When former US Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch gave evidence to the US Congress about the existence of UFOs or Unexplained Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) in July 2023, one question sent a deep chill through the room. The whistleblower and Afghanistan veteran was asked whether he knew of people who had been ‘harmed or injured’ or ‘murdered’ in efforts ‘to cover up secret programmes into extraterrestrial technology’.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘personally.’

During decades of research into UAPs – and government programmes to recover crashed alien spacecraft while concealing their existence – I have met people who believe that their lives were under threat for speaking out about what they knew. I have also spoken with two ex-special forces personnel in the US who claimed that colleagues were ordered to kill because of a perceived fear that the target was about to reveal highly secret information connected with a UAP programme.

As a barrister and King’s Counsel, I have spent my career evaluating evidence in very complex cases. I have brought the same rigorous standards to these investigations.

They have led me to the astonishing but unavoidable conclusion that, in order to protect the secrets about UAPs and extraterrestrial technology, agents of the US security services or their private defence contractors have been prepared to physically threaten and even to kill. Even the most famous actress in Hollywood – and even her ex-lover, a US president.

Marilyn Monroe died in her Los Angeles apartment on August 4, 1962. She was found naked in bed, holding the telephone, by her housekeeper. Empty medicine bottles were scattered on the floor.

The toxicology report found that she had acute barbiturate poisoning from doses of chloral hydrate and Nembutal (the brand name for pentobarbitone) that were several times above the lethal limit. Yet there was no trace of pills in the stomach or duodenum: the barbiturates were present only in the blood and liver.

This is an indication that the drugs were injected or given as an enema, rather than taken orally. Despite this, the deputy coroner of Los Angeles County classified her death as ‘probable suicide’.

Her friend Dorothy Kilgallen, a showbusiness journalist and TV personality, was immediately sceptical. She wrote in her syndicated gossip column, The Voice Of Broadway: ‘The real story hasn’t been told, not by a long shot.’

Former US Air Force intelligence officer David Grusch told the US Congress that he ‘personally’ knew of people who had been ‘murdered’ in efforts ‘to cover up secret programmes into extraterrestrial technology’

Marilyn Monroe’s death was immediately classified as ‘probable suicide’, but many have pointed out her comments on UFOs in the years leading up to it

The bed in which Marilyn was found dead in her apartment in Brentwood, Los Angeles

Marilyn’s friend Dorothy Kilgallen had an openly declared interest in UFOs

Kilgallen was a friend of President John F. Kennedy, and became part of Marilyn’s inner circle after they met in 1960, during the filming of Let’s Make Love. She had a long-standing interest in UAPs. She revealed this in February 1954, when she told her readers: ‘Flying saucers are regarded as of such vital importance that they will be the subject of a special hush-hush meeting of the world military heads next summer.’

In May the following year, she published a dispatch based on what a ‘British official of Cabinet rank’ had told her. He said that UK scientists and airmen were examining the wreckage of a ‘mysterious flying ship’ and were convinced that flying saucers from another planet were real.

Her source told her that the saucers ‘are staffed by small men probably under four feet tall’ and that the British government was withholding ‘an official report on the “flying saucer” examination at this time possibly because it does not wish to frighten the public’.

The source has never been identified and nor has the site of the crash to which he was referring.

Kilgallen’s openly declared interest in UFOs is relevant to Monroe’s death because of a document containing details of two of her phone conversations that were intercepted by the CIA. This document was leaked by two separate CIA sources – although during a later FBI review of the document the CIA claimed that the control stamps were not typical of the time.

The document is dated August 3, 1962, one day before Marilyn’s death. Just below the date is the reference ‘Moon Dust’. Moon Dust was a covert project fronted by the US Air Force to recover foreign space vehicles or debris. Any crashed UFO would have been within its remit.

The report covered two conversations, connected by their subject matter. The first was between Kilgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, the agent for actor Mel Brooks and others.

Rothberg said that Monroe, angry at her treatment by both John Kennedy and his brother Robert, ‘had secrets to tell’ – one of which was ‘the visit by the president at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space’. Kilgallen replied that she knew what that might be. In the mid-1950s, she had learned of a secret effort by the US and UK governments to identify the origins of crashed spacecraft and dead alien bodies.

The second part of the report referred to repeated calls by Monroe to Robert Kennedy, complaining about the way both Kennedy brothers were ignoring her. She ‘threatened to hold a press conference and would tell all’.

She referred to the president’s plan to kill Cuba’s long-time dictator Fidel Castro and to her ‘diary of secrets’ and what the press would do with such disclosures.

