Kennedy's Last Stand
Kennedy's Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK's Assassination is a 2013 book by Michael Salla, PhD, published by the Exopolitics Institute. It argues that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963 because he had pressed for the declassification of UFO intelligence files held by the Majestic 12 (MJ-12) group and sought to share that material with the Soviet Union — a disclosure plan that senior MJ-12 members regarded as an existential threat to their control of extraterrestrial technology reverse-engineering programs.
Key documents and events
Salla divides Kennedy's pursuit of UFO intelligence into three overlapping phases: tasking CIA director Allen Dulles for information on classified programs, touring military installations as commander in chief, and issuing formal directives for disclosure and data-sharing with the Soviet Union. The following table summarizes the documents and events central to the book's argument.
| Date | Document / Event | Description | Significance | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September–October 1961 | Project Environment directive | MJ-12 directive stating "when conditions become non-conducive for growth, it should be wet" — interpreted by Salla as a pre-authorized assassination order. | Establishes the mechanism by which MJ-12 could authorize elimination of officials threatening its existence.[5] | Salla 2013, ch. on assassination directive |
| Late 1961 – 1962 | George Adamski briefings | Adamski, a contactee holding a U.S. government ordnance pass, visited Kennedy twice, relaying communications from Nordic extraterrestrial contacts — including a warning of an approaching world crisis. | Salla identifies the warned crisis as the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), arguing Kennedy received advance extraterrestrial intelligence.[6][7] | Salla 2013, ch. on Adamski |
| c. 1962 | Homestead Air Force Base visit | Kennedy toured Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, identified by Salla as a storage site for extraterrestrial bodies and artifacts. | Corroborated, Salla argues, by the later Nixon–Jackie Gleason visit to the same base.[8] | Salla 2013, ch. on CIC visits |
| August 3, 1962 | Marilyn Monroe wiretap document | CIA wiretap signed by James Jesus Angleton recording Monroe's knowledge of Kennedy's visits to classified bases where he viewed UFOs; Monroe "had secrets to tell" about "the visit by the President at a secret airbase for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space." | Salla argues Monroe was killed the next day to prevent a press conference revealing this information, and that Robert Kennedy visited her twice that day to retrieve her diary on behalf of the CIA.[9][10][11] | Salla 2013, ch. on Monroe |
| November 12, 1963 | NSAM 271 | Officially declassified memorandum instructing NASA administrator James Webb to develop "a program of substantive cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space." | Salla calls this an "end run" around the CIA and MJ-12, designed to force UFO-related technical information into a NASA channel that would reach the Soviets.[12][13][14] | Salla 2013, ch. on Nov 12 documents |
| November 12, 1963 | "Burned memo" (UFO letter to CIA) | Top-secret memorandum to CIA director John McCone: "Classification Review of All UFO Intelligence Files Affecting National Security," requesting review of "high threat UFO cases" and "a program of data sharing with NASA where unknowns are a factor," with an interim report due February 1, 1964. | Authenticated at "medium to high" reliability by Robert Wood and the Majestic Documents team. Salla treats it as a concrete disclosure timeline targeting Kennedy's second term.[15][16] | Salla 2013, ch. on burned memo |
| November 12, 1963 | Kennedy–Khrushchev hotline conversation | Alleged NSA intercept (Majestic document) of a US-USSR hotline call in which Kennedy told Khrushchev: "I have also instructed our CIA to provide me with full disclosure on the phantom aspects and classified programs in which I can better assess the UFO situation." | Contradicts the conventional account that the hotline (installed August 1963) went unused for years; Salla argues it was used three months after installation to coordinate UFO file sharing.[17][18] | Salla 2013, ch. on hotline |
| November 20, 1963 | Angleton annotation on burned memo | Handwritten note on the Kennedy-to-McCone UFO memo recording that William Colby told McCone: "Angleton has MJ-12 directive" — two days before the assassination. | Salla reads this as the direct link between the "burned memo" and the Project Environment assassination directive, implicating James Jesus Angleton as the operative who activated it.[19] | Salla 2013, ch. on assassination directive |
| Early November 1963 | Eugene Dinkins warning | U.S. Army cryptologist stationed in Metz, France, warned Robert Kennedy and the UN press corps of an assassination plot against the president, tracing the intelligence chatter to September 1963. | Dinkins was committed to Walter Reed Hospital; his files were withheld by the CIA and ignored by the Warren Commission and the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations. Released in the 2017–2018 National Archives JFK file dump.[20][21] | Salla 2013, ch. on evidence |
MJ-12 factions and the assassination
Salla describes the MJ-12 group as internally divided between a pro-disclosure faction aligned with Kennedy and an anti-disclosure faction entrenched in the CIA clandestine services and the military-industrial complex, with James Jesus Angleton identified as the operative who activated the Project Environment assassination directive through CIA counterintelligence.
