We take a break from the recent onslaught of occult-related episodes and delve head-first into the world of conspiracy theory with legendary author Jim Marrs. Jim is the author of the New York Times bestseller ‘Crossfire: The plot that killed Kennedy‘, Above Top Secret, The Sisterhood of the Rose and many more.
This week, we discuss: Did the Nazis ever really go away, Who killed JFK, was Lee Harvey Oswald a Patsy or the lone gunman, and much more.
Joining Ken is SittingNow veteran Jacob ‘JW’ Williams, a man plagued with questions about the Kennedy assassination. One such question, “was Kennedy’s door open?”, is now available for your digestion:
Jacob’s eagle-eye spotted this
As regular listeners know only too well, there is a plot hatched by ourselves each week, and our lone gunman, Daddytank, has 3 shots of music for you in the shape of:
Ubertweet – I’m Not Dreaming Of You
U-bahn – Camphor
ùƒØ!))))) – Bloody Murder
If you have any queries, suggestions, insults etc. Please feel free to email ken@sittingnow.co.uk.
Enjoy!
Jim Marrs Bio:
Jim Marrs was born in Fort Worth. After graduating from University of North Texas he joined the United States Army. On his release in 1968 he joined the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He served as police reporter and general assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe and the Middle East. After a leave of absence to serve with a Fourth Army intelligence unit during the Vietnam War, he became military and aerospace writer for the newspaper and an investigative reporter. Marrs began to take an interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. After interviewing several members of the Dallas Police Department he became convinced him that the Warren Commission was a cover-up. Marrs continued to investigate the case and interviewed several important witnesses as well as city and county officials.
In 1976 Marrs began teaching a course about the assassination for the University of Texas at Arlington. He left the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1980 and worked as a freelance journalist while continuing to investigate the death of Kennedy. Marrs eventually became convinced that Lee Harvey Oswald had been set up by the government and in 1989 he published Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Published to critical acclaim and reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February 1992. It also became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK and he served as a chief consultant for both the film’s screenplay and production.
Since 1980, Mr. Marrs has been a freelance writer, author and public relations consultant. He also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism tabloid, a cable television show and several videos. Beginning in 1992, Mr. Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book on a top-secret government program involving the psychic phenomenon known as remote viewing only to have it mysteriously canceled as it was going to press in the summer of 1995. Within two months, the story of military-developed remote viewing broke nationally in the Washington Post after the CIA held a press conference revealing the program but putting their own spin on psychic studies. Psi Spies is now available from JimMarrs.com.
In May, 1997, Marrs’ in-depth investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, was published by HarperCollins. Marrs has been a featured speaker at a number of national conferences including the Annual International UFO Congress and the Annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference. Publisher’s Weekly described the book as “the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers and their crew in years.” The paperback edition was released in mid-1998 and has since become the best-selling UFO book ever in the United States. Beginning in 2000, he began teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington.
In early 2000, HarperCollins published Rule by Secrecy, which traced the hidden history that connects modern secret societies to the Ancient Mysteries. In 2003, his book The War on Freedom probed the conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.
Other books by Jim Marrs includes Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies (2004), Terror Conspiracy, The: Provocation, Deception and 9/11 (2006) and Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008)
Question: Why is Jim Marrs so obsessed with Nazi’s? Hid last few books have been about nothing but that and we all know that they were defeated in WWII but that hundreds of them got away and escaped with thier crimes they committed but we have an ex- president (Bush) that allowed toture and illegal invasions and and murder on other countries soil and violated the Constitution and got nothing for it. Pre-emptive strikes. Pre-Crimes.
Yeah I agree to be honest. Maybe it’s because the Nazi’s are such Archetypes of evil?
I would very much like to know Mr. Marrs’ opinion of Vincent Bugliosis
massive tome about the Kennedy assassination which concluded that the findings of the Warren Commission was correct in concluding that Oswald was the lone assassin
We kind of sweeped that a bit in the show.
Perhaps we should get Vincent on the show?