An ultra-secret US government department known as Majestic 12 was said to have been set up by president Harry Truman after a crashed craft recovered at Roswell, New Mexico

US National Archives images of the supposed crash site at Roswell

Officer Irving Newton holds up debris from a suspected UFO, which US Air Force officials said was in fact the remains of a weather balloon

There was a block of text which was redacted in both leaked documents and then the signature of James Jesus Angleton, head of counterintelligence at the CIA.

Any connection between the UFO cover-up and the assassination of JFK will seem far-fetched. But I believe it is worthy of serious investigation, because of another leaked document, one that I have personally inspected and which is known as the ‘burned memo’.

It is part of a cache of papers documenting the existence of an ultra-secret US government department known as Majestic 12.

This group was set up in 1947 by President Harry Truman, after a crashed craft constructed by a non human intelligence (NHI) was recovered at Roswell, New Mexico.

Majestic 12, or MJ12, was ordered to take control of the retrieval, storage and research of any NHI craft. This was a secret classified higher than even the atom bomb and, if necessary, people were to be killed to preserve it.

The nine-page ‘burned memo’ is so-named because it was rescued from a fire when MJ12 papers were being destroyed. It is undated but appears to have been written in 1961 by the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, who refers to himself as MJ1. In it, he invites the views of other Majestic 12 members, including Angleton (MJ2), on the need to assassinate President Kennedy to protect the agency’s alien secrets.

The memo says: ‘As you must know LANCER [Kennedy’s secret service codename] has made some inquiries regarding our activities which we cannot allow.

‘Please submit your views no later than October. Your action to this matter is critical to the continuance of the group.’

The memo went on cryptically to say: ‘When conditions become non-conducive for growth in our environment and Washington cannot be influenced any further, the weather is lacking any precipitation… it should be wet.’ This appears to be intelligence jargon suggesting that assassination should be considered.

Kennedy took office in 1961 and quickly showed a close interest in the activities of Majestic 12, ordering Dulles to provide a brief summary of MJ12’s ‘intelligence operations as they relate to Cold War psychological warfare plans’.

The president was concerned after the Cuban missile crisis that the Soviets might mistake a UFO for an incoming nuclear missile and wanted closer co-operation between the two countries on this topic. This interest continued, right up to his murder in November 1963. It was not, though, until 1971 that an agreement was actually signed to this effect.

JFK is said to have been become concerned after the Cuban missile crisis that the Soviets might mistake a UFO for an incoming nuclear missile

Further evidence pointing to state involvement in Kennedy’s assassination emerged in an extraordinary conversation that took place on a Washington street in early 1975. In the aftermath of the Watergate burglary at Democrat offices, a scandal which brought down President Richard Nixon, CIA operative E. Howard Hunt went to dinner with his friend and lawyer, Douglas Caddy.

Hunt was a colourful and unorthodox CIA agent. As part of the White House Special Investigations Unit, he had helped to mastermind the Watergate break-in and, on the night he dined with Caddy, he was about to begin a jail sentence at the federal prison camp at Eglin Air Force Base.

Over dinner, Caddy pressed Hunt as to the reason for the Watergate break in. ‘We believed,’ Hunt said, ‘that there were important Cuban documents inside dealing with Kennedy’s assassination.’

Later, on the sidewalk as they were leaving, Caddy pressed again as to what could have been in those files. Hunt replied with quiet emphasis: ‘Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to give our most vital secret to the Soviets.’

‘What was that?’ Caddy asked.

Hunt looked at him intently and replied: ‘The alien presence.’

He then shook Caddy’s hand and walked away to prepare for prison. That was the last time they met.

Caddy told me that he was puzzled by that information. What evidence was there that Kennedy was about to discuss aliens with the Soviets? Was Hunt implying that the CIA had killed him?

Though few knew about it at the time, Kennedy had long held an interest in UAPs. He was on the Board of Overseers at Harvard University and had chosen astronomy as his subject of special interest. He became friendly with fellow overseer Dr Donald Menzel, a professor of astronomy.

Menzel led a secret life. He was a covert member of MJ12, he had had a long association with the National Security Agency (NSA), and with his Top-Secret Ultra Clearance he had worked for the CIA. Dr Vannevar Bush, who had advised President Truman to set up MJ12, was also a close associate.

Correspondence between Kennedy and Menzel in 1960 has been discovered in which Menzel, while talking about the NSA, wrote: ‘Properly cleared to one another I should be able to help in this sensitive area.’

It seems evident that Kennedy was eager to learn more.

