Jim Marrs is not a Scientologist |340|

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Jim Marrs is a top-notch investigative journalist, so what’s he doing promoting L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth?

photo by: Galaxy Press

On this episode of Skeptiko…

Alex Tsakiris: There are a lot of people scratching their heads saying, “What the heck is Jim Marrs doing getting in bed with those Scientologists?”

Jim Marrs: I am not a Scientologist, and I’m not going to be a Scientologist.

(re: Jim’s still evolving investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination)

Jim Marrs: I get people all the time that say, “Will we ever know the truth about the Kennedy assassination?” and I try to explain to them that that’s not really what they’re asking. What they’re truly asking is, “Will there come a day when some government official will get up at a press conference, before all of the mass media, and say, “Okay, okay, alright, here, we’ve lied to you for 70 years but here’s the real truth, and we’re going to lay it all out here,” and no, that ain’t going to happen.

(re: Jim’s investigation of the U.S. psychic spying program)

Alex Tsakiris: One thing that kind of irks me is, the narrative that gets played out is, “Oh, this was all just kind of normal defense intelligence stuff… we had to do it because them darn Russkies were doing it, and we had to have a leg-up on them,” which there is some truth to. I mean, clearly the Russians were involved in this, but it does seem also like we were using that as an excuse.

Jim Marrs: Yeah absolutely, that’s a lot of facile rationalization. I think the reality of it was, it was the people who actually knew what was going on and saw the positive results from the remote viewing. I mean, who doesn’t want somebody around who can tell them what’s happening on the other side of the world?

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Read Excerpts:

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Alex Tsakiris: No one looks at those pictures and says, “Oh gee, that darn Lee Harvey Oswald fellow, I’m still so mad about that.”

Jim Marrs: That’s right.

Alex Tsakiris: What they think about is, “Something went on there that is totally against our values, is totally against everything America stands for.” Do you think we as a country, are ready to accept that history, that alternative history that you’ve been so much a part of documenting?

Jim Marrs: Yes, I think so and I think we’ve all matured and we’re more sophisticated and we understand. You know, you go back to John Jay McCloy who goes all the way back. In 1936 he sat with Hitler in his box at the 1936 Olympics and was CEO of City National Bank, which is now City Corp and was the largest lender of money to Hitler and the Nazis, okay?

Then at the end of the war somehow, he becomes the High Commissioner of Germany and was instrumental in bringing all of these Nazis over here to the United States where his protégé, Allen Dulles, had become head of the CIA and whitewashed their pro-Nazi backgrounds and called them anti-Nazis and rolled them into our military industrial complex.

Then he sits on the Warren Commission to determine what happened to Kennedy and then one of the very early meetings, before they have really even gotten into a real investigation, he made the comment, he said, “The most important thing is to show the world that America’s not just a banana republic, where the government can be changed by conspiracy.” So see, the whole position of the government, early on, was to, not find the truth, not find out if Oswald did it alone, not find out who actually did it, but to simply show the world that America’s not a banana republic.

Unfortunately I think, if you go back and look at the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, the shooting of George Wallace, you know, the shooting of President Reagan, Harvey and Oswald, who were after Jimmy Carter, then you find, “Wait a minute, we are just a banana republic.” So yes, I think we’re ready for this.

Alex Tsakiris: But Jim, there is a slight contradiction in that right, are we really ready, or are we ready to deal with it at a very, kind of superficial, sweep it under the rug…? I mean, what would it really mean to accept those truths that you’re talking about? We accept it on one level because, like in the JFK Movie, we say, “Yeah, we know that was a phony deal,” but do we really accept it?

Jim Marrs: Well we do but from a dispassionate, unemotional, historical viewpoint, you know. “Yeah, that happened. Okay,” and I hear people even today saying like, “Well, so what, what does that change?” Well, you know, it changes everything if you truly understand that we had a coup d’état in 1963 and this country has been on a downhill slide ever since. Now we’ve got Trump, who says he’s going to drain the swamp and make America great, and we’ll see, we’ll see if we can get back to the self-confident and productive society that we were prior to the Kennedy assassination.

