Most authors in the field of conspiracy theories focus only on one issue. Few have both the knowledge and tenacity to branch out. Fewer still have both the investigative skills and fearless mindset of Jim Marrs. The bestselling author and investigative reporter has been at the forefront of the movement to reveal America’s hidden history for decades. The Texas-based writer has written books questioning and subverting the conventional wisdom on the John F. Kennedy assassination, UFOs, secret societies, the New World Order agenda, and more.
Alien Agenda (1997) is one of the most comprehensive books available on the subject of UFOs, and has led Marrs to become an in-demand conference speaker, including Contact in the Desert event in (29-31 May 2015) in Joshua Tree, California. The Fort Worth, Texas native says he first became interested in the subject as a teenager in 1957, when he read Associated Press news stories about a UFO incident in Levelland, Texas where a cigar-shaped craft allegedly landed on a highway (recently the subject of a segment on the History Channel’s new show Hangar 1: The UFO Files).
But it was Marrs’ proximity to the fateful events of November 1963 that launched his path as one of the world’s most intrepid reporters. Then a sophomore majoring in journalism at the University of North Texas, Marrs was already familiar with Jack Ruby and the existence of a shadowy underworld in Dallas.
“I had fraternity brothers that told me, ‘Hey, if you wanna get into a high stakes poker game, just go into Dallas and go to the Carousel Club, look up Jack Ruby and he can fix you up.’ But then they’d add, ‘But be careful because he’s connected to the underworld.’ See, back then, it was a whole different time and place; we didn’t even know anything about the mafia. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover was assuring us there was no such thing as the mafia,” Marrs explained in a recent phone interview, “So when the assassination happened, I just went, ‘Holy cow, this is a hell of a story, and it’s right here in my backyard.”
Marrs went on to work as a reporter for the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, though he also took a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War. He says this experience proved enlightening: “You begin to realize things aren’t always what they seem to be, and it gave me an understanding of how the military operates with ‘need to know’ and compartmentalization and everything else.”
But Marrs says “the real epiphany” came in the early ‘70s when James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars, confessed to the judge in the trial that he had been working for CREEP, the Committee to Re-Elect the President, and was pressured by the White House to remain silent and plead guilty. “At that point I suddenly realized that the President had, could, and will lie to us. And once I understood that, everything began to fall into place.” Marrs said. By 1975, he had published a front page article in the Telegram about the then newly proposed House Select Committee on Assassinations that was formed to further investigate the JFK assassination. “I said if they’ll do their job, they will find there was a coup d’etat in the United States in 1963.”
A year later, he was invited to teach a course on the JFK assassination at the University of Texas-Arlington, which he did for 30 years. Marrs’ authoritative research on the topic led to the 1989 publication of his groundbreaking book Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He soon received a call from director Oliver Stone’s people to option the book as a basis for Stone’s film JFK, on which Marrs also served as an advisor. The popularity of the film sent the book to the bestseller list, which in turn led to speaking appearances that would catalyze the idea for Marrs’ next book.
“As I’d travel around the country, I’d ask people, well, what do you think the next big deep dark secret cover-up is? And almost unanimously, from cab drivers to publishers, they said, ‘Well we’d really like to know what is the truth about UFOs?'” This mass desire for cosmic knowledge coincided with Marrs’ own longtime interest in the topic dating back to the 1957 Levelland, Texas UFO incident.
He put his considerable investigative prowess to work on the subject. Alien Agenda became another bestseller, covering wide ground from the 1947 Roswell incident through the following five decades. One of the primary conclusions of the book is that main reason for the continuation of the UFO cover-up through the decades is the suppression of the free energy technology that Earth’s visitors use to get here, a technology that would ultimately put the fossil fuel powers that be out of business.
“That is probably one of the biggest stories of suppression ever. You go all the way back to Tesla, and probably even before that, and you get into Townsend Brown and all these people who have come up with viable free energy devices. And in every instance, suddenly the government steps in, or big corporations step in and they buy it up or they classify it under national security and it goes away,” Marrs said.
As to the status of the situation in 2015, Marrs says he thinks a slow but sure disclosure effort appears to be in play.
“There seems to be indications — even in the mass media, with government pronouncements, government leaks, release of documents — that they’re becoming more and more open. And it seems to me that we’re being conditioned to the idea, that one of these days pretty soon, they’re gonna say, ‘Hey, we’re not alone,’ and nobody’s gonna freak out,” Marrs said. However, he doesn’t think that the government will ever voluntarily open up on the subject. “If there is gonna be some sort of disclosure, it’s going to take place on the part of the UFOs.”
This conclusion matches that of one of Marrs’ peers, historian Richard Dolan, who will also be speaking at Contact in the Desert. Marrs wrote the forward for Dolan’s book, A.D. After Disclosure (co-authored with Bryce Zabel and published in 2012), which also suggests that a “soft disclosure” effort has been going on for some time. But like Marrs, Dolan concludes that the government will likely have to be forced to show its cards before any official pronouncement takes place.
Photo from Marrs’ official page on the Contact in the Desert page
Marrs says the government has actually already confirmed the reality of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth in a backhanded way, citing the Air Force’s infamous “Roswell: Case Closed” report from 1997. As the 50-year anniversary of the legendary Roswell, New Mexico UFO incident neared in July of that summer, the Air Force sought to meet the call for more information by issuing a new report to answer the public’s questions. A press conference was held in June to announce the conclusions of the report, where a public information officer revealed a puzzling new explanation. The Air Force’s conclusion was that what witnesses thought was a crashed flying saucer and alien bodies was actually debris from “Project Mogul” weather balloons and normal human-sized crash test dummies. The officer also stated that the Mogul project took place in the ‘50s and that “time compression” was the incredulous explanation for why people mistook 1947 as the year of the incident.