Hello:
Stumbled across your show and listened to the Jim Marrs interview re: the JFK assassination. Marrs is very knowledgeable but, I believe, he’s been doing this for so long that I don’t think he puts his evidence and opinions in the best light (and, in my opinion, often overreaches). When stating my beliefs regarding this matter, I state them very conservatively: I firmly believe that there was a conspiracy to kill JFK but, contrary to what the American media wants to portray, saying that one believes in a conspiracy does not mean that one agrees with every conspiracy theory put forward (e.g., I don’t believe the limo driver shot JFK nor do I believe that LBJ organized the plot). The reason I believe that there was a conspiracy is that it is too, too easy to cast serious doubt on some of the major conclusions reached by the Warren Commission, conclusions that are now shown as erroneous or highly questionable given either information that was known but ignored at the time or has come to light subsequent to the assassination. I won’t even speculate as to who arranged the murder or who pulled the trigger, and I will be the first to agree that no investigation is every conducted with perfection … but when you look at all the errors in the JFK investigation, the evidence ignored, the evidence that should have been pursued it’s clear to me that you can’t look at the Warren Commission conclusion as a credible document.
I’m no expert on this matter, but I’ve done some reading. Here are some facts that cast doubt on the Warren Commission: (1) It is undisputed that the autopsy physician – who had no expertise in gunshot autopsies – burned his autopsy notes. He didn’t even say he burned them by accident; this in and of itself does not prove Oswald’s innocence but it is disturbing; (2) the presidential limo – part of the crime scene – was washed and cleaned within hours after the murder. Puzzling; (3) Numerous witnesses testified that Jack Ruby and Oswald knew each other or, at the very least, had met more than once; (4) Ruby (as seen in a photo) was inside the Dallas police station after the assassination and actually answered a question (he made a correction to a statement) regarding Oswald. Ruby was very well known to the Dallas police because many officers frequented his nightclub (booze and naked women), and you have to ask how Ruby was able to enter the police station during the transfer of Oswald … and there was nothing in Ruby’s life to sugges that he would sacrifice his life just so JFK’s widow could avoid the stress of Oswald’s trial (which was the reason Ruby gave for killing Oswald); (5) the FBI agent, Hosty, who interviewed Oswald after his arrest, said that he took no notes of that interrogation; (6) one of the claims made was that shortly before the assassination Oswald had visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City – but in a taped conversation (you can actually hear the tapes) Hoover (head of the FBI) tells LBJ, in the days after the murder, that he doubts the FBI’s story. You can go find on-line a photo that was actually published in the Warren Commission report that the WC says is a surveillance photo of Oswald in Mexico City. I don’t know how anyone can say that that photo even slightly resembles Oswald.; (7) The Silvia Odio story (go here — http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Odio_Incident) for a brief discussion. The Warren Commission dismissed her story, but the subsequent official investigation conducted in the 1970s stated that “it was inclined to believe her”; (8) Not many people know that a few weeks before Dallas plot to kill JFK was disrupted; it was to take place in Chicago and would-be-killer was an ex-military solider who was also a loner, malcontent (as Oswald was supposed to be). You can Google “Edwin Black / Chicago plot” to find a PDF of this excellent article (written in 1974, I believe); (9) not even the Warren Commission could produce any evidence that Oswald was competent with a rifle. People often say that he was a “marksman,” but that’s the medal they given to virtually everyone in the military; it in no way means you’re a sniper. Jim Marrs was wrong in stating that no one could have made the shots that killed Kennedy; what he should have said was that “FBI rifleman and ballistics expert Robert Frazier admitted in 1969 during the Clay Shaw trial that no FBI reenactment had duplicated Oswald’s alleged performance” (http://www.kenrahn.com/jfk/the_critics/griffith/Oswald_poor_shot.html). The Warren Commission nor anyone else offers evidence of Oswald practicing with a rifle, let alone the kind of practicing that’s required for this level of shooting; (10) and I still find it very difficult to believe that a bullet, so-called “single bullet,” could have gone through both JFK and governor Connally, breaking bones along the way, and emerged virtually intact to be “discovered” on a stretcher at the hospital (http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Single_Bullet_Theory). I don’t doubt that bullets can be unpredictable; but I do doubt that this bullet, while it shows evidence of having been fired, shows virtually no evidence of having hit anything. But without this theory, the entire brief against Oswald crashes.
