Jim Marrs Feature

By Sean Casteel

            For more than 50 years, Jim Marrs has been drawn to the UFO phenomenon and its many offshoots. From sightings in his native Texas to the kind of investigative journalism that both invites and redeems itself through controversy, Marrs has, as the expression goes, covered the waterfront of the paranormal and the all-too-human conspiracies that are often related to it.

            In an interview conducted for “UFO” to coincide with the publication of Marrs’ new book, “The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies That Threaten To Take Over America,” Marrs talked about how it all got started for him.

            “Digging through junk in my attic recently,” Marrs said, “I found a watercolor I had done at the time of a sighting near Loveland , Texas . A large silver cigar-shaped object had landed on the state highway, and every time the cars came up to it, their engines stopped. Somebody managed to get away and notify the authorities and the cops went out there and their car stopped. Everybody stood there and looked at this thing for awhile until it lifted off and went away.

            “There were several newspaper stories in Texas about it at the time,” he continued, “and based on the descriptions from the witnesses in these newspaper clippings, I did this watercolor. That was in 1957. I also have a clipping that somebody sent me from when I was the campus editorial page editor—this was from about 1964—in which I was arguing in an editorial that we should take UFO sightings seriously, because there obviously was a serious issue that needed attention and scrutiny.”

            Upon graduating from the University of North Texas with a degree in journalism, Marrs went to work as a reporter for various newspapers in the state, such as The Fort Worth Star Telegram and The Lubbock Avalanche Journal. Even as a member of the straight press, he had an interest in the unusual and unexplained. By the 1980s, Marrs said, he decided to strike out on his own.

            “I found that there were no more journals,” he said, “just advertising distribution systems that were all corporate owned and had little regard for true journalism. So I began writing books, and my first book was “Crossfire: The Plot To Kill Kennedy,” based on my decades-long research into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

            The many years researching the Kennedy assassination landed Marrs a teaching position at the University of Texas at Arlington , where he taught a class on the subject from 1976 to 2006. Marrs would later teach a class on UFOs at the university as well, after much academic maneuvering to get the “out there” subject approved.

            After the publication of “Crossfire,” Marrs began to ask people what they felt was the “next big deep dark secret government cover-up.”

            “Almost unanimously,” Marrs remembered, “people said, ‘We’d like to know the truth about the UFOs.’ I thought to myself, ‘Well, I would, too.’ I had more than just a passing interest in UFOs as a journalist, all the way back to when I was working for ‘The Lubbock Avalanche Journal’ in the late 1960s when I had a chance to interview Dr. Edward Teller and Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

            “So I began to research and go back and reestablish my contacts in the UFO research community in preparation for writing this book on UFOs, and in that process I stumbled across, in 1992, the army’s remote viewing story. And I had to stop on that one. Whoa, wait a minute. We are spending tax money and they have a whole unit in the United States Army that is practicing psychic spying? Is there any reality to this? So that led to the writing of a book that I originally called ‘Psi Spies: The True Story of the American Psychic Warfare Program.’”

            Just as the book was set to go to the printer, something rather disturbing happened.

            “I had a contract with a large New York publisher,” Marrs explained. “It had gone through legal vetting and a tortuous editing process, and they already had advance sales. This was from a wholly owned subsidiary of Random House, Harmony Books. And in the summer of 1995 it got mysteriously canceled. They returned the rights to me, and they never asked for any of the advance money back. It just stopped. Then a few months later the CIA issued a press release publicly acknowledging the remote viewing program.

            “Of course,” Marrs continued, “I was about to break open a then top secret program. Obviously they didn’t want some lowly reporter to put out this information. They wanted to release it themselves with their spin. I think the reason for the cancellation of my book in 1995 was not so much to do with remote viewing, because some of the remote viewers had already retired from the military and were writing books on their own. I think they canceled my book because, after laying a very detailed and documented history and scientific background for remote viewing, I then led into the fact that every single military-trained remote viewer had some personal knowledge of UFOs. This was just a little too real apparently for the powers that be.”