“That’s the key to it. The Mogul balloon tests and crash dummy tests didn’t even begin until the ‘50s. So in a way, the people who are aware and who study the issue and become aware that crash dummies and Mogul balloons didn’t happen until the ‘50s, they go, ‘Well the government’s lying to us.’ And then holy cow, that means it’s really true, there was a crashed saucer and there were alien bodies and they’re covering it up. And yet, on the other hand, the government who has to answer to all the people, now they’ve also placated the ones who don’t wanna know about that and they can go to bed and sleep peacefully at night and say, ‘Well the government said it’s just crash dummies,’” Marrs explained regarding the Air Force’s crafty dual strategy.
The author’s main talk at Contact in the Desert, however, will be about his new book coming out in June, Population Control: How Corporate Owners are Killing Us.
“We’ve got all kinds of hazardous, dangerous, health-depleting substances that they’re putting in our food and in our water and in our air. And the whole purpose comes in, if you’ll go and listen to these self-styled globalists, the wealthy one percent that are trying to control the economy of the world, guys like Bill Gates and David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger and Ted Turner… If you really go and listen to them, they all are buying into the eugenics theology that the underlying problem in the world is overpopulation,” Marrs warned.
He cited the philosophy espoused by the Georgia Guidestones, a mysterious granite monument erected in Georgia in 1980 with ten engraved guidelines for humanity that conspiracy theorists have cited as a clue about a New World Order agenda of a secretive elite.
“The very first admonition on the Georgia Guidestones is to maintain a world population of no more than 500 million people, that’s sustainable, OK? Well wait a minute, right now the world population is somewhere about seven and a half billion people. So if they achieve their goals, what’s gonna happen to the other seven billion of us? And the key question is, who’s gonna decide who stays and who goes?” Marrs asked.
He says this philosophy is why corporations are poisoning our food, air, and water, and continuing environmental rape of the Earth without regard for the well-being of the masses.
“Are they simply greedy, non-thinking corporate types? Yeah there’s probably a bunch of those. But at the very top, and this is why it’s important for people to understand this, we’re not talking about some political philosophy, we’re talking about self-defense. They want you dead! And you better wake up and start eating right and filtering your water, and better yet, take the criminals out of the government. The FDA is supposed to be policing the drugs we’re getting… and yet no… the FDA [United States Food and Drug Administration] is now just a propaganda branch of the pharmaceutical industry.”
The subject of an elite cabal that seeks to control the world is one Marrs has tackled before in his book Rule By Secrecy, published in 2000.
“Most of these self-styled globalists are involved with secret societies like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberger Group,” Marrs said. “ In the case of the CFR and Trilateral Commission, they’re not secret in the sense that no one knows about them, they’ve got websites and they publish materials. But I call them secret societies because you and I can’t join. The only way you get to be a member is if they invite you and they only invite you after they give you a full vetting by their executive committee and make sure you’re a New World Order guy like them.”
Almost all Presidential nominees have ties to these groups and Marrs says that President Obama is no exception. “He has attended Bilderberg meetings and he simply follows whatever his marching orders are.”
Marrs sympathizes with those who feel that the Democratic and Republican parties have become all too similar, citing the JFK assassination as the turning point. “That’s when the one party took over. They keep us divided and conquered by arguing between Democrat and Republican. But they reality is that the Democrats and Republicans are simply two wings of the same party that runs this country, and that’s the War Party,” Marrs said in one of his pithiest conclusions.
Ongoing research into “the War Party” is also what led Marrs to write a book about the 9/11 attacks, first published in 2004 as Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies and later republished in 2011 as The Terror Conspiracy Revisited: What Really Happened on 9/11 and Why We’re Still Paying the Price. Marrs cited the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, aka WTC 7, as one of the most compelling anomalies of that day since the adjacent building was not hit by the airplanes that struck the World Trade Center towers. He also noted the 9/11 Commission’s puzzling failure to even address the issue.
“How did the 9/11 commission handle the fact that the Solomon Brothers building, WTC 7, collapsed that afternoon, hours later, and it never got hit by an airplane? They fact is they didn’t, they never mentioned it! And if you just act like it didn’t happen, then to a lot of people, it didn’t happen,” Marrs said, noting that five or six corporate entities now control almost everything aired in the mainstream media.
Marrs’ no-holds barred approach to examining hidden history and what it means for the modern world is engaging and entertaining, as he offers a compelling yet down-to-earth demeanor that few others on the speaker circuit can match. His talks at Contact in the Desert are scheduled to include a Friday lecture on “Population Control”, a Saturday workshop on “Our Occulted History”, a Sunday lecture on a yet to be determined topic and a Monday intensive on “Our Hidden History”.
The Contact in the Desert conference offers a who’s who of the UFOlogy world with speakers including Giorgio A. Tsoukalos of Ancient Aliens fame, legendary author and ancient astronaut theorist Erich Von Daniken, Coast to Coast AM host George Noory, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, author David Wilcock, Roswell investigator Stanton Friedman, former British “X-Files” agent Nick Pope, cosmic mythologist Laura Eisenhower (great-granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower) and many more. For those that like to believe fictional FBI agent Fox Mulder’s proclamation that “the Truth is out there”, Joshua Tree looks like the place to find it at Contact in the Desert.