Considering Marilyn’s incredible fame and the fanatical, almost fetish-like fascination with her tragic death, was it not just a matter of time before a conspiracist created an amalgamation, a unified theory of Marilyn’s murder that included flying silver disks and the possible existence of little green men? During May of 2001, an article entitled “Is There a Connection? Marilyn Monroe and UFOs” appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal. Two years later in 2003, a brief ninety-five page progeny of that brief two page article appeared in the Realm of Marilyn. The article’s author, Donald R. Burleson, PhD, published UFOs and the Murder of Marilyn Monroe; and therein, the erudite PhD explained in precise detail just how UFOs impacted the life and the death of America’s favorite blonde actress.

Since Burleson’s publication appeared before I became MO, Marilyn Overwhelmed, I cannot comment on the ripples it might have caused across the ether of the Marilyn Universe; but according to commentary regarding the PhD’s book, his publication was, and I assume still is, the most controversial publication ever written about the famous actress. Recently, a documentary entitled Unacknowledged advanced the addlepated theory proffered by Burleson and featured the revelations of Dr. Steven Greer, an odd impresario in the world of UFO conspiracies and conspiracists. Greer’s opinions and odd assertions will appear later in this section; but Burleson’s odd book and Greer’s odd assertions are, in my opinion, of course, a cockeyed union of The Outer Limits or The X-Files.

I realize that a person’s opinion of Burleson’s opinion regarding why Marilyn was allegedly murdered and my opinion of his opinion will be effected by their opinion of UFOs and extraterrestrials, their belief or disbelief thereof. I confess that I am currently a skeptic and essentially a denier of what I call The Alieata. Yet, when I was less old than I am now, I was a believer, prompted to be so by the spooky stories published in LOOK and TIME magazines about the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill from their Chevy Bel Air as they drove along a lonely and empty stretch of New Hampshire highway.

A teenager at the time, I was a Cold War Kid, steeped in the flying saucer movies Hollywood produced by the dozens in the 1950s, black and white, usually lucrative talkies about aliens visiting and attacking Earth in flying saucers or silver intergalactic disc-shaped crafts. I watched some of those movies inside dark movie houses; but in our small darkened living room, where they were displayed on my family’s tiny square television set, is where I watched most of them. I recall one movie in which the aliens were large grasshoppers with virtually no hands; but then, at the time, I was not analytical enough to question how a handless creature could possibly fabricate an elegantly complex and beautiful space craft. Perhaps the aliens constructed those crafts telekinetically using their big brains. But then, I digress, as I often do.

Sightings and reports of odd lights in the sky began long before the Roswell Incident occurred in 1947. Some UFOlogists claim that Ezekiel’s biblical flaming wheel was, in fact, a space vehicle. In 1953, the United States Air Force created the term Unidentified Flying Object as a general term to replace the more commonly used and more specific, descriptive term, flying saucer. Obviously the Air Force wanted to avoid the assumption by observers on the ground that any strange object observed flying in the sky was necessarily a flying saucer piloted by little green men. Unfortunately, this logical position regarding UFOs did not have the desired effect. By 1962, fifteen years after the Roswell occurrence, regular appearances of UFOs had become a significant part of the American experience. The acronym UFO had become entrenched in the American lexicon; but, for the most part, in 1962, UFO meant a flying saucer piloted by little green men. Essentially, most Americans believed by then that flying saucers and their occupants were real. No revelation from nor confirmation by Marilyn Monroe was required. Here in 2020, the situation is not that much different than it was in 1962; however, the conspiracists have attached to the UFO conspiracy plot of 1947 the names of Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy, along with an alleged intelligence document, now known as the CIA-JFK-Monroe-UFO Wiretap Memorandum. They have also attached murder. What else could or would a UFO conspiracist, or any conspiracist for that matter, want or need? The secret of secrets associated with Marilyn Monroe’s murder.

The CIA knew, from the wiretaps and the almost innumerable other surveillance devices planted at Fifth Helena, that Marilyn planned to reveal the secret of secrets, not her extramarital relationships with the middle Kennedy brothers. O no. Quite the contrary, according to Donald Burleson. Marilyn had a much more significant and larger alien catfish to publicly fry. Marilyn planned to reveal the existence of UFOs and The Alieata. Therefore, the blonde actress had to be silenced to prevent her from plunging Western Civilization into fear and religious chaos.

