, man, that'll feel, I can write a book on that. I can make money by selling books. I can preach sermons.

I can hold conventions for the message people. We're going to make everybody excited because I learned the exact moment that angel came down. And then they look and wait a minute. Hunting season wasn't even during the time the cloud came.

And he said he was hunting. What do I do with this? So that's what was happening in the message community. Well, Perry Green knew this. Perry Green, like my grandfather, studied the message. He would have known when Bramham said that the angel gave it to him in Jeffersonville.

And then he walked out on the platform. And he knew nothing of it before that room. He also would have known. Bramham said that angels came down from the heaven. It was in the form of this cloud.

A mist came up like you said. And they gave me the message of the seals in Arizona, not in Jeffersonville. These guys knew this. So Perry Green knew it. He attacks the people. Attacks all of the people who have any information to silence the information.

And that for me, Charles, that is the opposite of integrity. Have you ever wondered how the Pentecostal movement started or how the progression of modern Pentecostalism transitioned through the latter reign, charismatic and other fringe movements into the new apostolic reformation?

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You know, John, when you think about how they responded to the initial wave of information outing the cloud as a hoax, it's incredibly telling. Because it really defines the pattern that message leaders follow to the present day on all of this stuff.

You know, at the very first, deny, deny, deny, and harass, harass, harass, and discredit, discredit, discredit, right? You know, dig in the heels, do not give an inch. And even if we have to do very questionable things like harass people till they commit suicide, that's what we're going to do in order to keep this thing going, right?

They reveal the radicalness, right, with those initials. pieces. And of course, Peter Toyser was right. And of course, James McDonald was right. They were right, John. They were correct. And even though they responded so terribly to the point that they contributed to death and destruction of people's lives, John, that's what they did. I mean, there's hands down the message contributed to death and destruction of people's lives in order to deny these things. They still do the same thing to this day when they're confronted with this sort of information. Well, give it some time, John, and they're going to be forced. They've gradually

become forced to deal with the reality of the situation. Now, as it starts, the leaders are able to effectively suppress the whole thing. But as you come up into the mid and late 1980s, they lose their suppression effect, John. And their ability to suppress that initial bit of information is in large part because of this book by Doug Weaver, The Healer Profit. This book was originally published in 1987. Doug Weaver came around and he interviewed. He interviewed Perry Green. He interviewed Billy Paul. He interviewed quite a few people when he wrote this book. And this

is the first real scholarly biography that was published on William Brannum, The Healer Profit. And when he published this book, John, he included in passing that the Arizona cloud was created by a Thor rocket. And that William Brannum was in Arizona. Okay. He put it in the book. And he got it from Peter Doyser. So thank you, Peter Doyser, for talking to our dear friend, Mr. Doug Weaver.

So this could get into the book. Well, John, I'm telling you, this book was read by every significant leader of the message in the mid in the late 80s. By the early 90s, everyone in the message had read everyone and senior leadership had read this book.

Now, a lot of the rank and file had not. Okay. But by the time this book comes out, Raymond Jackson is aware of it, Floyd Patterson is aware of it, Billy Paul is aware of it, your grandfather, everyone is aware of it, you know, in the immediate aftermath of this book coming out in leadership. What do they do, John? It's an emergency. Something has to be done.

The timeline don't match up. The cloud might be fake. Might be, you know, man made. Well, that is when this magazine only believe magazine is published is in direct response to these things. Only believe magazine is published by William Brannum's daughter, Rebecca. Rebecca Brannum, who's married to George Smith. And I really wish, you know, I'm sure George, next time you watch this podcast, what I hope you do is you could put this back up on your website. I'd really appreciate that. But we have printed copies if you want. But anyway, the

inside of this book, Rebecca, and thank you, Rebecca. God bless you, Rebecca, for doing this. This is one of the best things Rebecca ever did. Rebecca was a nice lady. I don't have nothing bad to say about her. She was a nice lady. And look, He made the timeline in here to respond.

Sarah Brennan was, Rebecca was living with her dad in Arizona when all of these things happened. She knew where he was, what he was up to, and she made this nice timeline of all the dates so that everybody could understand what to do with this new information about the cloud and the hunting and all that.

