Jim Marrs Dies

On Wednesday, August 2, 2017, the family of Jim Marrs alerted friends that Jim died on this day from a heart attack. He had been in decline for a bit, but his spirit drove him onward.

I met and appeared with Jim a couple of times - once in Laughlin, Nevada, in 2003, when Jim was talking about future technology and I was speaking about unexplained phenomena, and another time in Dallas in 1992, when we both were on the "Strange & Convienient Deaths Panel" linked to the JFK assassination.

Jim and I shared tables next to each other in Nevada, and we talked for hours about our mutual interests in the unknown.

As a reporter, Jim had investigated many Fortean stories, including UFOs and monsters. Indeed, as Craig Woolheater reminded me this evening, Jim was the reporter that covered the Lake Worth Monster in front page articles on July 10 & 11, 1969 in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

Jim was a great person. Sorry to hear of his passing.

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The standard biographical background information, obtainable via Wikipedia in the past, is posted here for those unaware of Jim's broad range.

Jim Marrs (born December 5, 1943) was an American former newspaper journalist and New York Times best-selling author of books and articles on a wide range of alleged cover ups and conspiracies. He died on August 2, 2017, of a massive heart attack.

Marrs was a prominent figure in the JFK conspiracy press and his book Crossfire was a source for Oliver Stone's film JFK. He wrote books asserting the existence of government conspiracies regarding aliens, 9/11, telepathy, and secret societies. He was once a news reporter in the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex and taught a class on the assassination of John F. Kennedy at University of Texas at Arlington for 30 years. Marrs was a member of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth.

A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Marrs earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of North Texas in 1966 and attended graduate school at Texas Tech in Lubbock for two years more. He worked for several Texas newspapers, including the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where, beginning in 1968, he served as police reporter and general assignments reporter covering stories locally, in Europe, and in 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.

Since 1980, Marrs had been a freelance writer, author, and public relations consultant. He had also published a rural weekly newspaper along with a monthly tourism tabloid, a cable television show, and several videos.

Since 1976, Marrs taught a course on the assassination of Kennedy at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Beginning in 1992, Marrs spent three years researching and completing a non-fiction book on a top-secret government program called the Stargate Project involving the psychic phenomenon known as remote viewing, only to have the program canceled as it was going to press in the summer of 1995.

In May 1997, Marrs' investigation of UFOs, Alien Agenda, was published by HarperCollins Publishers. The paperback edition was released in mid-1998. It has been translated into several foreign languages and would become the top-selling UFO book in the world. Publishers Weekly said:

Marrs shows little discrimination, overemphasizing dubious phenomena like remote viewing and crop circles, and giving nearly equal weight to ludicrous pretenders like Billy Meier (who claimed close encounter with Pleiadians) and sophisticated commentators like Jaques Vallee. Marrs even devotes a chapter to theories that the moon may be a UFO, and he refuses to rule out obvious frauds like the alien autopsy tapes. But if rigorous analysis escapes Marrs, little else does; this is the most entertaining and complete overview of flying saucers and their crew in years.

In early 2000, HarperCollins published Rule by Secrecy, which claimed to trace a hidden history connecting modern secret societies to ancient and medieval times. The book reached the New York Times Best Seller list. In 2003, his book The War on Freedom probed the alleged conspiracies of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. It was released in 2006 under the title The Terror Conspiracy.

Marrs had been a featured speaker at a number of national conferences including the annual International UFO Congress and the annual Gulf Breeze UFO Conference, but he also spoke at local conferences, such as Conspiracy Con and The Bay Area UFO Expo. Beginning in 2000, he began teaching a course on UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington. Marrs also gave a book signing at Brave New Books in Austin, Texas at least once a year, until his health kept him away.

Marrs appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, The Discovery Channel, TLC, The History Channel, This Morning America, Geraldo, The Montel Williams Show, Today, TechTV, Larry King (with George Noory), and Art Bell radio programs, as well as numerous national and regional radio and TV shows.

In October 2011, Marrs started his own radio program, "The View from Marrs" on the Jeff Rense Radio network airing three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 pm Central time. Marrs had on his show a wide variety of guests and dedicated the entire month of November to the latest information regarding the JFK assassination. He had subject matter on UFO research, survival tips, and much more. This radio program was put on hiatus due to his two upcoming book contracts, then his health issues.

With a friend, Michael H. Price, Marrs completed a Comic Book entitled, Oswald's Confession & Other Tales from the War published by Cremo Studios, Inc., in 2012 with Marrs as also the cartoonist of the  book. February 2013 Marrs' book, Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? was published by HarperCollins.

In 1989, Marrs' book, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy, was published and reached the New York Times Paperback Non-Fiction Best Seller list in mid-February 1992. It became a basis for the Oliver Stone film JFK.