The lineage of the murder theory advanced by Burleson can be traced back to Frank Capell’s unsubstantiated political pamphlet, Norman Mailer’s novel factoidal novel, Robert Slatzer’s 1974 apocrypha and James Hall’s ambulance story, an incredible yarn that Hall related to Deputy LADA Ronald Carroll in 1982. Add to that lineage, Anthony Summers and C. David Heymann: both authors presented the visits to Fifth Helena by Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford which appeared in Summers’  and Heymann’s 1985 and 1989 publications respectively. Donald Wolfe along with Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin later expanded Hall’s story and Robert Kennedy’s visits into what is now called The Ambulance Theory, a Kafkaesque tale that will appear in a later section. However, Burleson was the first conspiracist to conflate all the preceding and UFOs with Marilyn’s purported politically motivated murder.

All things taken into consideration, according to Burleson, Marilyn obviously did not commit suicide. She was silenced by a lethal injection administered by her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, directly into her heart, the same murder scenario proffered by Donald Wolfe and later by Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin. Burleson omitted the alleged romance between the psychiatrist and patient, however; and Burleson did not actually explain how Dr. Greenson was coerced into injecting Marilyn in the heart because she knew about UFOs and aliens or why Marilyn’s knowledge of UFOs would have concerned Dr. Greenson so much that he involved himself in murdering her. Even so, Burleson incanted the names of Sgt Jack Clemmons and Robert Slatzer, whose claim of a Marilyn marriage Burleson absolutely accepted. Burleson also incanted the names of Jeanne Laverne Carmen and Norman Jefferies, Anthony Summers and Donald Wolfe, each mentioned obviously to provide the author’s murder scenario with verity. The PhD also offered two pieces of evidence to support his injection theory: Marilyn’s autopsy report and the top secret, the deadly and allegedly still classified CIA-JFK-Monroe-UFO Wiretap Memorandum, hereafter the CIA-UFO-Memo.

An abnormally high concentration of the drugs pentobarbital and Chloral hydrate in Marilyn’s tested blood convinced Burleson and, in his considered opinion, proved that she did not ingest the overdose that killed her. The concentrations noted on the toxicology reports of 4.5mg% barbiturates and 8mg% chloral hydrate could not have been reached, according to Burleson, because Marilyn would have died long before ingesting the quantity of pills required to attain that level of concentration, seventy-five or ninety or possibly even more than one-hundred capsules. That fact was revealed to writers Peter Brown and Patte Barham and also to Robert Slatzer when those three, at different times I presume, discussed those toxic blood levels with chemists at Abbot Laboratory and other representatives of that pharmaceutical manufacturer. Am I the only person who finds it odd that Abbot Laboratory has never issued a formal, public statement refuting the findings of Marilyn’s autopsy along with the toxicological tests and reports prepared by doctors Noguchi and Abernathy? Likewise, am I the only person who finds it odd that the commenting chemists at Abbot have never been identified?

Burleson also repeated Slatzer’s published assertion that Marilyn could barely swallow an aspirin without gagging—even if she had a glass of water to drink. Slatzer knew that detail due to his lengthy friendship with and brief marriage to Marilyn, his intimate knowledge of her, an intimate knowledge that included her speech patterns and pill swallowing abilities. We now know, of course, the preceding boasts by Slatzer amounted to a pile of bunkum; and, with a weary reiteration of the conspiracist’s usual palaver, Burleson noted, a drinking vessel was not found in Marilyn’s bedroom on August the 5th. Also, Burleson additionally repeated, Marilyn had no access to water since the water supply to her house had been stopped due to her residential remodeling project, all of which we also now know, amounted to another pile of Slatzerian bunkum.

Burleson then proffered a scenario as a repudiation of the autopsy and toxicology reports prepared in 1962. He asked his readers to suppose that they wanted to generate in their own bodies the blood toxicity found in Marilyn’s. He advised his readers to fill a jorum or two with an ample supply of clean water and to surround themselves with an ample supply of the appropriate pills. Ready set. Start gobbling. In his opinion, very early into the grim gobbling process, his readers would most certainly die. Not only would his readers most certainly if not promptly die, asserted Burleson, but the toxicity level of their blood would not reach the level asserted by Marilyn’s autopsy reports; and his readers stomachs would be filled with undigested and unabsorbed capsules.