And what ends up happening, John, is that Rebecca basically tells us in this book, yeah, my dad was lying about it all day. That's the, what you take away from it. He wasn't there when the cloud appeared.

You know, Charles, a person with integrity would simply say, yeah, my dad said he was there. He wasn't. My dad said it was on this date, it wasn't. But we believe the facts that he presented to us, the opening of the seven seals, the substance of the message was good.

A person with integrity could do that. And you could, you know, you could stretch it, and you say, yeah, he overspirited things, he exaggerated, he outright lied about a few things, but God was giving him a message.

And so we want to focus on the message, we don't want to focus on the lies that the man said. A person with integrity would just simply do this, right? Yeah, we, we discovered he wasn't being truthful.

He lied, he lied through his teeth, but 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.

They'll start to realize, wait a minute, if he lied about the supernatural claim that he had, an angel, did an angel really come down? That's what the net logical next step in the deprogramming process happens.

Did an angel really come down? Was the message that he gave to us? Was that message really from God? Because if you take away the cloud, you have to take away the angel. If you take away the angel, you have to take away God's interaction and the whole thing.

Did it even happen? Is any of it real? And your mind starts to go through that cycle. Cult leadership does not want people to think. That's the bottom line. They do not want people to think.

So 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.

If 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. We can actually eliminate the fallout.

That's what's happening. I agree with you, John. You know, what happened after Sarah published Road to Sunset and gave that... date. Um, this came out, I want to say, yeah, this came out in June of 1992. So by the time you get to June of 1992, there is no longer any ability to deny this anymore because unlike this book, John, which basically the leaders read and forbid their congregations for reading.

Rebecca had like how many people in the rank and file on her mailing list, this went to the rank and file. This is the moment the rank and file started to find out about it. Okay. And the leaders cannot ignore it anymore when it comes out in only believe magazine. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you. And so as that comes out, John, every group comes up with maybe nuanced ways to deal with the problem. You 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. You will not find Raymond Jackson,

mentioned the cloud again after this magazine. Okay. It never had, he just quit talking about it. And, and most of the leaders in our sec, that's just what happened. We're not going to talk about the cloud anymore. And 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. We had, so I'll throw this in. We 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. Like he forgot all of this stuff. So the other generation got to hear

about the cloud from him because he forgot that we was supposed to quit talking about it. Anyway, the, as that happens, you know, the people just lose awareness of it over time. But when you actually step back into the ideology, you're like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why do we think William Brownham had this great authority to preach the seven seals to us? How did he, how did this ever come about? And if you take away the cloud, you take away William Brownham's authority to preach the seals. If you take away the cloud, you take away William Brownham. I mean, you,

you can't even have it anymore. It don't work anymore. The angels didn't come down and say, go back to Jeffersonville and preach the seals. You don't have the face of Jesus. You don't have the Lord sending from heaven with the shout anymore. If you take away the cloud, if you don't got the shout, you don't got the message because the message is the shout like the logic of the message collapses without the cloud. If you take away the cloud, the message collapses. And so I would just highly encourage you. If you have grown up in the years after they quit talking about the cloud

for goodness sakes, ask yourselves, how do we get the Lord descending from heaven with the shout without the cloud? How do we get William Brownham giving permission to preach the seals? the seals. If, you know, how does this happen? So anyways, that's how my sector responded to it. I know others responded the same way, John. Um, and, and gradually they just moved the rank and files attention away from this obvious hoax cloud. And 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. Oh, signs and wonders. Eh, we've got this red, wonderful revelation. This is really where it's at. This is what proves that this is divine. Nobody ever preached anything like this ever before. No one ever had the revelation of the seals before. No one ever had any understanding of these things before. So 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. That's where they went next. I know in my sector of the message in and several others to to kind of vindicate it. Um, we'll talk about the

problem with that next. You know, I'll take it a step further than you did. If you take away the cloud, you take away the Holy Trinity of the message. When 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. You had the halo picture, the photograph from William Brannum in Houston, Texas, with the halo of his head. You had the cloud picture and you had Hoffman's head of Christ. Every single, I can't think of a single message person who displayed