The book also implicates Lyndon B. Johnson as an MJ-12 asset involved in both Kennedy's assassination and the earlier 1949 death of James Forrestal, Kennedy's mentor, who Salla argues was killed for attempting similar disclosures.
The Fourth Reich connection
A substantial portion of the book addresses what Salla calls the "Fourth Reich" dimension of the UFO cover-up. Citing Joseph P. Farrell's research on postwar Nazi networks and documents released in the 2017–2018 National Archives dump of JFK assassination files — including a CIA document showing a former SS trooper claiming Adolf Hitler was alive in Colombia in 1955 — Salla argues that the survival of a covert Nazi program in Antarctica was among the secrets Kennedy's disclosure plan would have exposed.
Salla contends that the Apollo program served as a funding conduit for the German secret space program, with former Nazi officers Wernher von Braun (director of Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960–1970) and Kurt Debus (director of Kennedy Space Center, 1962–1974) controlling its technical execution. After the assassination, Salla argues, the original twelve-member American MJ-12 group was absorbed into an international consortium — which he elsewhere identifies as connected to the deep state — by 1969, bringing British and German corporate interests into joint control of extraterrestrial technology programs.
Sheehan and Michels (2025)
Attorney Danny Sheehan, in a 2025 discussion with Jesse Michels, described the outlines of Salla's thesis: that Kennedy contacted John McCone to demand a briefing on the UFO subject, intending to share the information with Khrushchev as part of a proposed joint US-Soviet space program. According to Sheehan, when Kennedy demanded the briefing, "Bissell and the other guys tell Dulles about it" — keeping the already-fired Allen Dulles informed and in functional control of the classified programs from his Georgetown brownstone. Michels summarized: "He's aware of UFOs and trying to do some joint space program with Khrushchev around that."
Evidentiary basis and broader framework
Salla's evidentiary case rests primarily on the Majestic Documents — a set of alleged leaked government documents whose authenticity is disputed — and on analysis of officially declassified records. The documents bearing most weight in Salla's argument (the Kennedy-to-McCone UFO memo, the Project Environment assassination directive, and the NSA hotline transcript) carry a "medium to high" authenticity rating from Robert Wood and his Majestic Documents research team, a standard Salla endorses.
The book is part of Salla's broader Exopolitics framework and cross-references his later works, including Insiders Reveal Secret Space Programs and Extraterrestrial Alliances and Antarctica's Hidden History.
60th anniversary webinar (2023)
On November 22, 2023 — the 60th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination — Salla released a two-part free public webinar originally recorded November 22, 2020, presenting the core argument of the book to a general audience and updating it with documents released in the 2017–2018 National Archives JFK file dumps. In the webinar, Salla states that the Kennedy assassination chatter picked up by Army cryptologist Eugene Dinkins in September 1963 stemmed directly from Kennedy's UN address proposing joint U.S.-Soviet space cooperation — speech that anti-communist factions within the national security apparatus viewed as treason — and that Dinkins traced the plot to that month precisely. Salla also identifies Sergei Khrushchev's published account of his father's acceptance of Kennedy's September 20, 1963 UN space-cooperation offer on November 11, 1963 — one day before Kennedy issued NSAM 271 and the CIA UFO-sharing memo — as the crucial triggering event that prompted MJ-12 to activate the Project Environment directive.