Jim Marrs

Jim Marrs

Jim Marrs was born in Fort Worth, Texas, on 5th December 5, 1943. His father, a strict Baptist, sold structural steel for a company in St. Louis. Marrs began working as a journalist while at junior high school. After graduating from University of North Texas in 1966 he attended Graduate School at Texas Tech in Lubbock.

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), Rise of the Fourth Reich (2008), Population Control: How Corporate Owners Are Killing Us (2016) and The Illuminati: the Secret Society That Hijacked the World (2017).

Jim Marrs died following a heart-attack on 2nd August, 2017.

Primary Sources

(1) Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1990)

Whatever information Kilgallen learned and from whatever source, many researchers believe it brought about her strange death. She told attorney Mark Lane: "They've killed the President, (and) the government is not prepared to tell us the truth..." and that she planned to "break the case." To other friends she said: "This has to be a conspiracy!... I'm going to break the real story and have the biggest scoop of the century." And in her last column item regarding the assassination, published on September 3, 1965, Kilgallen wrote: "This story isn't going to die as long as there's a real reporter alive - and there are a lot of them." But on November 8, 1965, there was one less reporter. That day Dorothy Kilgallen was found dead in her home. It was initially reported that she died of a heart attack, but quickly this was changed to an overdose of alcohol and pills.

(2) Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1990)

One witness was Warren Reynolds, who chased Tippit's killer. He, too, failed to identify Oswald as Tippit's killer until after he was shot in the head two months later. After recovering, Reynolds identified Oswald to the Warren Commission. (A suspect was arrested in the Reynolds shooting, but released when a former Jack Ruby stripper named Betty Mooney MacDonald provided an alibi. One week after her word released the suspect, MacDonald was arrested by Dallas Police and a few hours later was found hanged in her jail cell. Neither the FBI nor the Warren Commission investigated this strange incident.)

(3) Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1990)

In a remarkable attempt to resolve the issue, Nosenko underwent "hostile interrogation." He was kept in solitary confinement for 1,277 days under intense physical and psychological pressure.

He was put on a diet of weak tea, macaroni, and porridge, given nothing to read, a light was left burning in his unheated cell twenty-four hours a day, and his guards were forbidden to speak with him or even smile. His Isolation was so complete that Nosenko eventually began to hallucinate, according to CIA testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Toward the end of this ordeal, Nosenko was given at least two lie detector tests by the CIA. He failed both. But Nosenko did not crack.

The believers of Nosenko, headed by the CIA's Richard Helms and J. Edgar Hoover, took his intransigence to mean that he was telling the truth but the KGB having no interest in Oswald.

But doubts remained. So at the CIA's request, the Warren Commission obligingly made no reference to Nosenko. Angleton retired from the CIA and later wrote: "The ... exoneration or official decision that Nosenko is/was bona fide is a travesty. It is an indictment of the CIA and, if the FBI subscribes to it, of that bureau too. The ramifications for the U.S. intelligence community, and specifically the CIA, are tragic."

The counterintelligence faction, led by Angleton, still believes that Nosenko's defection was contrived by the KGB for two purposes: to allay suspicions that the Soviets had anything to do with the JFK assassination to cover for Soviet "moles," or agents deep within US intelligence.

(4) Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer (6th July, 2000)

Marrs was asleep in his dorm room when events transpired at 12:30 p.m. November 22, 1963, to wake him from his reverie. Like Jim Garrison in JFK, Marrs would sleep no more when he heard John Kennedy had been shot while driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, gunned down by the bullets of an assassin. His initial reaction to the news of the president's shooting was one of relief, happiness. His roommate woke him to tell him what had happened, and all Marrs could say was one word: "Good."

By his own admission, he was then a "typical Texas redneck" who thought Kennedy was a handsome man determined to hand the country over to the liberals and blacks. He had no use for the man or his utopian vision of one nation under Camelot. But like the rest of the country, he was stuck to the television, watching every second of news coverage. When Walter Cronkite showed up at 1 p.m. to announce Kennedy's death, Marrs was watching and, he insists, thinking about how he could get involved in covering the biggest news story to come out of North Texas in decades. Even now, he has all the newspaper clippings from November 1963. They would, in time, become his life's roadmap.