the things on the wall, the relics on the wall. I can't think of a single person who didn't have the Holy Trinity. And then after this comes out, Trinity turns into dualism. I would actually just, I think it was yesterday, I saw the photographs inside of a message, message persons home. And they had dualism because they had Hoffman's head of Christ and the halo photo. They didn't have the cloud because the cloud isn't that important in the message today. But when I was growing up, before all this information was widely available as it is today, before this, people had the Holy Trinity. And keep in mind, as I

mentioned earlier, William Brannum was a key figure in what would evolve into the charismatic movement. When all these charismatic leaders are there in Houston with William Brannum, headlining the event for this convicted duo, John Osteens right there, right there with them in the prison sale talking to the guy. These guys were all believing that William Brannum was communicating directly with God. And this is the same exact time he's starting to say seven angels came down from heaven. So did they believe the Holy Trinity too? I would love to know if you went into John Osteens home, Joe Osteens father. If they

had photographs of Brannum and the halo and the cloud, I don't know if they did or not. But What I can say is that did happen in the message sect and those people did go visit people leadership in the message who would have had the things on the wall.

So John Osteen likely would have come in contact with the holy Trinity of the message. And then what happened later? You know, if John Osteen did his due diligence and started studying and really wait a minute, William Brannum lied about this. Was that Charles the reason why that the charismatic movement by and large said William Brannum went astray in the later years?

Did they also discover this lie? As you come into the 1990s with this information, most of the message community successfully weathered the schoom, right? They're either able to suppress the information or come up with alternate explanations in order to keep the message coherent. But the ideology of the message went through a very e-evolution with the information from Peter Doyser initially then published through the Healer Prophet and then made where to everybody by Swervek of Brannum. Like these three things in that cascade caused really significant evolution in message thinking about these things. Now if you are from the message after that,

you probably think that the way you believe the message is the way it has always been believed. No, absolutely not. They changed it after these things, right? And they changed it because there were things that just could no longer work. And so they changed the message. And here's what they do. It's so dishonest, John, is they change it and then they say, but this is what we believed all along. Did you experience that in the message, John? They would change it and tell you this is what we believed all along. And if you say, no, this isn't what we believed all along. In fact,

this is the exact opposite of what you said three weeks ago. They'll throw you out of the church. Like you can't question the narrative even. So they change it. They say this is what we always believe. And you can't even question the narrative or you will have discipline and be thrown out.

So they change the narrative in order because they got to keep up this façade that they have the blessed truth. And they've always believed it right. And they will always believe it right.

But the message changed. And the big emphasis at that point came in, like I said, the uniqueness of the seals was really became a really important justification. But as time rolls on, John, and this is where I get a tad fuzzy, people started to also discover that William Brannum actually copied the seals out of his library books. And this then undermined the new rationale that a lot of people had come up with to continue to justify it. So now the cloud has fallen. The uniqueness of the revelation of the seals falls next.

And this is where a lot of groups are at today. A lot of groups are unaware still that William Brannum copied the sermons on the seals primarily out of his library books, right? And then the ones though that have kind of embraced that, they then have then backed up to a new backup position.

Well, yes, he did copy them out of his library books, but God gave him the inspiration of which book to copy out of, right? So this thing has evolved from angels, came down from heaven and commissioned William Brannum to come back to Jeffersonville and gave him all the divine revolution in a room to, let's not talk about the cloud anymore, angels came to the room and gave him the revelation.

To now, he copied it out of his library books by divine inspiration, like that is the official answer in certain sex of the message. Now he, yes, he copied it out of his library books by divine revelation.

And that is a massive, massive shift from the universal belief of the early message community, right? And they want to say, no, this is the way it was all along and we believed it this way.

No, you're a bunch of liars. You're a bunch of liars. You did not believe it this way all along. Good, give me a break. Give me a break. So you lied when you told us his lot repeated his lies to begin with.

You lied when you changed it the first time. You lied when you changed it the second time and you're still lying to us today, telling us you believed it this way all along, right?

You have compounding lies. How can you trust people who can't tell you the truth, John? How do you trust people that don't know how to be honest? So let's go back to integrity, Charles.