The preceding sounds plausible, sounds reasonable. Most persons who read Burleson’s book probably accepted his pill ingestion scenario and did not download a copy of Marilyn’s autopsy report and thereby learned that the concentration of pentobarbital in Marilyn’s liver, 13.0mg%, was essentially three times the concentration in her tested blood. A convenient omission by Burleson and a fine example of cherry picking; but then, an explanation of why the concentration in Marilyn’s liver was that high would have severely diminished the legitimacy of his pill ingestion scenario and argument. This subject appeared with more detail in the preceding section dedicated to Marilyn’s autopsy and the resultant toxicology reports; but to briefly recap here, if Marilyn had died long before her blood reached that high toxicity level with unabsorbed capsules remaining in her stomach, then the level of barbiturates in her liver would not have been three times the toxicity level of her blood; and the fact that the level of toxicity in her liver exceeded the level of toxicity in her blood precludes the use of an injection, a hot shot, as the method of introducing the barbiturates into Marilyn’s body.

The now famous CIA-UFO-Memo, which figured prominently in Burleson’s murder hypothesis, was revealed to the world in 1995 during a press conference called by Milo Speriglio, a somewhat dubious private detective once hired by Robert Slatzer to ostensibly investigate Marilyn’s death and substantiate what Slatzer claimed in his 1974 faux memoir and I-married-Marilyn-Monroe reveal. Milo also wrote three books about Marilyn’s death: Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-up, published in 1982; The Marilyn Conspiracy, published in 1986; and Crypt 33: The Saga of Marilyn Monroe: The Final Word, published with Adela Gregory in 1993, one year after Robert Slatzer’s second book, The Marilyn Files, plopped out of the publishers printing presses. Regrettably, Milo relied heavily on his former boss as a source.

In 1995, private detective, labeled a publicity hound by his detractors, convened a press conference during which he revealed the CIA-UFO-Memo to the world. Since the memorandum appeared to memorialize two wiretapped telephone chats, one between Dorothy Kilgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, and another telephone chat, allegedly between Marilyn and her lover, Robert Kennedy, that now infamous memorandum figured prominently in Burleson’s murder hypothesis and his brief publication. The memorandum also mentions President John Kennedy, things from outer space, dead bodies, Marilyn’s anger with the middle Kennedy brothers, her diary of secrets and an explosive press conference Marilyn planned to announce or had already announced.

The memorandum displayed a curious date, the 3rd of August in 1962, and a curious signature, that of the legendary James Jesus Angleton. Angleton’s signature appeared in the lower right hand corner. The date alone, only one day before the day of Marilyn’s death, caused reasonable doubt in my mind; but by virtue of Angleton’s signature and several other factors, conspiracists and UFOlogists accepted the document as authentic.

Enter Dr. Greer.

Dr. Steven Greer is the founder and international director of the Center for the Study of Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, CSETI. An impresario in the world of UFOlogy and the related endeavors, Dr. Greer appeared in Donald Burleson’s Marilyn-Was-Murdered book; and he resoundingly proclaimed the authenticity of the CIA-UFO-Memo; Dr. Greer also declared that the document amounted to poor Marilyn Monroe’s death warrant.

Apparently Dr. Greer received what amounted to poor Marilyn’s death warrant one day, in 1994, quite out of the blue, a year before Speriglio revealed the death warrant to humanity. Dr. Greer received it, he claimed, from a man who helped create the National Security Agency. To whom was Dr. Greer referring? Herbert Yardley? Harry Truman? Anyway, this unidentified man who helped create the NSA and delivered the CIA-UFO-Memo to Dr. Greer also supported the doctor’s work with extraterrestrials. That’s right: Dr. Greer’s work with actual other worldly beings. According to the man who works with extraterrestrials, the best document researcher and authenticator in the world proclaimed the CIA-UFO-Memo document real and tiptop secret along with being dangerous to possess, even though Dr. Greer possessed the dangerous death warrant document and appeared to still be alive. This proclaimer who proclaimed the document authentic was the senior aide to retired General William E. Odom, the former director of the NSA. General Odom’s mysterious senior aide, you have probably already concluded, conveniently requested anonymity, of course, and as usual.

Even though Dr. Greer is, as I have already stated, an impresario, even a totem to some denizens in the world of UFOs, aliens and all the associated endeavors, like organizing expensive seminars and cosmic training sessions, more than a few websites across Al Gore’s Amazing Internet, Act For Libraries , for instance, along with OccupyTheory along with The Angry UFOlogist, posted articles critical of Dr. Greer, articles that unabashedly labeled the good doctor a fraud and PhD grifter.