            Marrs decided to go back to his book on UFOs, and in 1997 “Alien Agenda” was published.  The book covers the subject dating from pre-Biblical times up through to the present and garnered some of the best sales ever for a book of its kind as well as being translated into a dozen languages. But Marrs said the book left one open to a rather nagging question.

            “The little guy in the saucer lands,” he said, “and the first thing he always says is, ‘Take me to your leader.’ So it begged the question of, ‘Who is our leader? Who speaks for Earth?’ Putin of Russia doesn’t speak for Earth. Bush does not speak for Earth. A lot of people don’t think he even speaks for the United States . So who speaks for Earth? That led me to dig into who’s really running the show. Who is really the power behind the throne?

“And we’re not talking about the political figures we see in the media and are distracted with all the time,” Marrs continued. “But who is the power behind them? Just for example, in this election year of 2008, we have the great choice of Barack Obama, who is backed by Zbigniew Brzezinski and his son, the head of the Trilateral Commission, which was an offshoot of the Council on Foreign Relations, corporate globalists. Or John McCain, who is backed by Henry Kissinger and the Council on Foreign Relations. So you can either get leftwing socialism or rightwing socialism. There’s really not much of a choice.”

Things weren’t much different in 2004, according to Marrs, when one could vote for Republican George W. Bush, who was an oilman and a member of the Skull and Bones secret society, or his cousin, Democrat John Kerry, who was also an oilman and a member of the Skull and Bones secret society.

“The whole thing makes a mockery out of the idea of true democracy,” Marrs said. “But anyway, that led to my book ‘Rule By Secrecy,’ about who is really ruling and how they are ruling by deceit and secrecy. And then I began to think that the thing to do would be to bring ‘Rule By Secrecy,’ which tracks these secret societies back through the past, such as the Knights Templar, the Priory of Sion, back to the mystery schools of Egypt and Greece, the thing to do now was to bring it up to modern times and figure out what we’re doing today.

“And I was amazed and chagrined,” he went on, “to find that the very same financial powers and families and corporations that had created communism in Russia at the end of World War I had then become fearful of the worldwide spread of communism and had then created National Socialism in Germany as a block to this worldwide spread of communism. Of course, that was National Socialism, the acronym of which is Nazi.”

Marrs said that the Nazis were funded, even as the war raged in Europe , by major U.S. corporations like U.S. Steel, IBM and Standard Oil, as well as by banks such as National City Bank, which is now Citicorp, and J.P. Morgan, which is now Morgan Stanley. Also on that list is the Bankers Trust of New York, which is now owned by Deutsche Bank, the German central bank. But the connections cut even deeper than that.

“It’s amazing,” Marrs said. “In fact we find that today the Germans are the muscle behind the world economic wheels. And then you look and you realize that the president of the United States , at the time of this conversation, is George W. Bush, whose grandfather was actually prosecuted by the federal government of the United States in late 1942 for being nothing but a financial front man for Hitler and the Nazis. We find that the governor of our most populous state, Arnold Schwarzenegger, his father was a Nazi party leader. We find that Carl Rove, widely known as Bush’s brain, his grandfather built Nazi concentration camps and was an ardent Nazi. And even the pope, the current pope, as a young man in Poland had been a member of the Hitler Youth. So it really makes you wonder.”

The result of all that research into Nazi infiltration was the aforementioned “The Rise of the Fourth Reich.” The book was written before the current stock market debacle, which Marrs says clearly echoes the passage into power of the Nazis in Germany .

“We are following right in the steps of the Germans of the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “In 1931, J.P. Morgan and National City Bank and others pulled the plug on the ballooned economy in Germany , causing a depression and hyperinflation, which then drove middleclass Germans right into the arms of Hitler and the Nazis. Today, Morgan Stanley and Citicorp and others are ballooning up the U.S. economy, which is now deflating and before long it looks like we will be facing hyperinflation.

“And apparently they’re planning to bring a new Fuehrer to us,” he said, “no telling who that might be.”