I wanted to mention though, about Jackie Kennedy, here’s something interesting you may not have realized. She actually kind of is the one that really kind of broke up the conspiracy, caused a huge problem and here’s what I mean. On the flight back to Washington, on Air Force One, initially they were saying they were going to take the body to Walter Reed Hospital, well that’s the army hospital and something tells me and my suggestion is that they had their own doctors lined up at Walter Reed and their own hand-picked people and they were ready to take the body in there, do whatever necessary, to come out with the result that they wanted, okay? Which was to make sure that the wounds were reported so that it supported the lone assassin theory, with the three shots from behind. But Jackie Kennedy said, her husband had been in the Navy and she wanted him taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital and at the last minute they had to change plans and shift to Bethesda and at Bethesda they had to round up those three inexperienced doctors and then put them under heavy manipulation and control by military officers, so that the autopsy was shoddy and slipshod and, you know, was not carried out correctly. There were a lot of questions about it and that’s what started the whole thing, that’s what started everybody going, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, this doesn’t match that and that doesn’t match this.” So, you can actually thank Jackie Kennedy for shifting to Bethesda Naval Hospital, which caused problems all the way up to today in the medical evidence.

Alex Tsakiris: Hey Jim, in 2007 you published another book, PSI Spies: The True Story of America’s Psychic Warfare Program.

Jim Marrs: One of the most amazing books I ever got involved in.

Alex Tsakiris: Well great, we’re going to talk about that because it’s a topic we’ve covered quite a bit in this show, including interviewing several of the people who were directly involved in Project Stargate for quite some time. I also interviewed Lloyd Auerbach about his book, ESP Wars: East & West, that was co-authored by Dr. Ed May, who I’m actually scheduled to interview in the next couple of weeks, but Ed ran the psychic spying program for the US and the book was interesting in that it also was co-authored by Victor Rubel, who was a high-ranking Russian official, running the program for the Soviets. So, there’s a lot of history to unpack here. What seems to me when the dust settles, is that a ‘psychic spying program’ was really a small component of a much larger mind-control program that started decades earlier with Project Mockingbird, Project ARTICHOKE.

I’ve got to get this into the show so people… One of the stated goals in the declassified documents that have come out of Project Artichoke was, they had stated goals such as, get control of an individual to the point where he will do out bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature.

So we, being the US intelligence apparatus, were deeply, deeply, deeply into mind-control. Wasn’t that really the big picture? Isn’t this whole Stargate thing just a small component of that?

Jim Marrs: Well, I don’t know if it’s a small component, but yes, you’re right, it was a component and it goes and it covers a lot of the distinct things. For example, most of these people will talk to you about the remote viewing, but they really are a little hesitant to tell you about remote influencing and it’s really pretty simple to understand how you can do this because, for example, you can take a rat, a lab rate and hook electrodes to his brain and then put him in a cage with a cat, where he freaks out in fear, okay, and that registers as brainwave frequencies. So, they could take the same frequencies, turn around and beam them to some other animal, including the human animal, and it could provoke fear in people.

Now, it’s not that clear-cut, it’s not going to, just immediately going to run screaming down the street. In fact, I interviewed a fellow one time who’d been involved in that work and he said actually they weren’t really that satisfied with the results of their crowd-control, mind-control, not individuals, but as a group of people, a whole population and he said because, number one, he said about a third of the people, it just really doesn’t work on, and he went into kind of a scientific, physiological explanation, but basically what he said was, is that, to alter someone’s thinking, first they have to be thinking. You’ve got about a third of the population, they get up to go to work, to come home, they drink a beer, they watch TV, they go to bed. They’re not really thinking, so it doesn’t really affect them.

Now, another third of the population would probably include you and I and hopefully all your listeners, and these are people who, yes it would influence, but not to the point of where it couldn’t be overcome by their own self-esteem and their own identity. Think about it, how many times have you woke up in the morning and you go, “Oh man, I just don’t want to get out of bed,” but then you go, “Oh well, I’ve got stuff to do, I’ve got meetings, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that,” boom, you’re up and you’re going, you know, so you overcome it.

So he said, only about a third of the population does this mind-control actually work on and he said, but these are the dangerous ones, because these are the ones who are the borderline schizophrenics, borderline psychotic and sometimes this remote influencing, this mind-control, using frequencies, electromagnetic brain frequencies, it can push them right over the edge. And if you think about it, it’s only been in recent years, I know when I was a young kid, we never heard anything about school shootings or you know, I guess the first one I can recall was, I can’t remember his name now, but the tower shooter at the University of Texas in Boston.

