Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Area 51, the Nevada Test and Training Range, aliens, JFK, and the death of Marilyn Monroe: are they all connected? It’s a hugely charged saga that dates back to the mid-1990s that is clearly not going to go away anytime soon.
The vast majority of the story relies upon a controversial document of questionable origins and of equally questionable authenticity. Allegedly, it’s a CIA document dated August 3, 1962, that deals with Marilyn Monroe’s supposed knowledge of Roswell and UFO-themed conspiracies and matters relative to what is referred to as a “secret base.” Now where might that be…?
What is particularly interesting about the “Monroe document” is not so much what it says but what it specifically doesn’t say. Despite what many researchers have said, not even a single reference in the document is to aliens, extraterrestrials, flying saucers, or UFOs. Not a single one. In fact, the wording could actually push the whole thing down a very different path, as you will soon see, but first, let’s see how and under what circumstances the controversial, one- page document surfaced.
It all began in 1995 at a Los Angeles-based press conference. It was a press conference held by a man named Milo Speriglio. He was a man with a deep interest in the circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s death. Speriglio was so interested in her final day in August 1962 that he wrote three books on the issues of her life and her still controversial death. They were Crypt 33, The Marilyn Conspiracy, and Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-Up. Until 1995, Speriglio had not made any kind of connection between the Hollywood uberbabe and UFOs, so what was it that prompted Speriglio to head off into new and highly inflammatory territory? It was a revelation from a man named Timothy Cooper.
Today, many people within ufology might not recognize that name, but from the early to late 1990s, Cooper—of Big Bear Lake, California—was a well- known figure in ufology. He was also a controversial figure. Most of the controversy stemmed from the fact that Cooper claimed to have received a wealth of old, sensational, leaked documents from retired figures in the intelligence community—almost all of them on crashed UFOs, Roswell, dead aliens, and the notorious Majestic 12 group. Rather notably, the initial batch
came to Cooper from a source in … Nevada.
Undoubtedly, the documents existed (and still exist). You can find PDF versions of most of them at Ryan Wood’s MajesticDocuments.com website, where there are literally hundreds of pages. The big question is this: Are they the real deal? When the papers were made available, some researchers believed that the documents were 100 percent real. Some investigators, though, considered them to be government disinformation, and others were firmly of the opinion that Cooper had created them himself, perhaps for fame, notoriety, or money or, possibly, all three.
The controversy raged on for a while but finally imploded upon itself with barely a sigh. The Monroe document was one of those that Cooper claimed to have received from one of his various sources or, as we might justifiably call them, “ufological Snowdens.” I know quite a bit about the Cooper papers (including the Marilyn Monroe document), as the following extract from my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, makes clear: “It’s a little known fact that in late 2001 Tim Cooper sold all of his voluminous UFO files to Dr. Robert M. Wood. Bob is the author of Alien Viruses and the father of Ryan Wood, who has spent years researching alleged crashed UFO incidents—all detailed in his book, Majic Eyes Only.
It is even less well-known that in the early days of 2002, Bob hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. “The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies—which is precisely what I did.
It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.” Contained within that huge amount of material at my disposal was the Monroe document—the “original copy” that Cooper is said to have received from one of his shadowy sources. Also, he had sent a number of FOIA requests to various military and intelligence agencies in search of any and all files on Marilyn Monroe. Cooper was clearly seeking out as much as he could find on Marilyn and UFOs—regardless of the actual origin of the document.
For around eight weeks, Speriglio did absolutely nothing with the document aside from sitting on it and pondering what his next move should be. What Speriglio finally did was to hold that aforementioned press conference, and that’s how the story began and how the document and its contents spilled over into the UFO research community.