According to Stephen E. Ambrose (in an essay generally critical of conspiracy theorists) Marrs wrote in Crossfire that motives for the murder of Kennedy were "Attorney General Robert Kennedy's attack on organized crime (Mafia motive); President Kennedy's failure to support the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs (Cuban and C.I.A. motive); the 1963 Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty (military-industrial complex, or M.I.C. motive); Kennedy's plan to withdraw from Vietnam before the end of 1965 (Joint Chiefs of Staff and M.I.C. motive); Kennedy's talk about taking away the oil-depletion allowance (Texas oil men motive); Kennedy's monetary policies (international bankers motive); Kennedy's decision to drop Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson from the ticket in 1964 (L.B.J. motive) and Kennedy's active civil rights policy (Texas racist billionaires motive)."

Sylvia Meagher is a critic of the Warren Commission and author of Master Index to the JFK Assassination and Accessories After the Fact. In April 1987, Meagher received the manuscript of Marrs' Crossfire. She was asked to evaluate the book by Simon & Schuster, which was considering publishing it. Meagher concluded, "The accuracy of the manuscript in dealing with a vast body of complex evidence is nearly impeccable...the manuscript is, in my opinion, a fine and admirable work." Despite this glowing recommendation, Simon & Schuster became one of about 25 major U.S. publishers to turn down the book. It was finally published in 1989 by Carroll & Graf Publishers."

Source.

Jim was a classic, a one-of-a-kind gentleman author, who will be missed by many.

Books

• Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. Basic Books. 1993. p. 648. 
• Alien Agenda: Investigating the Extraterrestrial Presence Among Us. William Morrow Paperbacks. 2000. p. 480. 
• Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids. William Morrow Paperbacks. 2001. p. 480
• Psi Spies: The True Story of America's Psychic Warfare Program. Career Press. 2002. p. 320. 
• Inside Job: Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies. Origin Press. 2004. p. 240. 
• The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten to Take Over America. Harper Collins. 2008. p. 449. 
• Honegger, Barbara (2006). The Terror Conspiracy: Deception, 9/11 and the Loss of Liberty. Disinformation Books. p. 505. 
• Above Top Secret: Uncover the Mysteries of the Digital Age. Disinformation Books. 2008. p. 305. 
• The Sisterhood of the Rose: The Recollection of Celeste Levesque. Disinformation Books. 2009. p. 386. 
• The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy: How the New World Order, Man-Made Diseases, and Zombie Banks Are Destroying America. Harper Collins. 2010. p. 468. 
• Oswald's Confession and Other Tales from the War. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2012. p. 150. 
• Marrs, Jim (2013). Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens?. William Morrow. p. 609. 

Thanks, partially, to Kenn Thomas.

Nightingale Suicides and Defenestrations

"How very little can be done under the spirit of fear." 

~ Florence Nightingale

It is well-known that the British woman Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was the founder of modern nursing.

Few today realize that Nightingale was also a celebrated English statistician, and a pioneer in the visual presentation of information and statistical graphics. She refined the newly invented visual form of showing statistics, the pie chart (invented by William Playfair in 1801), into her polar area diagram, or what is today occasionally called the Nightingale rose diagram. Nightingale called a compilation of such diagrams a "coxcomb." She was constantly looking for linkages, and her work in mortality rates and sanitation, whether among Crimean War soldiers in field hospitals or of rural peasants in India, won her praise.

Nightingale's work, carrying a lantern around at night to check on the battlefield wounded in Crimea is legendary. (The Crimean peninsula is located just south of the rest of the Ukrainian seacoast and west of the Russian region of Kuban. The name Crimea takes its origin in the name of a city of Qırım (today's Stary Krym) which served as a capital of the Crimean province of the Golden Horde. Qırım is Crimean Tatar for "my hill." The ancient Greeks called Crimea Tauris (later Taurica, Ταυρική in Ancient greek), after its inhabitants, the Tauri. The Greek historian Herodotus mentions that Heracles plowed that land using a huge ox  -"Taurus" - hence the name of the land. Herodotus also refers to a nearby region called "cremni or 'the Cliffs'" which may also refer to the Crimean peninsula, notable for its cliffs along what is otherwise a flat northern coastline of the Black Sea.)

Today, Nightingale might be regarded as a sychromystic. Certainly, her name is powerful, as I shall try to demonstrate in this essay.

Florence (="flowering, in bloom") is a name due to the city in Italy where she was born. But, as is relatively well-known, Nightingale's surname has its origins in that of a bird.

The Common Nightingale or simply the Nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), also referred as the Rufous Nightingale, is a small passerine bird that was formerly classified as a member of the thrush family Turdidae, but is now more generally considered to be an Old World flycatcher, Muscicapidae. It belongs to a group of more terrestrial species, often called chats. None are found in the New World, and North Americans generally think of the name "Nightingale" in association with nursing.