So you are a Christian who's not involved with any of this and you walk into a church and I've done this. I've gone to several different churches now and there's different ways in which they do this.

I think the most common is the pastor will give you some little pamphlet or handbook that says, what do we believe? And 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.

You either like it and you want to stay or maybe this is not the church for me. That's how open and honest many of the churches are if you're not in a cult, if you're in mainstream Christianity.

I remember clearly opening one of these books and they what we believe and they had explanation of the gospel, I think I've mentioned this to you. I was shocked, man, wait a minute, the gospel is that simple?

Why would anybody want to add anything to this? That's what hit me. But they were very open, honest, they showed integrity. This is what we believe. The entire duration of us being with them, they didn't really deviate from that.

And I suspect, I never got to witness this but I suspect if they were to have deviated they would gather everybody into the room and say, look, we give new people who come to our church.

This pamphlet, it says what we believe and we've learned new information and we've changed a little bit in what we believe. Would you all vote that we update this pamphlet? And by and large everybody in the room would say, yes, let's do it because that's no longer...

what we believe. We want to be open and we want to show integrity to people who are coming to our church. Now take the message Charles. You have people, my family was like this. We wandered from church to church. I went to all kinds of different churches. You go in one church, you go in the next church and picture if they were to show integrity and have this little thing that says what we believe. And you go to it and you're there for a few years, you go somewhere else, you come back and you get the same pamphlet and suddenly wait a minute, this church doesn't believe it all

like the last time we were here. You would start to ask, well, why is this? Why did you guys change so much? And a church with integrity would just simply say, well, we discovered that William Brannum wasn't honest about almost everything that he said. So we decided we don't want to talk about the cloud anymore because that man was lying. That's integrity. But what happens is they don't publish this paper. You go and you listen to the sermon, they're talking about God showed his face through the heavens and then he sent his angels down and William Brannum was right there and

this mist came up and there's all kinds of weird things that they, I listened to many of these sermons and then I never really thought about it until you said it. We'd go visit some other church, we'd move around, we might come back, we come back and they're not talking about it at all. And why?

There's no integrity because they don't tell you that they completely shifted in what they believed. And Charles, we're talking about the cloud today, but you can almost go through doctrine for doctrine whenever they discovered that the man was lying, they just stopped talking about it.

And why did they stop? Man, you never really as a rank and fall member, you never stop and think, wait a minute, the cloud was one of the most important fundamental elements of what they preached every Sunday about. Why did they stop? You never asked that question.

It's so dishonest and deceptive, John. And you're right. I mean, can you imagine that if an average message church created a little handout, what we believe, oh, that'd be so expensive because they have to revise it every other week and they'd have to have some means to destroy the old ones to get rid of the evidence of what they believed before because at the very end of it, they would have say, and we always believed it this way. They couldn't actually make it. You know, because they revise it so often and then there'd be an easier paper trail that they're changing all this stuff

all the time. It's really sad and unfortunate stuff, John. So, 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. Clarence Larkin being by far the most important source on the whole thing. You know, it just blows away the mystique of William Brannum and there has been in many sects of the message and evolution.

Um, an evolution in the ideology and the way they look at William Brandham and the message because of these things, right? You take Perry Green is just a fantastic example of it, right? And he ends up flip-flopping.

He flip-flops. There are things that he drove people to suicide over and split churches over in the 70s that he's completely changed his mind and now he's on the opposite side of the issue by the time you get to the early 2000s.

He'd be on the side of the guy, he committed suicide. He'd be on the side of the church he split against if, you know, a few years later, right? And 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?

While they were in the radical state of mind, look what they did to James McDonald. While they were in the radical state of mind, look at the churches they split. Look at the homes they destroyed.

Look at all of the horrible, horrible things that you did in that radical state. You divided churches and homes and families and even drove people to suicide back in the day that you were going crazy over this stuff.

And then at a certain point, let's just not talk about this anymore. And then time goes on and people, no, you did terrible things in the name of this. The message did terrible things in the name of this stuff, John.

