Monday, 15 August 2011 20:01

JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Conclusion

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I am an ardent advocate of the late Carl Ogelsby’s comment with regards to the Kennedy assassination: “We must be careful of running off into the ether of our imaginations.” – especially when it is precisely our imaginations that are being targeted by intelligence-inspired, consumer-driven conspiracy nonsense like the JFK-MJ-12 hoax, concludes Seamus Coogan.



Part 7: Conclusion

We have covered some extensive ground with JFK and MJ-12. We effectively started out in Hollywood, journeyed into space and then returned to Dallas. So how to summarize all of this within a page or two was always going to be a challenge. But at least I hope the reader has learned the following:

  1. The Monroe-JFK-MJ-12 documents, which the Woods’ back to the hilt, are fraudulent. Yet they still persist in championing their authenticity, even after the original owner, Timothy Cooper, disowned them as a prank. Jim Marrs, author of Alien Agenda and one of the few JFK researchers to ever entertain the Monroe-JFK-MJ-12 document/s, has been very inconsistent in his appraisal of them. Marijane Grey proves conclusively that Monroe was not obsessed with the Kennedys, nor did the diaries she kept throughout her life contain anything more than appointments and brief details, which makes a mockery of her being murdered for any of her personal writings.
  1. In the research notes I assembled, and in an earlier draft, I hoped to show that JFK had no particular interest in UFO’s. The remaining JFK-MJ-12 documents, like the Monroe-JFK-MJ-12, are also hoaxes. In particular, the celebrated ‘Scorched/Burnt Memo’ which supposedly laid the grounds for Kennedy’s assassination. Kennedy’s disinterest in the topic may have come from finding out about Dulles’ games, or Dulles could have even shot the breeze when the relationship was more cordial. Red herrings and ‘pitfalls’ in the case were discussed with looking into Cabell and Prouty on the topic of UFO’s. Bar some interesting links between Oswald, the J Reilly Coffee Company and NASA that Jim Garrison discovered and the fact that Dulles’associate and UFO philanthropist and disinformation conduit Arthur Young was Michael Paines stepfather there’s really nothing to see here folks.
  1. Perhaps the most fun part of the series was coming across the Woods’ hilarious replies about Cooper’s failed lie detector test, and then coming to grips with how deluded the Woods really are. Why they never thought (like a good many ufologists did) to compare Colby’s actual handwriting with the document in question is beyond me. That they hired remote viewers to find out about how truthful Cooper was should be beyond anybody.
  1. Linda Moulton Howe and Bob Wood were always going to have a party. Sure enough the two trashed the house, and further each other’s credibility permanently with their utterly inept examinations of the tell-all ‘Scorched/Burnt’ and ‘Colby’ memos.
  1. A curious predicament has befallen Ufology, those hunting for scam artists and hoaxsters are also trying to weed out the disinformation from the very chaff these schemers lay. Indeed the ersatz efforts and wild discourse have helped mask and convolute the role of individuals like Collins and his underlings like Doty and Cooper-- who helped Hollywood out on their next big venture. All the while they have attempted to embroil two very well-known and highly suspect individuals, Allen Dulles and James Angleton, with all manner of UFO tomfoolery, which is counter to the reality of what Dulles himself created.
  1. Guss Russo, long time ‘Lone Nut’ ambassador, got caught up with UFO’s but inadvertently got caught with pants down. Denying any and all forms of CIA malfeasance in the JFK case (and their spreading of disinformation) has been his and his partners' (Dave Perry and John McAdams) main aims in the disinformation game. As has been aligning the Kennedy assassination with Ufology. Yet Russo was quite happy to hang out with some of Ufology’s worst, and in doing so discuss US intelligence playing games in the UFO field.