In 1977 a former mistress of Fidel Castro, Marita Lorenz, told a US Congressional Committee that she had driven with Lee Harvey Oswald and CIA contractor Frank Sturgis to Dallas before JFK’s assassination and saw Sturgis handed an envelope filled with cash

Ms Lorenz, seen here at a press conference in 1977, is said to have received death threats

Frank Sturgis would late become infamous as one of the five men who broke into the Democratic National HQ in 1972… leading to the Watergate scandal

Ten days before he was killed, the president wrote a top-secret memo to Angleton, the director of counterintelligence at the CIA, calling for a review of all UFO intelligence files that affected national security and asking to start sharing the ‘unknowns’ with Nasa to help its mission directors in their defensive responsibilities.

More provocative still, on the same day that November, he called Russia’s president Nikita Kruschev, seeking his co-operation on the detection of UAPs.

None of this would have been welcome news to the CIA. Since its inception in 1947, it had pursued a ruthless policy of denying the existence of UAPs while establishing secret reverse engineering programmes to unlock their technology. Kennedy’s initiatives risked it all.

Numerous Senate commissions on CIA activities have since suspected the agency of having been involved in Kennedy’s assassination for other reasons yet have lacked the proof. But in October 1977 a former mistress of Fidel Castro, Marita Lorenz, provided an extraordinary statement to a US Congressional Committee.

She said that she had met Lee Harvey Oswald in Miami (who was arrested for Kennedy’s murder) and that she had driven with him and Frank Sturgis, a CIA contractor, to Dallas once Kennedy’s motorcade had been moved there from Miami. She said that agent Hunt had come to their motel room in Dallas and handed Sturgis an envelope filled with cash.

When Sturgis learned of her proposed evidence, he threatened to kill her. Two detectives from New York’s 18th Precinct were called to protect her. One of them was Jim Rothstein, a tough cop who always carried a shotgun in his coat. Sturgis arrived later in the evening and Rothstein arrested him.

The two men sat and talked for an hour before he was taken to the police station. During that time Sturgis learned that Rothstein had served on the USS Essex in the Bay of Pigs and they shook hands in recognition of the fact that they were both professionals.

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They discussed the day of Kennedy’s assassination and Sturgis frankly admitted that he had been one of the gunmen in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963. While Oswald fired three times from a book depository, there have long been claims that a fatal head shot came from a second shooter on the plaza’s grassy knoll.

Back at the precinct, Sturgis was collected by the CIA and no charges were ever brought.

I spoke to Rothstein to confirm that Sturgis had, effectively, confessed to shooting the president. He confirmed he had and that he did not know why the matter had not been taken further.

In July 2025, Caddy contacted me raising further suspicions that the CIA was involved in Kennedy’s death.

Caddy had been looking for a photo he recalled seeing of Hunt which was taken in Dallas on the day of the assassination. He had found it online among many others in the immediate aftermath.

It shows a crowd in Dealey Plaza about five minutes after the shooting. On the far left is a figure in a three-quarter length coat and a trilby hat. ‘I was Hunt’s attorney,’ Caddy told me, ‘and I am certain that is him in the photo.’

Dorothy Kilgallen continued to investigate her friend Marilyn Monroe’s death, as well as the assassinations of Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot dead by Jack Ruby two days after the president was killed.

Kilgallen had a contract with Random House to publish her findings and was eagerly working to complete the manuscript, telling close friends that she had made significant progress.

Her last appearance on the hit US television game show What’s My Line?, on which she was a regular panellist, was the evening before her own suspicious death and the host John Daly said that she ‘was in great spirits’. She was at the height of her career.

Just after 9am on November 8, 1965, her hairdresser, Marc Sinclaire, entered her townhouse on East 68th Street in New York and went upstairs to her dressing room on the third floor. She was not there waiting for him.

Jonathan Caplan’s Not For Disclosure

Her bedroom was her private office on the fifth floor. Sinclaire looked in and to his surprise saw Kilgallen sitting up on the bed in a blue robe. She was fully made up and her hair was perfectly in place. She always removed her make-up and hairpiece at night, he said. He knew that she was dead and he called the butler to come up.

The toxicology report showed that she had consumed alcohol and barbiturates. She was not a heavy drinker and was prescribed only Seconal in a moderate dose for insomnia. But two other barbiturates were also detected, Tuinal and (like Monroe) Nembutal, for which she had no prescription. Traces of Nembutal were found on the rim of a glass in the bedroom, which suggested the capsules had been emptied into it before being ingested.

The cause of death was given by Dr James Luke, Manhattan’s chief medical examiner, as acute ethanol and barbiturate intoxication. The conclusion was ‘circumstances undetermined’, meaning this could have been an accidental death.

Other scientists and intelligence officers connected with UAP programmes have spoken of death threats and they continue to this day. The US Congressional Oversight Committee has recently asked the FBI to investigate.

© Jonathan Caplan, 2026

Adapted from Not For Disclosure, by Jonathan Caplan, to be published by Century at £22 on June 11. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to June 13; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.