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Jim Marrs: But up until then, there hadn’t been anybody walking into places, shooting up places or anything. So, you know, maybe what we’re seeing are the effects of the surreptitious mind-control experiments that were brought over here from the Nazi scientists rolled into the CIA and the military and they continued their work.

Now, remote viewing, it’s a whole different thing. Remote viewing, if it’s done properly, you just go out and you view something, you look at it. In fact, it’s interesting that they were talking about the differences between channeling and remote viewing. Remote viewing is when you cast your mind out there as an objective observer and you’re just kind of looking at whatever’s out there, or if it’s on this earth or outside this earth. Channeling on the other hand is when you open yourself up to any entity that might want to come, and come into your body, come into your mind, and they said that could be a little hazardous because there’s no guarantee, when you open yourself up and ask for some being to come to you, there’s no guarantee who you’re going to get, you know?

Alex Tsakiris: And expanding on that a little bit, we don’t know what they know, in terms of dabbling into those realms. One thing that kind of irks me is, the narrative that gets played out is, “Oh, this was all just kind of normal defense intelligence stuff but we had to do it because them damn Russkies were doing it and we had to have a leg-up on them,” which there is some truth to. I mean, clearly the Russians were involved in this.

Jim Marrs: Right, yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: But it does seem also like we were using that as an excuse. Richard Helms, director of the CIA, and father of the MK Ultra Program, you know, contradicts himself over and over again to congress, at one point he’s saying, “Well, you know, we really have to work on this because the Russians are way out ahead,” and then the next time he comes back he says, “Well, you know, they don’t really know what they’re doing, we’re five years ahead of them.” I mean, it sounds like what they were trying to do was weaponize, not only the psychic aspect of it, but as you eluded to, the magical, esoteric, other worldly, demonic… they didn’t care what it was, and from an intelligence standpoint you can understand it.

Jim Marrs: Oh yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: If there’s demons out there, well let’s figure out if they’re a security risk, number one, and then number two, if we can get them on our side, well then that’s great, let’s use them.

Jim Marrs: We’d use them as a weapon, yeah absolutely. That’s a lot of facile rationalization. I think the reality of it was, it was the people who actually knew what was going on and saw the positive results from the remote viewing, I mean, who doesn’t want somebody around who can tell them what’s happening on the other side of the world, you know?

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Jim Marrs: Without the use of the normal five senses and so the people who knew that it was working, as you said, they wanted it, and they wanted to weaponize it and they wanted to keep it to ourselves and as a result they came out with all kinds of facile explanations about why we needed to be doing this. But the reality of it was, we needed to be doing this because we could and they wanted to find out where it led, and you know, this is what got me going with remote viewing, is that early on, when I first heard about that, back in probably the late 80s, early 90s, and it was still a very top secret, classified program, and as a journalist I thought, “Wow, what a story,” okay?” I said, “Because it’s either true or it’s not true, and if it’s not true, then here’s a great story about a waste of tax payer money, by funding all of these experiments and funding this work through the CIA, into the office of Naval Intelligence and on up through the work at Stanford Research Institute out in California and then all the way into forming a unit within the United States Army of these psychic warriors,” you know?” I said, “Oh, what a story,” I said, “but then, on the other hand, if it turns out it is true, holy cow, this is an evolutionary leap for mankind,” and it turned out it is true and I know this because I studied it at length, I interviewed and talked to most of the original…

Alex Tsakiris: You actually tried it, didn’t you?

Jim Marrs: Oh yeah, and then I’ve done it myself, yeah. In fact, the very first time, my first effort at remote viewing, I drew a floorplan for an office building that was 100% accurate and the thing hadn’t even been built yet, I was looking into the future. But then a year later, when I went to Albuquerque and I went to this place, I’m going, “Holy cow, that’s kind of how I envisioned it,” and they gave me the official floorplan for this place and it was 100% accurate from what I’d drawn the year before.