What’s ironic is that Russo and his buddies, bar one or two barbs hurled at Marrs for entertaining the JFK-MJ-12 documents, were just as bad as he was and never saw the need to castigate or investigate the Collins, Doty and Cooper, the people behind the documents. The reason for doing so is remarkably transparent. To oust these people would be an admission that at least one US intelligence agency was running a disinformation campaign aimed at trivializing the Kennedy assassination in the aftermath of Stone’s film JFK. For in exposing these assets in the former, they ran the risk of exposing themselves in the latter.

In Preamble I, I briefly discussed the bad blood existing between the DIA and CIA and their disputes over the USAF. There is a possibility that in muddying the waters of the Kennedy assassination that the documents do seem to have one or two jabs at the CIA within them. CIA disinformation rarely, if ever, implicates themselves in anything. It’s usually, Johnson, Mob, Cuba, not to mention the classic Kennedy had blowback coming to him for something. But then again it could still be CIA all the way, or some sort of ‘fruity’ salad all outputting the BS.


Organic Self Sustaining Disinformation, the Best Kind.

While trying vainly to wrap this whole thing up I consistently found myself going over my notes and returning to points I made at the very beginning of this exercise.

In the Preambles one will note how I discussed the CIA’s playing both sides of the UFO equation, effectively marginalizing those voices asking the real questions about the CIA’s manipulation of UFO’s e.g. Leon Davidson. In Parts I till now you would have seen this initiative mutate into associating UFO’s with JFK researchers. But it failed to divide assassination researchers over a JFK-UFO link, nor have the two groups ‘joined at the hip’. After the film, they merely planted their usual little disinformation seeds on both sides of the Kennedy debate, while sending an invitation for Ufologists to join it. They then sat back and watched as an assortment of UFO crazies, new age pseudo leftists, and the Libertarian right grew into weeds effectively burying the much smaller Kennedy research base with their own vivid imaginings. The free market, which appealed to and exploited these appetites, has long been exploited by the CIA and its rival agencies. The UFO detour into the Kennedy quadrant was simply a detour for this longstanding operation and was achieved with relative ease. The hype surrounding the X-Files is a case in point as Coppens writes in his article ‘Alien Overlords’

The drive that the government – and specifically the CIA – is involved in an “alien cover-up” was paramount throughout the 1990s, popularised by the existence of “The X Files”, which in the eyes of the UFO community seemed to “validate” them.

While I wholeheartedly agree with Coppens that it gave Ufologists a ‘voice’ (and a lousy one at that), the X-Files article he linked it too was extremely poor. It lacked any of Coppens skeptical analysis in his previous articles and exemplified why he contributes to Nexus and is friends with the likes of David Hatcher Childress. Coppens praises the courage of the shows of director Chris Carter and their pioneering qualities (despite his mentioning of Doty’s consultancy in the show). Now the X-Files pioneered something alright, but it wasn’t ‘positive’. Furthermore, the X-Files didn’t spark the ‘conspiracy’ subculture; it was Stone’s JFK. And evidence suggests this ‘subculture’ was created purely as a reaction to Stone’s film in an attempt to conflate the Kennedy assassination (a stand alone event wholly unrelated to UFO’s) with all manner of tabloid fantasies.

Now, I don’t buy this ‘lighten up it’s only a show’ line. Programs like the X-Files and others have subverted real inquiry into real issues for purely entertainment and disinformation purposes. (And it culmianted in silliness like Men In Black.) Stories based around fake UFO abductions, which were apparently covered on the show, albeit as an aside, yet The X-Files hammered Aliens as real most of the time. It their audiences look for truth in carefully marketed and designed myths, and quite clearly put the idea out there that anybody thinking such a thing, or that Kennedy was killed by the ‘Cancer Man’ in the Storm Drain must be a fan of the show or a ‘conspiracy theorist’. The large amounts of people who have told (note ‘told’, most X-Files UFO types never ask serious researchers anything) me of this last ludicrous idea is considerable. I have even had someone tell me in all seriousness the cancer man ‘did it’.

