By Tom Horn
Raiders News Network
5-23-07
Editors note: This is the fourth in a special series of Raiders News Network interviews focusing on the 60th Anniversary of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO Incident. Tom Horn is joined by Donald Burleson, New Mexico State Director of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, and author of "UFOs and the Murder of Marilyn Monroe."
Raiders News Network
5-23-07
Editors note: This is the fourth in a special series of Raiders News Network interviews focusing on the 60th Anniversary of the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico UFO Incident. Tom Horn is joined by Donald Burleson, New Mexico State Director of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, and author of "UFOs and the Murder of Marilyn Monroe."
HORN: Donald, let me introduce you by pointing back two years ago to the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death, when a Los Angeles County prosecutor who investigated her case said the he wanted a new autopsy done on the Hollywood sex symbol because large doses of barbiturates found in her body may have been administered "by someone else." John Miner, 86, told the Los Angeles Times that Monroe's psychologist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, had allowed him to listen to secret audiotapes made by the star during one of her therapy sessions just before her death and that a "key revelation of the alleged tapes" was that "Monroe was not depressed." She was in fact anything but suicidal according to Minor--very happy, and actively planning her future. What did Minor believe happened to Monroe? He wasn't exactly saying, but he indicated she had been "suicided" by the CIA. You are the one man who may know the real story behind Marilyn Monroe's death and whether or not Miner was right, or partly right. But before we get to that, tell us generally how you became interested in the subject of UFOs.BURLESON: I had a close fly-by UFO sighting myself at the age of five on the night of 4 July 1947. This was "Roswell night" but I was 300 miles east of Roswell at my grandparents’ house in Breckenridge, Texas. From that time on, I was fascinated by the whole question of strange objects in the skies.
HORN: What is it like being the New Mexico State Director of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network?
BURLESON: It’s an exciting position to serve in. I get sighting reports fairly often through the MUFON online Case Management System, and I assign them to one or another of our field investigators, sometimes assign them to myself depending on where the sighting was. The "N" in MUFON stands for "network," and that’s really what we are. It’s always gratifying to see so many people with common goals working together to try to get at the truth.
HORN: Since you have written a book titled UFOs AND THE MURDER OF MARILYN MONROE, what first suggested to you that the death of Marilyn Monroe was connected to UFO secrecy?
BURLESON: There is a now famous CIA document strongly suggesting that the CIA and other agencies were concerned over secrets imparted to Marilyn by John and Robert Kennedy, including matters related to at least one UFO crash retrieval.
HORN: I haven't read it, but I understand Matthew Smith, who paid a fee to Miner to use the Monroe transcript in his book, "Marilyn's Last Words: Her Secret Tapes and Mysterious Death," doesn't believe the Kennedys had anything to with her death. He believes disenchanted survivors of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA agents had her killed. What is your take on this?
BURLESON: If Matthew Smith thinks the Kennedys didn’t have anything to do with her death, he clearly doesn’t have all the information I have. Actually Donald Wolfe in his book "The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe" linked the Kennedys to Marilyn’s death, but Wolfe doesn’t go the extra step of asking why they would have her killed, or at least without entertaining the same hypotheses that I do. Wolfe reproduces the CIA "Marilyn memo" but says nothing about its references to a UFO crash retrieval. Steve Miner, by the way, whom you mentioned before, was right about Marilyn not being suicidally depressed. Her mood was one of defiance mixed with optimism. She was looking at something like twenty different movie scripts because of parts she was being offered, and had a million dollars’ worth of new contracts sitting on her attorney Mickey Ruden’s desk waiting for her to sign. The notion that she was depressed was simply part of the deception. Anyway, it’s clear to me that the Kennedys felt trapped when Marilyn started threatening to hold a news conference and "tell all." There would have been indictments against the president on criminal charges, having to do with unauthorized disclosure of classified information, and in the process the public would have found out a great deal more than the government was willing to reveal. And by the way, I also have an FBI document that places Bobby Kennedy smack in the middle of things the night Marilyn died of a massive lethal injection of pentobarbitol and chloral hydrate. They wanted her dead to shut her up once and for all about what she knew.
HORN: The infamous libido of the Kennedy boys, as well as in a bigger sense how often other famous men have gotten in trouble over beautiful women, is nothing new. Why else would foreign and domestic government intelligence agencies spend so much time and money recruiting femme fatales as spies in order to bring us dumb men down, right? But the purported CIA document you have mentioned, dated 3 August 1962, which surfaced in the early 1990’s may reveal that Marilyn Monroe was 'suicided' over something even more intimate; her knowledge of the Roswell UFO crash and the recovery of alien bodies -- information she allegedly was told during pillow talk with John F. Kennedy. If you can, tell us what this document actually says and also whether the legitimacy of the document has ever been authenticated.
