I stumbled onto this book because of the Kennedy assassination files that were recently made public. There was a document cross-referencing Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy. Although not mentioned directly, this book came up on Google as part of a random search for more documents of that nature. I think this book is very well written and helps to fill in a few blanks. It ties in well with other good books on the subject of her murder. I found the process of deduction to be natural and logical. Glad I found it!

More important historically than most people would think.

Best investigative journalism to date on what really happened...

I have to say that I wasn't too surprised at the link that was made between Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys...or why she was murdered.

The CIA document contained in the book "seals the deal" for me.

So far, this book is excellent...and definitely needs to be read by more people so that they can understand to what lengths some people were willing to go to keep the secrecy going...

A small book, and easy to read! Very well written I thought! And I learned a few things about the MURDER that I never knew! Dear Marilyn, you were one in a million!

If Marilyn Monroe were alive today, she would be in her mid-eighties. I like to think she would still be casting her indefinable spell over the men of our generation. Sadly, Marilyn Monroe is remembered mostly through her pictures; the woman herself continues to elude description.

Unlike her biographers, Donald Burleson does not try to bring Marilyn back to life for future generations. Nor does he leave room for the sentimental claim that she was a tragic suicide. Shortly after she died on August 4, 1962, the Assistant Los Angeles Coroner Thomas Naguchi (who later earned the nickname "Coroner to the Stars") performed an autopsy on Monroe and found enough pentobarbital and chloral hydrate to kill scores of people. The concentration of these fast-acting drugs in her bloodstream were simply too great to have been taken in pill form. Time simply would not have permitted her to ingest the volume of drugs that were found in her body. Marilyn Monroe died from a lethal injection. She was murdered, and the murderer took the syringe. There can be no other explanation.

Burleson (a college professor and mathematician) devotes his energy to the question of motives for murder, and focuses on the well-documented affairs that she had with President John Kennedy and his brother Robert. But how would that lead to a motive for murder? The most likely explanation is that the President may have divulged state secrets to Monroe during the course of their affair, and that people surrounding Kennedy concluded that she had become a security risk. Speculation exists, for example, that Monroe knew about the plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Monroe was also known to have kept a diary. The diary was recovered from her house the day after she died. It disappeared within weeks - from an evidence safe that showed no signs of external tampering. Shortly before her death, Monroe had in fact disclosed to friends that she was about to "tell all."

Burleson offers another explanation - one that does not compete, necessarily, with the conjecture regarding Castro, but offers a compelling motive unearthed by Burleson during the course of his own investigations. He establishes the connection that Marilyn had to stories of UFOs that went back as far as July, 1947, when a "flying disk" reportedly crashed in Southern New Mexico near the town of Roswell. Burleson offers the hypothesis that a CIA memorandum, unearthed after a persistent campaign of FOIA requests, acknowledges Monroe's access to information concerning the existence of extraterrestrial artifacts long denied by our government. His closely reasoned analysis (too detailed to outline here) follows two lines of inquiry:

The first is the CIA memorandum itself. Prepared "3 August 1962" (the day before Monroe's death), the memo contains the summary of a wiretap of Dorothy Kilgallen (a Hollywood journalist) and her friend, Howard Rothberg, obtained pursuant to a wiretap of Monroe's phone calls. During an earlier phone conversation with Monroe, Kilgallen learned that Monroe had " .. secrets to tell, no doubt, arising from her trists (sic) with the President and the Attorney General." Kilgallen offers that one of the secrets was " .. the visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space." That is known to be Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson AFB) in Ohio. She adds that she learned of " .. a secret effort by US and UK governments to identify the origins of crashed spacecraft and dead bodies." The memo goes on to say, "Kilgallen believed the story may have come from a New Mexico story in the late Forties," a reference to Roswell.

Burleson's second line of inquiry is, in my opinion, a work of brilliant scholarship. One of Burleson's students made the original discovery. She called to his attention a vaguely discernible smudge at an awkward place on the document, and asked if Burleson knew what might have caused it. The "smudge" ultimately yielded to the application of sophisticated image-enhancement software, and revealed a reference to "MJ-12," the super-secret organization formed by President Truman after the first UFO reports in the Forties, but whose existence has always been denied by government since rumors of its existence first surfaced more than sixty years ago. The imprint is possibly the result of a "bleed-through" from a document that occupied the adjacent position for many years in a long-neglected government file. Burleson's investigations also turn up a connection with Gen. George Schulgen, head of Intelligence at Wright Field in the late Forties; and reference to a "Project Moon Dust," whose existence has also been denied.

This is a complex book. If Marilyn Monroe's death had been simply an untimely suicide, it would be enough to speculate on reasons she might have had to be despondent. But her death was not a suicide. This book provides an undeniable link between Marilyn, John Kennedy, and at least one visit to Wright Field to inspect "things from outer space." It shows beyond any doubt that fear of Marilyn Monroe penetrated deeply into government and caused widespread concern. It provides the missing motive to explain her murder. It is a fascinating piece of detective work and scholarship.

David M. Hooker
Tucson, Arizona

I have to say, I was Marilyn Monroe , you are so right, that was the big secret, the ufo's. I am very very happy that this has come out and I just want the writer of this book to know how right you are!!!!