Alex Tsakiris: You know one other thing I’ve learned and I want to bounce this off you, because it relates back to this very interview, and a lot of people don’t know this, but Dr. Harold Puthoff, who along with Russell Targ, were both topnotch scientists before they got involved with the remote viewing, Stargate program, but anyways, Puthoff was a Scientologist, quite an advanced Scientologist, as was Ingo Swann, the psychic who really, kind of started the whole program, he was a very advanced Scientologist. But the real story is that, that wasn’t an accident, because US intelligence apparatus had hotly pursued Scientologists, had hotly pursued L. Ron Hubbard for years because of course, L. Ron Hubbard was navy intelligence, and he had gone off and he was doing this mind-control thing that he wrapped into the Scientology thing, but they wanted to know, “Hey, has this guy figured out something that we need to have?” and they were hounding him, trying to infiltrate him and get that.

So, what do you make of that whole Scientology-MK Ultra Project connection and that battle that was going on there? Have you looked into that?

Jim Marrs: Well, yes I have, and basically I think that they were kind of running parallel in their research of the mind and how it all fits together, and I think for Hubbard, that led to his advances in what he calls Scientology. They were anxious to know what he was doing and there was that overlapping connection.

Now, L. Ron Hubbard was quite a guy. I knew him as a science fiction writer, okay? Before I’d ever heard of Scientology and he was actually quite famous in his time, back in the 40s and 50s he was well-known and he was right up there with some of the giants in the field of science fiction, like Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and it’s useful to go back and read some of the stuff he’s written. Of course, through the 30s and 40s he was writing pulp fiction, but as such and as a world traveler, he really had this broad view, an insight into the world and to the various nations and how things were fitting together and I think that made him very desirable.

And you’re right, also back at this time, when Scientology first got going, they were kind of at loggerheads with the federal government because they were finding out they were infiltrating government offices and they were revealing some of the corruption that was going on within the government and the government was coming down on them, but then at some point, some kind of agreement was reached, they were granted a tax-exempt status as a church and they dropped their lawsuits against the federal government and everything’s been copacetic ever since.

Alex Tsakiris: Boy, I don’t know about that. There’s a long history of battling back and forth, I mean they gave them the tax, they gave them status but later on they take it away. L. Ron Hubbard is writing and saying, “We cannot let this technology get in the hands of people who want to weaponize it inside the government.”

Jim Marrs: Yeah.

Alex Tsakiris: But in the meantime, he’s doing some really crazy things, he’s out there with Aleister Crowley protégés and trying to summon demons, he’s trying to play the magic game too. I mean, there’s a lot of crazy, crazy stuff that seems extremely well-documented, but there is this back and forth, all about mind-control, between the Scientology people and the military intelligence people, and what a lot of people think is that eventually, and I don’t know if you have an opinion on this, but eventually, the military intelligence people kind of won out and did infiltrate Scientology and did take it more in a direction that they wanted to explore, or at least tried to siphon off any technology on that.

Jim Marrs: Well they, of course, came up with their Stargate program and they were the ones that were doing their own and I think a lot of this may have been… and there may have been some overlaps, and I’m sure they wanted to know what Hubbard knew, but I think that they were just kind of running parallel in their investigations. But I think you’re right, I think that the military industrial complex kind of came out on top.

This is what I like today, if you ask them, “Is there a remote viewing unit within the US Army?” they’re going to just say, “No,” okay?

Alex Tsakiris: Right.

Jim Marrs: And technically that’s true, but what they’ve done is, instead of having one unit where they put all their psychic spies into, they’re spread out and they are embedded and a lot of these different things like, Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, you know, I mean what commander would not like somebody at hand who can tell him what’s on the other side of the hill. So they’re still using it, but they’re using it in a diffused manner.

But you can actually learn a lot from reading Hubbard’s work. Battlefield Earth, they’ve just issued a new edition, last year, and you can get really good deals on that in Amazon, and you can go to their website, battlefieldearth.com. But what’s cool is, here’s a story of an alien invasion, but yet it’s not like what we see today, like in Independence Day, where the aliens just come and want to blow up everything; these are the intergalactic bankers who have loaned money to the intergalactic mining corporation, giving them a contract to loot the mineral resources of the Earth. But they have a timetable, they’re supposed to complete it in such a such of time, and they’re beginning to push on this timetable and they’re getting worried because these pesky humans are causing problems, so they’ve got to go to the planet Psychlo and get these tall, hairy aliens to come and try to subdue the pesky humans on the earth.