And you can't just, you know, move along like none of this matters. It matters. And 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, you, other people, they did the same thing. They come harassment campaigns, attack people, viciousness, hatefulness, attack homes, destroy lives, right? All in the name of this stuff.

And give it a few more years. A lot of them will be not talking about it anymore, John. And they'll end up believing a lot of the very things that these people have been saying the last number of years, right?

But 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? You know, and it's, it's really a shame that it has to be this way.

It's really a shame that they will go to all those radical extremes and then let's pretend that never happened. Let's just kind of, you know, move along, move along and never admit we were wrong and never admit we caused all the harm and, you know, find some way to continue to perpetuate this system of false religion.

It's awful, frankly. It's awful. It is awful. And keep in mind, people like my grandfather, they came in contact with this information. Like you said, the book, I'm certain my grandfather read it. When my grandfather came in contact with the fact that Jim Jones of People's Temple had worked directly with William Brannum and that Brannum is the one who basically lifted Jones into fame.

They were putting that book in, I think it's called the Raven. They were putting that in the public library. I'm told by people who were involved in that whole situation that my grandfather fought to keep the book out of the public library because if you can keep the information away from the people, they don't ask questions.

And if they don't ask questions, they don't snap out of the brainwashing. So people like this were involved. And you have to wander to what extent? Because my grandfather, he worked closely with Billy Paul.

We've seen pictures of it, I mean, I knew how grandfather worked. You have to understand that these men knew that there were critical flaws with the message, and they were working with the direct heads of the organizations, which also knew.

And you have to wonder what extent was it a strategy? What extent did they initiate campaigns of suppression of information? I have to believe that my grandfather sadly was involved in some of those campaigns.

Because he himself, he knew these things. He had to have known. In fact, he told me his exact words where people have known these things for years, John. What does it hurt you to believe it anyway?

That's a statement testifying to the suppression of facts. Because I didn't know that information for years. I was one of the new people who discovered it. And I was like, Grandpa, come on, man.

So it is a suppression campaign. And it all goes back to integrity. If you have integrity, you don't try to suppress the truth. Because the truth will stand for itself. You don't even have, whether it's good or bad, you own your history, you have integrity, you own your history.

And because you show integrity, people would stay believing what you said. So I'm going to flip this upside down just a bit, Charles. I'm going to actually help the leaders of these cults. If you just show integrity and be honest about your past, people might stay in your cult.

But if you don't, people are probably going to leave you. You know, John, the great irony is the message is a religion that claims to love the truth. I mean, the message worships the truth.

Certainly, the church has I come from. I mean, you worship the truth. You're all about the quote unquote truth, right? In fact, where I come from, the word truth was used to describe the message just as much as the word message.

The truth, the message is almost interchangeable in our parlance. But the sad thing is, is the message really doesn't love the truth. In fact, a lot of people in the message hate the truth.

And a lot of people in the message will destroy people if they try to tell them the truth, right? I really hope, John, that one day, the people in the message develop a real love of the truth and are actually willing to look at the truth and follow it out to its conclusions rather than carry out campaigns of destruction against people who try to tell them the truth.

It's very, very sad that they do that. Unfortunately, it is widespread across the message that they do that sort of terrible wicked behavior. Now, one last thing I wanna say too, John, before we wrap up, you know, as I mentioned, we're really, we're just gonna talk about the main set up to about 1995.

But my book, like I mentioned, goes up to 2000. five. And these events that we're talking about right here, the final evolution of this event. It was about 1995, roughly, you know, when the cloud stopped being talked about and slowly phased out in a lot of groups as far as being a focal point. It still remained there in the background. It still was there, but people just stopped talking about it as much and it became deemphasized for a lot of people. And not every group, but some of them. And it was in large part to this fallout, you know, around the information that it was

all the hoax. It was all great big hoax. And I think the fact that the leaders stopped talking about it, even the ones who didn't put anything on record, the fact they stopped talking about it is evidence that they they internalized the fact that they had that it was a hoax, right? They were and they kept that information to themselves. It was okay for Raymond Jackson to internalize and believe the cloud was a hoax. It was okay for him to stop talking about it. It was okay for this and that other preacher to internalize that information, but it wasn't okay for the people

in the benches and the rank and file to have the same information. I mean, that's really, what can you call that, but deceptive? It is deceptive is what that was. Now, one other thing also was happening right in this time frame, John of 1995, and I'm not going to talk about this very much, but this is maybe just also help our listeners understand why we're cutting it off here.