Films like Z, The Parallax View and JFK were never intended for this sort of thing. Costa Gavras, Alan Pakula and Stone took big commercial risks in presenting such ugly, fearful and most of all, real, views of the world we live in. The individuals in their films saw conspirators as faceless and sinister ‘gods’ whose only goal was control of control itself. In The X-Files we can see that the elite conspirators are doing so in a ruthless yet benign fashion to bide time in preventing an imminent Alien invasion of Earth (which was the major plot arch of the series).

If that premise isn’t selling the hoary old ‘elites know best’ ‘have a plan’ or they do what they do ‘for the common good’, I don’t know what is. People also forget that the series was a fantastic advertisement for the FBI, and they aided in the show’s development.To this endI’ll give the reader a quote discussing one of the nineties most undeserving heroes, namely The X-files creator, Chris Carter from page 83 of Greg Bishop’s book Project Beta: The Story of Paul Benewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth (thanks to Steve Snider for bringing it my attention):

After the final season of the show, X-Files producer Chris Carter was reportedly spotted at the Los Angeles FBI shooting range. Which makes one wonder who was courting whom?

Contrast Carter’s hassle-free ride he received in the press for his shows, with what Stone got after JFK. There were no reports of Stone hanging out at the FBI shooting range after JFK’s run in the theatres ended. Hence it’s safe to say I think the question of who has more ‘manna’ is pretty darn obvious. Kennedy’s death won’t lead anyone to little green men, but it may lead us to the man whom, in large part likely helped create them, Allen Dulles. Who probably would have been something of a fan of X-Files. After all, he was part of that Elite the show depicts as benign.

Thus we return to the problems discussed at the very beginning of this essay. Why are there balanced debates about the greatest questions of our time ‘is there a God’ and/or ‘are we alone out there’. Yet Tom Hanks jumps on board the Bugliosi ‘lone nut’ band wagon and Leonardo DiCaprio gets involved in Lamar Waldron’s lame and unfounded conspiracy musings? Neither initiative brings any balance to the table, nor valid discussion. If life ‘out there’, is such a concern for the CIA, why have they tried to associate and mock serious JFK researchers as being aspiring Ufologists since the sixties. And why whenever something concerning the assassination and/or other important events gets notoriety, UFO’s suddenly get bandied around in the press?

The big lie that X-Files spouted was that the ‘Truth is out there’. The reality is that the ‘Truth is really within us’. Once we strip away the hype from the myths we can see who is behind them, and if their points are worthy of pursing or not. Ultimately, when it comes down to conspiracy, I am an ardent advocate of the late Carl Ogelsby’s comment with regards to the Kennedy assassination: “We must be careful of running off into the ether of our imaginations.”In particular nowadays, when it is precisely our imaginations that are being targeted by intelligence inspired, consumer driven conspiracy nonsense like the JFK-MJ-12 hoax. The ‘Truth’ in matters of conspiracy is usually far stranger, yet more banal, than the fiction.


Special Thanks

During the course of this project two people who would have been rather interested in its outcomes CH and TS passed away. I didn’t know either as well as I would have liked and found out about their interests in SETI and UFO’s respectively much too late. CH whom I met through his associates CM and GH had in fact given myself a lot of support over the ten years I’ve known him in various endeavours. With particular relevance to this assignment my very good friend and now draft editor for much of my CTKA work JS lost her brother TS, a person also deeply interested in the UFO field. What added to the sadness was that they both witnessed the famous Kaikoura light shows of the seventies as children, which left an indelible imprint on them. My thoughts and feelings go out to CM, GH and JS for their loss, not to mention, a big ‘thanks’ for all their help.

Last modified on Sunday, 23 October 2016 18:09
Seamus Coogan

Seamus Coogan is one of a number of JFK assassination researchers hailing from New Zealand and Australia.  He has devoted considerable effort to ferreting out and exposing unfounded and sensationalistic or far-fetched conspiratorial hypotheses.  His most notable contributions include those on John Hankey's JFK II, on Alex Jones, and on the Majestic Papers.  He  has also reviewed numerous books for this site.

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