Did JFK Die for UFOs?
No other recent event has encouraged as robust a conspiracy industry as Lee Harvey Oswald’s 1963 shooting of John Kennedy. Books alleging conspiracies of various motivations and complexities are almost literally numberless.
Standard suspects encompass Lyndon Johnson, Fidel Castro, racist crackers, the John Birch Society, the international Jewish conspiracy, the CIA, the KGB, defense contractors, multiple shooters, Oswald impersonators, the Mob, and even a Secret Service agent detailed to the motorcade (as we’ll see later in this chapter). Some of the conspiracy books are carefully researched and vetted, and raise challenging questions. Others are plainly absurd, hysterical, or the work of the unschooled or demented. (Although self-publishing platforms bring some of this material to [a tiny] market, much of the material is posted directly to the Internet, and never appears in book form.) Inevitably, some JFK conspiracy theorists claim links between the Dallas event and UFOs.
The connective tissues are a pair of memos, dated November 12, 1963 (ten days before the president’s death), and sent by Kennedy to the CIA and NASA. At the time, Kennedy was exploring the possibility of space- program cooperation with the Soviet Union, and he wanted to see classified data about UFOs. He was interested in UFO reports that could not be attributed to traditional aircraft or tests of secret American aircraft. His concern reflects the value of standard risk assessment. Kennedy’s concern was that the Soviets might misinterpret UFOs as breaches of the (proposed) partnership, or even as spy devices.
The memos are not unreasonable. Nor are they quite as interesting as assassination-UFO advocates believe. The White House made a request for esoteric, classified information. In that, the memos are little different from White House interest in, for example, American intelligence activity in Turkey, the speed with which Chrysler Corporation could ramp up tank production in case of renewed crisis in Berlin, the identities of KGB agents masquerading as diplomats around the Free World, or the true GNP of Bulgaria.
Regardless, conspiracy theorists made (and make) a leap of logic, insisting that because of a possible cover-up at Roswell, and because JFK wanted to know more about UFOs, it follows that the president was murdered by schemers anxious to protect the secret of human-alien connivance in the development of weapons systems (another leap); or the existence of alien bases on the dark side of the Moon (variously belonging to humans, humans and aliens, or aliens operating alone).
Long after the assassination, a USAF loadmaster assigned to Air Force One claimed to have asked the president what he thought about UFOs. According to the crewman (his name was Bill Holden), Kennedy took a long pause before gravely replying, “I’d like to tell the public about the alien situation, but my hands are tied.” (This is an amusing echo of the frustrated airline pilot of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, who complains to his wife, “I saw a flying saucer. . . . Oh, it burns me up! These things have been seen for years. They’re here, it’s a fact. And the public ought to know about it. . . . But I can’t say a word! I’m muzzled by army brass!”) Skeptics insist that Holden, as a loadmaster busy at the ass end of the aircraft, would have had no opportunity to interact with the president. (Holden claimed to have been an on-board steward as well as a loadmaster, an impossibility).
Beyond that, the thought of Kennedy confiding top secret regrets to a crewman is risible. Yet this supposed encounter is a frequently cited part of Kennedy-UFO lore.
Some buffs claim that Kennedy planned to go “off speech” at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, putting aside his prepared remarks in favor of his own handwritten notes, to which he would refer when he revealed the truth about UFOs. (The notes have never been found.) Whatever the particulars, President Kennedy had to be eliminated. By signing off on the CIA and NASA memos, he signed his own execution order.
This kind of thinking has the grade-B fun factor of those splashy intrigue novels found at airport bookstalls. Sensible readers grasp (and happily accept) the inherent improbability of such tales. Conspiracy theorists, though, demand to be taken seriously, suggesting calamity if we fail to pay attention, and implicitly criticizing our supposed naïveté by defending their positions via liberal use of “certainly,” “obviously,” “of course,” “There is no doubt,” “naturally,” and other certitudes that are nothing more than wishful assumptions.
Kennedy’s presumed involvement with UFOs goes all the way back to the first days of Roswell itself. A supposed July 1947 MJ-12 memo dubbed “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary” reveals that Massachusetts congressman John F. Kennedy has been made privy to secret Roswell information—and was, in fact, the only House member to have the information.
Given that Kennedy was just twenty-nine years old, a young man with little initial enthusiasm for politics, a freshman representative with barely a half year in office, and a rich kid whose father may have purchased the congressional seat he occupied, this level of insider status is remarkable. Preposterous, even.
In 1993, researcher Robert Wood got hold of what he described as a fire- scorched Majestic 12 memo supposedly written by CIA head John McCone thirty years before. (For more on Majestic 12, see chapter eight.) The memo reads, “As you must know, Lancer [the Secret Service’s code name for JFK] has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow. Please submit your views no later than October. Your action to this matter is critical to the continuance of the group.”
“The group” is an especially pungent pair of words, suggestive in this context of a cabal or a secret society. Because the memo’s intended recipient is unknown, conspiracy buffs are free to speculate on precisely who and what “the group” might have been. A partnership of aliens and the CIA? The CIA and NASA? The government, arms makers, and aliens?
JFK-UFO speculation reached a particularly large audience during the 1996– 97 run of Dark Skies, a fictional NBC-TV series in which Kennedy is killed after learning that the Hive—a malevolent, spiderlike alien race—conspires to take over Earth.
Some sources (exopolitics.org is one) work backwards from the Kennedy-UFO conspiracy to the August 1962 death of actress Marilyn Monroe, who was sexually involved with JFK (likely enough) and murdered by government operatives (most unlikely) a day or two before she planned to call a press conference and go public with UFO information gleaned from the president.
A proportionally insignificant number of Kennedy assassination books refute the standard conspiracy theories. The two best are Gerald Posner’s Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK (1993) and Vincent Bugliosi’s mammoth Reclaiming History (2007). Neither book mentions flying saucers, UFOs, extraterrestrials, or Roswell. Posner makes no mention of NASA; Bugliosi does, but only in discussions of the U-2 spy plane and the Challenger shuttle disaster. Are those omissions significant?