For example, Act For Libraries published an article with no by-line entitled, “Dr Steven Greer is a Fraud.” The article began by comparing Steven to L. Ron Hubbard. Evidently, during a 1950s party, before the cult and quasi-religion of Scientology became Hubbard’s central focus, L. Ron apparently commented that religion is where the money is. At that moment, the unnamed writer asserted, the largest financial endeavor ever to be disguised as a modern religion was born. In the writers’ opinion, Dr. Greer was simply trodding down the same well-trodden grifter’s path, deceiving his naïve seminar attendees with fraudulent promises of learning how to remote view with a cosmic consciousness, and to be precognitive, meaning an ability to see the future. All through meditation techniques. Supernatural, psychic powers. All for the small fee of $995. Of course, Dr. Greer, the grifter, requires his students to purchase the doctor’s many books as a prerequisite for seminar admission. Finally, in the end, the author noted, Dr. Greer was only engaging in a shady business, one which demanded faith without proof and a collective faith at that, collective faith in a Religion—and religion is where the money is, right, Dr. Greer?1“Dr. Steven Greer is a Fraud.” Act for Libraries. 2017.
<http://www.actforlibraries.org/dr-steven-greer-is-a-fraud/>Similar articles pilloried Dr. Greer as a grifter and a prevaricator whose many and varied stories could not withstand any actual scrutiny. One such article asserted that Dr. Greer exaggerated to establish a dubious credibility and then added that the doctor offered zero verifiable facts. The article then stated unequivocally that Dr. Steven Greer was committing a large hoax on a gullible public. Writing for Variety, Owen Gleiberman, panned Dr. Greer the science-whiz P.T. Barnum of alien visitation, a role he seems to relish all the way to the bank, a deceptive man who will go the extra mile to sell his snake oil. (“Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind” by Owen Gleiberman. Variety. 7 Apr 2020. <https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/close-encounters-of-the-fifth-kind-review-dr-steven-greer-1234574140/>) To me, the good doctor sounds like any televangelist who simply needs a new yacht or a new Rolls Royce or a new Lear jet.

But … why all the animus and hostility? More than just a few members of the UFO Community consider Dr. Greer to be an emblem of phoniness and a distributor of disinformation that actually clouds the issue of the government’s UFO stonewalling and obfuscation, phoniness that actually inhibits real UFO research. Dr. Greer’s detractors believe that he only wants to aggrandize and enrich himself while failing to offer anything tangible. Gleiberman observed that Dr. Greer is afflicted with a prattling-on-at-the-mouth touch of New Age narcissism. (Op. Cit. Gleiberman.) It seems, however, that Dr. Greer’s most egregious transgression involved an acting Director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, a dinner party and and Dr. Greer’s assertions about, and his assessment of, that dinner party.

In an article posted on OccupyTheory‘s website, dated the 18th of December in 2014, an unnamed writer stated:

Greer is known for making up a lot of excuses, but the problem is that there are no facts behind the statements that he has publicly made. […] At one point, Greer says that he briefed the CIA director about the Disclosure Project and that the whole conspiracy was going to be exposed. The only problem is that no one remembers such a briefing.2“Dr. Steven Greer Debunked.” OccupyTheory. 18 Dec 2014.

In an article posted on the website, Writing Wrong, Ryan Moorwood noted:

Greer claims that he spent many hours briefing CIA director James Woolsey about extraterrestrials and has since gone to accuse Woolsey of blocking inventors from going forward with their inventions. A former associate of Greer’s, who states that the briefing was actually just Mr. Woolsey making the mistake of inviting Dr. Greer and three other people to dinner, has objected to this claim.3“Dr Stephen Greer or: How I learned to stop worrying and just believe in aliens.” Ryan Moorwood. Writing Wrong. 5 May 2014.

In short, Dr. Steven Greer’s credibility was abducted by what appears to be a monstrous alien lie; and thus Dr. Greer’s critics, and those skeptical of his veracity, do not trust anything that exits his prattling-on mouth.

In 1993, the alien aficionado evidently attended a dinner party also attended by R. James Woolsey, Jr., who was then the acting Director of the CIA. Woolsey’s wife, Suzanne, John L. Petersen, founder of the Arlington Institute and acclaimed futurist, along with his wife, Diane Petersen, also attended.  Dr. Greer and wife, along with the Woolseys and the Petersens, apparently found themselves seated at the same table that evening. According to Dr. Greer, he used that opportunity to discuss extraterrestrials with the CIA chief; and the man who works with aliens recounted the Woolsey contact in the introduction to his book, Extraterrestrial Contact. That introduction prompted the following letter, dated September 16, 1999. First, a copy of the actual letter.