FT276


I know there hasn’t been much glamour in this column, but how about Marilyn Monroe, JFK and UFOs? The Daily Mail revived this one on 19 April with “Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? Secret memo shows presid­ent demanded UFO files 10 days before his death”. JFK was proposing joint Soviet-American space exploration (in 1963!)[1] and, though the memo’s intent isn’t entirely clear, he seems to have been asking the CIA to review their UFO files in the hope of providing information about the ‘unknowns’ – presumably unidentified sightings – to persuade the Soviets that the UFOs they were seeing were not US espionage devices: “It is import­ant that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs.”

The veracity of this document has been questioned,[2] but it did arrive from the CIA after a Freedom of Information request, so it might be genuine.