I’ve just offered a few of the, what I believe, are undisputed facts. People don’t have to reach my conclusions, of course, but there is an abundance of “reasonable doubt” (the American legal standard in a criminal court case) that the plot to kill JFK began and ended with Oswald. I’ve not even gotten into the medical evidence which can be complex and subtle … Here’s my belief: the American public knows the story doesn’t add up; to the extent that polls are valid, a large percentage of the public has not accepted the Oswald-did-it-alone (if he did it at all) story for years. And even though the subsequent official investigation (in the 1970s) concluded that Oswald was likely involved in a conspiracy and that organized crime was behind it all (I don’t believe this), America cannot psychologically handle the thought that elements of its government killed a president. Now, such a fact is unremarkable in the annals of history, no? My goodness, history is rife with conspiracies and schemes and grasps for power (or whatever). But in America, we’re the land of the individual and not collectivist action … and we are the worst government in the world (except for all the others) … and we buy into the idea of American exceptionalism (whatever that means) … so we cannot believe or publicly admit that elements of our govt killed the president. Even LBJ said several times before he died that he believed JFK was killed because of a conspiracy! The big open secret is that among official Washington no one believed the Oswald story; so, to me, LBJ et al are, at the least, accessories after the fact (but they will say that they spared the nation from something that the nation could not handle or blamed in on Oswald to prevent going to war with Russians).
I understand how, from a cursory viewpoint, book after book argues that, while imperfect, the Warren Commission got it right. Vincent Buglisoi wrote a very long book making this argument … and someone else wrote a withering critique of Buglisoi’s book (found here http://www.ctka.net/2008/bugliosi_review.html) … and there are all the shows that purport to use new computer modeling to prove that the Warren Commission got it right (and there are substantive rebuttals to such shows, but not coming from large media outlets) … well, my belief is that the reason Oswald had to be killed and killed quickly is because it would have been too easy, just too easy, for him to either prove that (1) he didn’t kill JFK; (2) if he did, he wasn’t the only shooter; (3) that he didn’t but was involved with the people who did; and (4) that he was a low-level functionary in U.S. intelligence establishment. If you note, within a very short period of time, days I believe, the FBI was claiming that there was no conspiracy and they knew virtually all the facts about Oswald relevant to the investigation. Really? In a few days you’ve already decided that a man who defected to your arch rival, repatriated, allegedly was a communist/Marxist, worked at a CIA base while in Japan … you’ve decided — in a few days — that he acted alone and not in a conspiracy?
Finally, probably the best book I’ve read on the JFK murder is JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W. Douglass. It’s not a book so much about arguing the evidence (although it does provide some of that); but it very accurately shows the climate that JFK operated in, the Cold War tensions, how he struggled to keep his military men in check (one of the top military officers suggested executing bombings in several American cities, blaming the bombings on the Cubans, and invading Cuba). I think it’s a brilliant book that goes right to heart of how a rich and powerful president can be so publicly killed.
http://www.ctka.net/2008/bugliosi_review.html
Okay, I’m done (ha, ha).
Thanks Carl. I resisted the urge to write “too long, didn’t read”. I am currently working my way through your epic post and will respond when I have dones so. In the meantime, thanks for popping in and make sure you come back. We love having people tell us stuff.
I like your sceptical take on this. It can seem very obvious to some JFK theorists that the Oliver Stone line is pretty much what happened. There is too much evidence that something odd happened but not enough to point the finger…although I think the presence of E.Howard Hunt on the day dressed as a tramp doesn’t help the governments case.
I personally don’t think this will ever be resolved (although with the recent revelations about the Titanic steering fail who knows) but I hope you have also stumbled upon the excellent Out There Radio podcasts (http://www.outthereradio.org)? They did an excellent two parter on Kennedy, plus a whole bunch of other excellent shows. Best podcats evar.
Except ours of course.
Thanks … it’s “outthereradio.net” … I haven’t heard the JFK episodes, but I’ll check them out (as I work my way through more of yours).
Regards
kennedy was shot from a weapon installed into the dash board of the car