BURLESON: The CIA "Marilyn memo" in part reads this way: "…she had secrets to tell, no doubt arising from her trists [sic] with the President and the Attorney General. One such ‘secret’ mentions the visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space. [Dorothy] Kilgallen replied that she knew what might be the source of visit. In the mid-fifties Kilgallen learned of secret efforts by US and UK governments to identify the origin of crashed spacecraft and dead bodies, from a British government official. Kilgallen believed the story may have come from the New Mexico story in the late forties."
As for authentication of this document I have in effect been able to bring that about, myself, because I manipulated the CIA into authenticating the document themselves. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA asking for the release of the transcripts from the wiretaps on Marilyn’s phones at the time of her murder. When the CIA refused to release any such transcripts to me, denying that they had them, I immediately filed an appeal, appending the "Marilyn memo" of 3 August 1962 as justification. The CIA accepted the appeal and sent the case up to the Agency Release Panel. Ultimately they still didn’t release the wiretap transcripts to me, but their acceptance of the appeal authenticated the document as one of their own, since it would have been contrary to Agency policy to accept the appeal if it were not based on a legitimate CIA document.
HORN: Your website says that your book on Marilyn Monroe presents NEW evidence connecting her death with the UFO cover-up; what is this NEW evidence?
BURLESON: My computer enhancements show a "bleed-in" (or optical show-through) on the CIA document involving the name of Brigadier General George Schulgen, who was the chief UFO investigator for the Air Force at the time. Clearly the Schulgen "intelligence collection memorandum" exhibit-document and the "Marilyn memo" had been archived together, and this obviously forges a link between Marilyn’s death and the whole matter of UFO secrecy.
HORN: We see that you and your wife moved to Roswell, New Mexico from New England in 1996; was this due to your interest in UFOs?
BURLESON: Yes, mainly. My wife Mollie and I have always loved the state of New Mexico and spent years trying to find a job and move here. But the UFO phenomenon in particular was the draw, for us, to Roswell itself.
HORN: Have you worked on the Roswell case itself?
BURLESON: Yes, I’ve worked on the Roswell case in a number of ways. I did much of the original decipherment work on the famous "Ramey memo," interviewed a number of major Roswell witnesses, and as a mathematician have done trajectory feasibility work to try to determine probable placement of the UFO impact site.
HORN: What other major UFO cases have you worked on?
BURLESON: I’ve worked on the Lubbock Lights case of 1951 (doing photo enhancement and airspeed estimations), the Levelland, Texas case of 1957 (reopening that case with new witnesses and new evidence), the Great Falls, Montana case of 1950, the Socorro, New Mexico landing case, and a number of other cases, including a recent one for which I was the original investigator, one I call the "Melrose Lights" case involving a close-encounter and lost-time experience that occurred about a hundred miles north of Roswell.
HORN: Why do you think the government continues to keep everything about UFOs secret?
BURLESON: People often ask why the government keeps up the secrecy routine. My best answer is that at this point they can’t tell us the truth, because it’s too late. There’s too big a bill to pay. They’ve threatened people, they’ve killed people (Marilyn is a notable example), they’ve committed all sorts of illegal acts and deceptions. There isn’t a word in the United States Constitution, or in statutory law for that matter, about the government’s right to keep everything secret, so they’re on very shake ground, legally, and they know it. All they can do now is keep telling the big lie, or just keep saying "no comment."
HORN: The field of UFO studies doesn't always get high respect among some scientists and academicians; why do you think this is the case?
BURLESON: It’s mostly peer pressure and professional concerns. If you’re a scientist working with federal grant money, you’ll lose it if you talk too much about UFOs. If you’re an academician interested in UFOs and you’re up for tenure, things could get awkward. I got my tenure okay at Eastern New Mexico University, but that was in Roswell!
HORN: What do you see for the future, in the field of UFO studies?
BURLESON: I think we will find out large parts of the truth, but not by any official disclosure. We’ll dig it all out for ourselves.
HORN: Are you giving a lecture during the Roswell Festival this year? If so, tell us what it's about and when and where people can hear it.
BURLESON: I’m lecturing on the murder of Marilyn Monroe at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, 5 July at the Civic Center in Roswell.
HORN: How else can people find out about your research or get a copy of your book?
BURLESON: The best way is to visit my publisher website at www.blackmesapress.com
HORN: Donald, thanks for taking time to discuss this research with us during the Raiders News Network "On The Road To Roswell 2007" series.
BURLESON: My pleasure.
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