There is a further point of comparison. The German Reichstag, or parliament building, was burned and gutted by alleged terrorists on February 27, 1933, which impacted on the German people a great deal, much as 911 has on Americans.  Hitler was then able to rush through a piece of legislation called The Enabling Act, which permitted the Nazis to require national identification cards and racial profiling. Marrs sees an obvious correlation to our own Patriot Act, rushed through before many legislators had even had a chance to read it.

“The Patriot Act,” Marrs said, “began to concentrate power in the executive branch of the government, just as the Enabling Act did in Germany . They began to set up detention centers for dissidents and terrorists, just like we’re doing. They began to strip away civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, right to an attorney, etc. And we see all this being repeated.”

But it’s not a simple thing to describe the kind of takeover Marrs envisions.

“Let me be very clear here,” he said. “When I talk about people trying to take over the United States , secret society members trying to take over the United States , and that it’s becoming a Fourth Reich, I do not want anyone to get the idea that I’m trying to say that jack-booted Germans wearing swastika armbands are trying to take over the United States . No, we defeated the Germans in World War II, no question about that.

“The problem is that we did not defeat National Socialism,” he continued. “We didn’t defeat the Nazis. In fact, the very same banking and corporate interests who had created and sustained the Nazis brought thousands of them over to this country under Project Paperclip and other programs and enrolled them in our military/industrial complex. Of course the rocket scientists were the beginnings of our space program, we know about that.

“We know about the fact that we brought their mind control experts over here and they began to work on drugs and chemicals for mind control. But then we brought over their psychiatrists, we brought over their philosophy, their ideology. And this is what has slowly crept and seeped into the United States at the lower levels, through first the military and then the universities and foundations that support the military and then the corporations that support the military. And finally on in to our political system. They brought National Socialism over and they began to merge it into American life. That’s why today we see the attributes of it all over the place.”

One piece of this rather complicated puzzle goes back to Hitler’s death in Berlin at the end of the war. Or his supposed death.

“There is no hard evidence,” Marrs said, “that Hitler died in the bunker. In fact, the Russians initially said that he got away. Then apparently, when the world leaders decided that it would be more expedient to say he was dead, then the story began to coalesce that he had indeed committed suicide in the bunker. Now, the only way we have of knowing what actually happened in the bunker was from a handful of Hitler’s closest associates, his driver, and some SS men there in the bunker. Well, number one, you know they’re loyal to Hitler, so they’re going to tell whatever they’re told to tell.

“Number two, even assuming they’re telling the truth, by their own stories, there is only one person, who, after hearing a shot in the Fuehrer’s apartment, went in there, came out and said the Fuehrer has shot himself. That was Martin Bormann, who by all accounts escaped, went to South America , and had been heading up a Nazi commercial enterprise that soon was spanning the globe and today has its tendrils into corporate life both in America and Europe and even Asia .

“Hitler’s driver said that Martin Bormann came out with a body wrapped in a blanket, and that they brought out a woman’s body wrapped in a blanket, and they took them up there and they were burned in the courtyard. Yet none of those remains were ever recovered supposedly because of the shelling of the Russians.”

The use of body doubles by highly visible political leaders has been documented as a commonplace throughout recorded history, Marrs said.

“In fact in my book,” Marrs said, “I document several instances of people who claim that Hitler had body doubles. So how easy would it be to kill one of them and tell the world that Hitler was dead? But that’s kind of a moot point, because it doesn’t really matter whether Hitler survived or not. The bald-face and documented fact is that his philosophy, National Socialism, did survive and in fact seems to be thriving in the modern United States.”

Regardless of what may have happened to Hitler, by the end of the war the Nazis had had five or six years to loot the entire continent of Europe, including vast stores of gold and silver, stocks, bonds, licenses, agreements, patents and valuable artwork.

