JFK'S UFO TURF WAR WITH THE CIA

[NOTE TO READERS: Apologies: my previous substack contained material at the end that I was planning to edit out and save for elucidation here, please ignore those confusing out-of-context notes.]

With his existence barely known of outside his inner circle, the CIA’s longtime chief of counterintelligence James Angleton stepped down late in 1974 after his illegal domestic surveillance Operation Chaos got exposed by the press. Accompanying him were several of his top aides, including the Deputy Chief of Angleton’s Special Operations Group, Newton (Scotty) Miler. When Angleton was called the following year to testify before the Senate Church Committee investigating CIA abuses, he had Miler by his side. And when Angleton was dying of cancer in 1987, he asked Miler to destroy his “Yellow Files.”

The fireplace was cooking away with paper when Angleton’s aide had second thoughts. Miler rescued from the blaze what would become known a decade later in UFOlogy circles as “the burned memo.” The nine-page document, charred and discolored, was dispatched to private investigator Timothy Cooper in June of 1999, from a gentleman who signed the cover letter as S-1.

It began by noting he was “a retired CIA counterintelligence officer who’d worked for Jim Angleton….This document did not exist officially and has never been disclosed within the agency. AWD [Allen W. Dulles] was very fearful of disclosure….I literally snatched the Directives’ from the fire and have kept them safe from review.”

Only recently have researchers determined the dispatcher was almost certainly Scotty Miler (see Geoff Cruickshank’s yeoman work on this at the link above). So why did Miler preserve the files and in the Nineties decide to release certain things through Tim Cooper? After retiring to a small town called Cuba in New Mexico, Miler became a chapter president of the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, which is how he met fellow member Cooper in 1991. As S-1 explained in another letter to Cooper, in 1982 he became aware that the leakers of certain documents to UFO researchers were actually intelligence-connected disinformation agents. He knew better, and the correspondence indicated he was in favor of legitimate disclosure.

S-1 added: “I feel the time is fast approaching when the files of the Majestic/Jehovah project will be pried loose and the public’s right to know should begin.” Initially around the flying saucer issue, there had been a Pentagon consolidation “overseen by a group of twelve high level military, intelligence and scientific institutions.” It included a “DoD project to back engineer the hardware and research the physics” of downed extraterrestrial craft. MJ-12, as it was called, continued to exist under various names but “became a private concern financed by big money and big science.”

I’ve mentioned in previous substacks that JFK had been briefed about Roswell in 1947 when a freshman Congressman. According to British UFO researcher Timothy Good in his 2007 book Need to Know, as president JFK “expressed a wish to see the alien bodies associated with an alien crash site….According to information received [from a military whistleblower], “the alien bodies were taken to Florida where Kennedy went to see them [at] a medical facility.”

If that really happened, it likely followed on a revelation from Kennedy’s former aide Harald Malmgren shortly before his death in early 2025. Malmgren maintained it was Holloman AFB where JFK made a secret trip to see such bodies. Malmgren told interviewers that he was briefed by ex-CIA official Richard Bissell about the recovery of a fallen alien orb that had been monitoring an American nuclear test in the Pacific at the time of the October 1962 Missile Crisis. (Watch Jesse Michels’ long interview with Malmgren, link above).

That the Operation Blue Gill Triple Prime test occurred has been well documented since Malmgren’s disclosure. JFK’s National Security Memorandum of November 12, 1963 is also now public record, clearly showing that Kennedy had decided to cooperate with the Soviets on ”Outer Space Matters.” That same date - ten days before his assassination - the MJ-12 files released to Cooper contain a memo labeled Top Secret. It’s addressed by the president to the Director of the CIA (John McCone) under “SUBJECT: Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security.”

Parts of this are redacted, but what does appear is JFK’s reference to his plans with the Russians and noting “it would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fides as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. 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.”

Which seems to make a lot of sense from a national security perspective. The president went on to add: “When this data has been sorted out, I would like you to arrange a program of data sharing with NASA where Unknowns are a factor. This will help NASA mission directives in their defensive responsibilities. I would like an interim report on the data review no later than February l, 1964.”

The nine page long “burned” memo that came out of the CIA’s fireplace and into Cooper’s hands was stamped TOP SECRET/MJ-12. Unlike most of the Majestic documents, this one is an original carbon copy with an Eagle watermark characteristic of government files. Various directives were on original onionskin papers, forensically verified red ink of the same time period, and rare “CI” (counterintelligence) stamps. As S-1 [Miler] wrote in his cover letter: “This document did not exist officially and has never been disclosed within the agency….This carbon copy is the only link to MJ-12 and don’t expect any more in the future. Everything is now on computers and there is no existing paper trail to my knowledge.”

It’s purportedly from MJ-1 - former CIA Director Allen Dulles, fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs - addressed to members of MJ-12. It says: “As you must know LANCER [the CIA’s code word for JFK] has made some inquiries regarding our activities which we cannot allow.”

The last page, Tab H, says; “Draft, Directive Regarding Project ENVIRONMENT. When conditions become non-conducive for growth in our environment and Washington cannot be influenced any further, the weather is lacking any percipitation [sic]…it should be wet.” In CIA parlance, “wet affairs” is known to apply to assassinations.

Written in the margin of an earlier release to Cooper was this cryptic message dated November 20, 1963: “Response from Colby - Angleton has MJ directive.” At the time of the Kennedy assassination, William Colby was in charge of the CIA’s Far East Division and playing a significant role in U.S. Vietnam War policy-making. Rising to become CIA Director, it was he who got rid of Angleton and Miler in 1974. Colby was found dead in 1976, eight days after going missing on a solo canoe trip. As Miler wrote to Cooper in 1999: “Remember a few years back when you got the JFK memo. William Colby got fingered in it and someone decided to shut him up before he was questioned about it. Coincidence? No way.”

CIA officer E. Howard Hunt, made famous for his role in the Watergate burglary, provided back-up for what these documents point to. In a deathbed statement to his son, Hunt allegedly said: “Kennedy was killed because he was about to give our most vital secret to the Soviet Union.” Asked by St. John Hunt what that secret was, Hunt had replied: “The alien presence.” He said something similar to his friend Douglas Caddy, a Watergate lawyer who came forward on an episode of the Dark Journalist podcast.

As is now known, after his appointment to the Warren Commission, Allen Dulles consulted on a regular basis with James Angleton, who had run the CI/SIG operation involving Lee Harvey Oswald (and the eventual whistleblowers who called themselves Cantwheel, Serena and S-1.) Assuredly, there were many reasons that Kennedy would have been a target of the CIA and elements of the military as well as the Mob and the right-wing Cuban exiles. But here is the raison d’etre that S-1 (Miler) described in an “important” memo to Tim Cooper: “Simply put, Kennedy would have interfered with MJ-12’s effort to come up with a defense and a plausible explanation to the UFO/EBE [Extra Biological Entity] problem and was too sensitive an issue for investigation even by a president.”

S-1 went on to say: “Everything associated with UFOs has a purpose and so far, no one has figured it out yet. The appearance of UFOs in our century is no accident. Why do you think the UFO Study Group appointed in 1947 was called MAJESTIC? And, why do you think the other project was called JEHOVAH? Put the two together and see for yourself. It is SPIRITUAL.”

On that cryptic note, let’s close our analysis for now. What do readers think Miler’s motive in all this may have been?

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