But 1995 is the point that Billy Paul, what I would call the decline of Billy Paul, he started to take steps to elevate his successor in these years and move towards retirement. By the time you get to the early 2000s, Billy Paul went into retirement and his successor has taken charge by the early 2000s, but it was really roughly 1995 that this transition really started. His successor had been around since the mid 90s or the mid 80s, but his successor really wasn't in any real authentic leadership capacity until about 1995. It was 1995 that he actually began his successor

began pulling the levers of power and it was on the other side of that that you really see the copyright wars explode. So it was right in the same period of time that Billy Paul is beginning his march towards retirement and his successor is coming into power. And so here, I think John is where we will end this episode today and there's so much more we could say about the main sect, isn't there, but this is a good stopping point. The transition of leadership point in the main sect that happened roughly began in 1995. And it's an interesting transition

when you think about it Charles. So if you use the allegory, the emperor who had no clothes. So as this information is starting to get out and Billy Paul is starting to be exposed and he's exposed as the emperor who has no clothes, he passes the no clothes robe to his successor.

Sir, so what do you do with this, man? You've got all of these people who they realized that some of the things that he said was complete lies, that some of the things William Brandham claimed as supernatural were not, they were lies.

The new emperor began with no clothes at all, which if you actually followed out to its conclusion. But now take it even further than that, take it to the new apostolic reformation. You have people like Benny Hinn who's saying, William Brandham had an angel who followed him around in his meetings.

Well, he's not telling you that, yes, but we also realized that William Brandham was lying about other angels, seven of the other angels. He's not telling the people that. When you have, oh, I could go through the names through, I won't go through all of them, but Paul Cain, one of the bigger ones.

Paul Cain and Todd Bentley and all of these, Mike Beck, all these figures were saying that Brandham's angel came and sparked the international house of prayer revival, spark the, oh, there's different. The Lakeland Revival, all of these things are saying that Brandham's angel was there.

And they're telling all these people this, well, they're also not telling them that, well, we also figured out that Brandham lied about seven other angels. And he might have been lying about the big angel, the one that we're claiming is in our ministry.

Well, the people who are listening might say, well, wait a minute, are you lying about the angel too? So in the New Apostolic Reformation, they're not going to tell you that Brandham lied about all these things.

What they're going to say, Charles, is exactly what they say. Brandham was a good man, but he went astray in the later years. We're not going to tell you how that happened. We're not going to tell you what we believe was his going astray.

We're just going to stop it there because if we can suppress the information, you will stay in our cult. And with that, that's in a nutshell. That is the history of what sparked William Brandham's decline of fame in the charismatic and the New Apostolic Reformation movements.

So thank you for walking through this. It is great episode, John. I've enjoyed doing this with you. There's so much there, and you're right about the Emperor's No Clothes comments there. I really appreciate that.

I think, too, just maybe one last parting word for our listeners. I am not certain. In fact, I leaned towards confidence that Billy Paul's successor has a lot of unawareness of all of the things we're talking about because he really was that disconnected from the goings-on before 1995.

And so he may not even realize the mess that he was inheriting at that moment, is entirely, I would say, very probable that he did not even understand the messy state of the message when he was moved into the successor position in 1995, which again explains.

lot of what what followed. So anyways, I'm going to end it there. Thank you, Jim. There's very little I could add to that, but I'm just trying to picture a profit junior who suddenly inherits the no emperor with no clothes, religion, and suddenly, well, it looks like it.

It smells like it. We're feeding it to the people and they know it tastes like it. What do you do with this? And with that, I'll end it. 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-Brandom.org and ChristianGospelChurch.org.

For more about the history of William-Brandom and the healing revivals, read, come out of her, my people. And for more about the dark side of the new apostolic Reformation, read, weaponize, religion, from Christian identity to the NAR, available on Amazon, Kindle, and Audible.