“They had everything,” Marrs said. “Interestingly enough, there’s even a section in my book where I present the claim—that is somewhat supported—that the Nazis may have even recovered the legendary treasure of Solomon, which over the centuries has been relocated from Palestine, from Jerusalem, over to the Pyrenees Mountains, the foothills of the Pyrenees in southern France. So with one of the most fabulous treasures that the world has ever known, plus the entire loot of Europe , this gave them such enormous wealth that anything was possible. And apparently it was.”

Some of the money funded what came to be called the “Rat Lines,” which sent many thousands of unrepentant Nazis out of Europe to find a haven in South and Central America , Egypt and the United States . The transplanted Nazis were then able to set up about 2000 corporations worldwide, according to Marrs. These Nazi owned corporations began devouring smaller corporations, a practice that continues to this day, the result being that control of the corporate world is now devolving down to just a handful of major multinational corporations.

But the Nazis had more than money to offer the postwar world. They also had amazing technology, including one of the first functioning televisions.

“My Dad was one of the first in our neighborhood in Fort Worth , Texas , back in the mid-50s, to have a television set,” Marrs recalled. “I remember our neighbors would come over to look at our set. The Germans in the 1930s had big television screens and television. In fact, several hundred thousand Germans watched the 1936 Olympics via television in these television lounges that were scattered across Berlin . By the end of the war, the Germans had even developed a television-guided missile. Holy Cow! It sounds like one of our modern missiles.

            “But they made even greater technological leaps,” he said. “It is historic fact that when the Nazi bases were overrun, we found drawings of flying saucers on the drawing boards. The only controversy has been did they ever perfect one and get one that would fly? In my book, I present some evidence that yes, they did.”

            The Germans may also have developed a nuclear bomb of their own.

            “The reason we don’t hear much about it,” Marrs explained, “is because that was a scary thought then and it’s a scary thought now. But it appears that unlike the United States , which was using centrifuges to enrich uranium to make plutonium for a plutonium bomb, the Germans may well have found a chemical reaction technique that allowed them to refine uranium to make enough for a uranium bomb.  There are even some suggestive reports that they may have actually used tactical nukes on the Eastern Front in the fight against Russia .”

            Were the Germans planning to use their nukes against the West? According to Marrs, they were. At the end of war, the ground crews at a Nazi base in Norway said that atomic weapons were held there in preparation for a strike on New York City . They had the range. So the question becomes, why weren’t the weapons used?

            “The answer is that they did not have a reliable delivery system,” Marrs said. “They had a three-stage rocket, but they were far from perfecting a guidance system. But I think the main reason is that by the time they had a nuclear bomb and a delivery system capable of taking it to a target, the war was just about over. The Allies were closing in from the west, and the Russians were nearing Berlin from the east, and cooler heads realized that if they dropped a nuclear bomb on, say, Paris or London or New York , that would not have ended the war. That would only have meant unthinkable retaliation against Germany and it would have laid waste the entire country.”  

            So rather than attack the U.S. , the Nazis traded their technology for immunity, which again smoothed the way for German scientists and technicians into the American military/industrial complex.

            “And of course under the rationale,” Marrs said, “that after the war they were needed to help us in our Cold War against Soviet Russia.”

            The Nazis may have even moved beyond harnessing nuclear power to the creation of an even more powerful antigravity device codenamed Die Glocke, or the Bell .

            “It was a bell-shaped device,” Marrs said, “of counter-rotating electromagnetic fields which then generated an overall field in which all kinds of strange things were happening. This seems to be an effort to nullify gravity, to produce an antigravity device. What’s really scary is that in modern physics, it’s becoming understood that if you can cancel out gravity, you likely also cancel out time.

            “Which explains a lot in the UFO field,” he continued. “Because we all know that the reports say when the UFO comes over, often motorists’ vehicles stop. When the UFO goes away, their vehicles start up again. And if you think about it, nobody says that they put the key back in and turned on the starter and it starts. What happens is, when the field comes over, it nullifies gravity so that the craft can skim along through the air, but it also nullifies time. Time stops. The pistons freeze and everything just stops—clocks, everything.