But the bird is a key to understanding the underlying meaning carried in the general references associated with "Nightingale."

Wikipedia has important pieces of information that impact on this discussion:

Common Nightingales are named so because they frequently sing at night as well as during the day. The name has been used for well over 1,000 years, being highly recognizable even in its Anglo-Saxon form – "nightingale." It means "night songstress." Early writers assumed the female sang when it is in fact the male. The song is loud, with an impressive range of whistles, trills and gurgles. Its song is particularly noticeable at night because few other birds are singing. This is why its name includes "night" in several languages. Only unpaired males sing regularly at night, and nocturnal song is likely to serve to attract a mate. Singing at dawn, during the hour before sunrise, is assumed to be important in defending the bird's territory. Nightingales sing even more loudly in urban or near-urban environments, in order to overcome the background noise. The most characteristic feature of the song is a loud whistling crescendo, absent from the song of Thrush Nightingale. It has a frog-like alarm call.

The Common Nightingale is an important symbol for poets from a variety of ages, and has taken on a number of symbolic connotations. Homer evokes the Nightingale in the Odyssey, suggesting the myth of Philomela and Procne (one of whom, depending on the myth's version, is turned into a nightingale). This myth is the focus of Sophocles' tragedy, Tereus, of which only fragments remain. Ovid, too, in his Metamorphoses, includes the most popular version of this myth, imitated and altered by later poets, including Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and George Gascoigne. T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" also evokes the Common Nightingale's song (and the myth of Philomela and Procne). Because of the violence associated with the myth, the nightingale's song was long interpreted as a lament.
The Common Nightingale has also been used as a symbol of poets or their poetry....Virgil compares the mourning of Orpheus to the "lament of the nightingale." Source.

"Any mortal who is infuriated by his wrongs 

and applies a medicine that is worse than the 

disease is a doctor who does not understand the trouble." 

~ Tereus by Sophocles, before 414 BCE.

So let's look at some recent intriguing deaths and their links.

I was doing research on "Nightingale," over this last week and the weekend, when the news hit last Friday (December 7th) that nurse Jacintha Saldanha had died by suicide. She was the nurse at the London's King Edward VII Hospital who initially patched a prank call to another nurse. It turned out it was from morning radio hosts in Sydney, Australia, Mel Greig and Michael Christian. They impersonated Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles to try to pry out information on the health of Prince William’s pregnant wife, Kate Middleton. Saldanha, 46, who was born in India, was found dead three days after the pranking. No method of suicide has been revealed.

Nightingale = nursing. Alright, that was a weird sync. There is more to this than meets the eye, I predict, and it has been a news story that seems certain to increase suicides, a la' the copycat effect. This real possibility is already being discussed in Australia, where a suicide alert has been issued.

What started me down this road was that on December 5th, I heard from a correspondent (Dave M) about a suicide, which seemed a little unusual.

A Serbian government statement said on Wednesday December 5, 2012, that Serbia's Ambassador to NATO, Branislav Milinkovic, 52, died by suicide by leaping from a busy parking garage platform at Brussels Airport on Tuesday night, December 4th. A diplomat who could not be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Milinkovic suddenly jumped from the 26- to 33-foot-high (8- to 10-meter-high) platform while waiting with the Serbian delegation for foreign ministry officials due to hold talks with NATO officials. 

"His motives are a mystery. Three diplomats who knew Milinkovic said he did not appear distraught in the hours leading up to his death Tuesday night," reported the AP.

What happened to Milinkovic was not technically a defenestration, but the combination of a politician and the fall from a high location quickly brought to my mind some infamous defenestrations from history.

Defenestration, specifically, is the act of throwing an individual (or even something) out of a window, usually from a location above ground level. Historically, the word defenestration was used to refer to an act of political dissent or political murder or suicide.

The term originates from two incidents in history, both occurring in Prague. In 1419, seven town officials were thrown from the Town Hall, precipitating the Hussite War. In 1618, two Imperial governors and their secretary were tossed from Prague Castle, sparking the Thirty Years War. These incidents, particularly in 1618, were referred to as the Defenestrations of Prague and gave rise to the term and the concept. Source.

Self-defenestration (autodefenestration) is the act of jumping, propelling oneself, or causing oneself to fall, out of a window.
What I found interesting, as to the timing of Milinkovic's "suicide," was it came the day after Showtime's broadcast of Oliver Stone's newest episode of The Untold History of the United States on the Cold War.

Stone's program had several internal links, some of which were probably on purpose, and others may have been more synchromystic, about defenestration. (And then Branislav Milinkovic's fall occurred.)