Anyway, it’s all a big business deal, just a deal, you know, which is really interesting because, when you look at the United States today and what we’re doing in other countries, trying to get their mineral resources and claiming we’re bringing them democracies, and we bomb the hell out of them, it kind of runs parallel there; it’s kind of like, I think he had a vision of how things were going.

Alex Tsakiris: That’s a great point, and one of the points I wanted to talk about, I don’t know how you feel about it, but one of the reasons that you’re here today is that the publicist for Galaxy Books, the Scientologist who owned Battlefield Earth, contacted me and said, “Hey, Jim’s out here and he’s promoting our book.”

Now, I’ve got to tell you, and you know this, there are a lot of people scratching their heads saying, “What the heck is Jim Marrs doing getting in bed with these Scientologists?” What do you say to that? I mean, there’s a lot to sort out there, before we can really talk about Battlefield Earth, I mean, to heck with that, we’ve got this huge Scientology thing to deal with.

Jim Marrs: I am not a Scientologist and I’m not going to be a Scientologist, and the only reason I’m…

Alex Tsakiris: Do you think they get a bad rap, do you think that Scientologists get a bad rap?

Jim Marrs: In many areas, I think so, I do. For example, there was a big documentary on recently, oh god, what did they call it? I think it’s called [Going] Clear, okay? Their big thing was because of the E-Machines and you’re supposed to clear your aura, I don’t know, whatever all that is. The only reason that I’m touting for Battlefield Earth is that I read it when it first came out and I was a big fan of L. Ron Hubbard and I just think it was a great book and I think there’s some parallels with today’s society. I guess it’s just like, Alex if you found a particular brand of beer that you thought was really great, you’d got to your friends and say, “Hey, try Schmidt’s beer, you know, it’s great.”

Alex Tsakiris: Unless ISIS was brewing it and distributing it, then I’d say, “You know what, it’s the best damn beer I’ve ever had,” but I can’t…

Jim Marrs: Yeah, you may have to pull up there but no, listen, Scientology is just like anything else, you can go to any other religion, well take the Catholics, they’ve had their share of bad press, right, okay?

Alex Tsakiris: Sure.

Jim Marrs: And if you go to any other religion, Baptist or any others, you’re going to find disgruntled members, you’re going to find corruption, you’re going to find some bad things going on. Any time you get a whole group of people together, there’s always 2% that’s going to cause trouble. So, I’m not trying to say that everything’s fine, I don’t really even know and I don’t particularly care, as long as they’re not in my face and bugging me. The people I’ve met and dealt with, within Scientology, have always been wonderful people and they act in a very positive and Christian-like manner. They might cringe at my saying that, but it’s true. They are very alert, very smart people, very educated people, very thoughtful people, at least that’s the ones I run into and of course I can’t speak for all of them, and I’m certainly not, because I’m not a Scientologist and I don’t plan on being one.

Alex Tsakiris: What about the allegations of people like Jenna Hill, a real credible Scientology insider who says, you know, the kind of mass child abuse, mind-control stuff that goes on in there is just the kind of horrific things that we never hear about but that, when people do break away they say, “This is purely a cult.”

Jim Marrs: Well, like I said, I can’t say it doesn’t happen, I haven’t had any… all I can talk is from my experience and it’s like, for example, when they refer to the church and a lot of people think that’s a cultish thing, you’re with the church or you’re against the church and I’ve had them explain to me, they say, “Look, you don’t understand, the definition of a church is simply the gathering of people with a common interest and thoughts, and that’s what we do.” I don’t know. Believe me, you can go to any particular church in this country and I bet you could find somebody who says, “Well, that’s a cult. They just go down there and they all talk about so and so and they gossip against each other.”

So, I can’t defend, I’m only trying to explain that obviously, for the handful who say it’s a cult and have raised questions about it, then you’ve got thousands that are members that seem to be pretty complacent with it. I don’t know, but that’s for everybody else to decide for themselves and what their understanding is based on their experience. But like I said, based on my experience, everybody I’ve ever met, that’s had anything to do with Scientology are just really kind of nice, good people. So, I don’t know.

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