            “And even the people inside this field are outside of time. This goes very far in explaining the Missing Time phenomenon in the UFO field. People say, ‘Well, I saw a UFO at six o’clock but I didn’t get home until seven o’clock and it’s only a ten minute drive.’ Well, while they were in the field, time had stopped. So if you can stop time, now you’re talking about the possibility and feasibility of time travel. Time traveling Nazis. Sounds like a bad 1950s horror movie, but apparently they were actually working on this. So they were really into some very exotic and very advanced technology.”

            What basic purpose does all this mad rush to technological superiority serve? And what motivates these fascist corporate powers to seek an ever-tightening control over the masses? To Marrs, it all comes down to greed and the lust for power.

            “It’s hard for people like us, who work from paycheck to paycheck, just trying to get enough ahead to pay off our house or car, it’s hard for us to understand,” he said. “These people, they have more money than anyone to begin with, so why would they want more? So it’s not only about greed for money, it’s greed for the power and control that money brings. These globalist financiers, these global fascists if you will—and by the way, fascism is defined as the blending of state and corporate power. I quote Mussolini in my book as saying that certainly, in the early stages, fascism is probably not the correct term. The more appropriate term is ‘corporatism,’ rule by the corporations. And I don’t think anybody would argue that America today is ruled by the corporations.

            “And these people who own and control these multinational corporations, they want total control and they do this by controlling the Earth’s natural resources. If you’ll track back to the basic materials and minerals that are needed for all manufacturing, for all chemicals, for all pharmaceuticals, you’ll find that it’s concentrated in a very few hands and they totally own the whole thing.”

            How close are the fascists/Nazis to reaching their ultimate goal?

            “Pretty close,” Marrs replied. “I think the ultimate goal can be found in the work of a British Fabian Socialist who in 1948 wrote a very prescient book under the penname George Orwell. Eric Arthur Blair was his real name, and he was well-connected to the British royalty and to the British aristocracy. And I think he was let in on the ultimate plan. And we see from his work, ‘1984,’ that the world will be divided into three major economic blocs. In the book it was Oceania , Asiana, and East Asiana . In today’s real world it’s the European Union, the soon-to-be North American Union, and the future Asian Union. These three unions will be played against each other, two of them constantly at war, either economic war or maybe even actual war. They will continue this because this is their method for maintaining their profit and control.”

            Marrs added an interesting anecdote to flesh out his theory.

            “The film producer, Aaron Russo, was befriended by one of the Rockefellers,” he said. “Nicholas Rockefeller. And he actually just pointblank asked Nicholas Rockefeller, ‘What’s the game plan? What do you all really want?’ And according to Russo, Rockefeller responded, ‘We are going to microchip the population and have the banking interests control the world.’ Well, the Real ID Act and the increased surveillance, the surveillance cameras being mounted on every street corner—they already are in Britain, and now they’re beginning to mount them in the United States—all of this is being set up for a totalitarian Orwellian future society.”

            What can we do about it?

            “Educate yourself to the truth of what’s going on,” Marrs said. “This financial crisis should have been a wakeup call to everyone. For about 40 years I’ve been preaching that this is coming and here it is. Everybody said I was just a conspiracy theorist and now they’re beginning to have second thoughts because we now see it coming to fruition. As the economy continues to deteriorate, and as we have either more contrived false flag attacks or even natural disasters, then we will see the noose get even tighter.”

            Marrs advises that after educating oneself, one should try to educate others as well, not by finger-pointing but by asking questions and leading them to think for themselves rather than “just mouthing the slogans and platitudes that they hear within the electronic matrix of the corporate-controlled mass media.”

            Another grassroots approach to the problem is to vote out every current member of Congress.

            “The good, the bad, and the indifferent,” Marrs said. “Vote them all out. That would send a very clear message that we’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore.

            “But of course,” Marrs admitted, “that probably will not happen because, again, most people are still caught in the matrix of the mass media.”

            But one can at least dream, right? At least until the fascists buy control of our dreaming as well.

THE END