Early in the program, Stone was discussing WWII covert operations in Ukraine. At that point in the program, in large letters, Nightingale was flashed on the screen. It was not too clear what the exact significance of the prominent lettering was, but I figured it was some kind of foreshadowing. [I looked it up later and found it was the code name of the Ukrainian Nazi elite unit Nachtigall (Nightingale) Brigade, which James Forrestal would help to smuggle to the United States after World War II.]

Later, the Oliver Stone episode told of how on March 10, 1948, the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs Jan Masaryk (pictured above) was found dead (below), dressed in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial investigation stated that he died suicide by jumping out of the window, although from the beginning some believed that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists, during the Czech coup. A new criminal investigation discovered and confirmed, recently, from the trajectory of Masaryk's fall and other evidence, that he was thrown out of the window. He had, indeed, suffered from a defenestration, so well-known in that part of the world.

James Vincent Forrestal (February 15, 1892 – May 22, 1949) too died by death from a window. 

Forrestal was the last Cabinet-level United States Secretary of the Navy and the first United States Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was the man inside the government who would oversee the establishment of the CIA. And as I mentioned above, the sneaking of the Ukrainian Nazi Nachtigall (Nightingale) into America.

Stone's documentary television program spent some time telling parts of the story of Forrestal, including the bizarre tale of Forrestal's "suicide," which involved his falling from the window of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

In the early morning hours of May 22, 1949, Forrestal's body, like Jan Masaryk's, clad only in pajamas, was found on a third-floor roof below the 16th-floor kitchen across the hall from his room.

Again, with Nightingale projected on the screen, Stone, as the narrator, noted that Forrestal, right before he died, was writing down a poem from Sophocles' tragedy Ajax - and then stopped when Forrestal came to the word nightingale:

Fair Salamis, the billows’ roar,

Wander around thee yet,

And sailors gaze upon thy shore

Firm in the Ocean set.

Thy son is in a foreign clime

Where Ida feeds her countless flocks,

Far from thy dear, remembered rocks,

Worn by the waste of time–

Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save

In the dark prospect of the yawning grave....

Woe to the mother in her close of day,

Woe to her desolate heart and temples gray,

When she shall hear

Her loved one’s story whispered in her ear!

“Woe, woe!’ will be the cry–

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail

Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale–

Some have read what Forrestal left behind as an implied suicide note. Others have considered it some kind of warning, linked to the Nazi unit he had help get into America. We may never know.

In a new form of art ("Conspiracy Theory Opera") presented to the public between 2000 and 2007, The Defenestration Trilogy, three chamber operas, were created by Evan Hause.
The three defenestrations that Hause details are those of James Forrestal (d. 1949), Frank Olson (d. 1953), an army chemist who worked for the CIA in America's early biological warfare program, and Edwin H. Armstrong (d. 1954), the inventor of F.M. All three died by relatively mysterious falls from windows.

Hause's opera about Forrestal is entitled Nightingale, a two-act performance, scored for strings at its core (with some winds, piano and percussion).

Consider this, even the life of Florence Nightingale remains a mystery. Why should we be surprised that anything linked to "nightingale" should be totally known?

"I have lived and slept in the same bed 

with English countesses and Prussian 

farm women...no woman has excited 

passions among women more than I have." 

~ Florence Nightingale

A Clockwork Orange

The motion picture A Clockwork Orange was a blockbuster by Stanley Kubrick when it came out in 1972. The controversary about the impact of the graphic violence in the plot, however, lives on. 

An article in UK's Camden Gazette noted in 2005 that a play based on the story was stirring up thoughts about its effect, especially since 12-year-olds were part of the production.

The article overviewed the plot: "A Clockwork Orange sees teenage misfit Alex and his cronies delighting in 'ultra-violence,' dishing out beatings and sexual attacks before Alex is made to participate in a brutal Government-backed scheme to force him to be good."

The copycat effect that followed in the wake of the film was very real. As the British Camden Gazette mentioned: "The film version was withdrawn by Kubrick in 1973 after allegations of copycat killings and violence. It was not re-released until 2000 - a year after Kubrick's death."

The withdrawal of the film discussed is what is specifically the "British withdrawal."

It is also interesting to see where it was banned in the USA. As Wikipedia notes,

In 1976 A Clockwork Orange was removed from an Aurora, Colorado high school due to "objectionable language". A year later in 1977 it was removed from high school classrooms in Westport, Massachusettsfor similar concerns with "objectionable" language. In 1982, it was removed from two Anniston, Alabama libraries, later to be reinstated on a restricted basis. Also, in 1973 a bookseller was arrested for selling the novel. Charges were later dropped. Ironically, each of these instances came after the release of Stanley Kubrick's popular 1972 film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange, itself the subject of much controversy.

That's right: Aurora, Colorado!

See The Copycat Effect, pages 221 and 224, for more on A Clockwork Orange and how Oliver Stone felt about Kubrick's withdrawal of the film.