Mike Bara may be knowledgable regarding NASA and Ancient Aliens but he doesn’t know Beans about the Kennedy assassination.
If you have ever watched Ancient Aliens on the History Channel you’ve seen Mike Bara along with other experts giving their opinions on how aliens arrived on earth in the far away past and advanced human evolution and technology. It makes for entertaining television and the show makes it apparent that sometime in ancient human history there is evidence of what appears to be high technology and engineering being used at a time when civilization was supposed to be in a primitive state. So the Star People came and gave us free advice on how to climb down from the trees and into the savanna.
Bara is a retired engineer and has written numerous books on this subject and NASA space programs. Most of his books bears the “Ancient Aliens” title (here, there and everywhere!). He hosts a 6 day a week channel on Youtube and is a conspiratorialist with some reservations. For example he is a supporter of the Apollo Moon landings but he swerves into the John Kennedy Jr. conspiracy that he faked his death to escape being murdered by the Deep State (a popular theory among the Q followers). To someday reappear like the Second Coming of Jesus. And do what precisely? So Bara is reasonable and then sometimes not.
Mike Bara’s main thesis in this work is that President Kennedy had knowledge of contact with Aliens and was planning to share this knowledge with the Soviets as a peace entreaty. This in turn sent the President on a collation course with the Deep State and ended his life. Farfetched to say the least.
It is interesting that while Bara does conclude there was a conspiracy in the death of JFK and resorts to using the same old tired arguments of the Lone Nut crowd. Which in turn, harkens from the easily discredited Warren Commission Report. Bara follows the well trodden path of Oswald being a good marksman to the Magic Bullet Theory. I shall explore this in greater detail below and show why he is wrong on all of these matters.
MJ-12 Documents
One of the controversial issues in UFO research is the release of alleged documents about the MJ-12 group. One day in 1984 a UFO researcher Jaimie Shandera checked the mail and found a package containing a set of microfilm documents from an anonymous source. The Majestic 12 legend was born and launched thousands of arguments both pro and con. Now that the dust has settled down a bit, the MJ-12 docs are considered a hoax. (For more on this you can check out Seamas Coogan’s Magnus Opus, JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax. LINK)
Mike Bara seems reluctant to let it go. As he said on page 38, “I am less concerned with the question of authenticity than I am with the content.” He should be! He ponders what if the documents have traces of truth in them (the 12 members were real men at least) and then precedes thru the chapter to discuss connections to the documents as if they were real. Such as he does on page 42 when he suggests that JFK knew of aliens. “But if Kennedy was taken out of the loop on what MJ-12 knew, how then was he even aware of an alien presence?” Bara wants to believe, regardless. Most of chapter 2 flows like this and the rest of the book will feature similar confusing episodes.
Nevertheless, Bara’s reasoning that JFK was aware of aliens wanting to share this with a Cold War enemy ultimately set in motion his death, is totally absurd. Kennedy had a multitude of enemies that hated him worse than speculating about flying saucers.
The Magic Bullet Theory one more time…
Also known as the “Magic Bullshit Theory” was developed when the Warren Commission discovered they had more bullets flying in Dealey Plaza than Oswald could have fired. So their lawyers created the fiction of one bullet wounding two men. The problem was the shooter was firing from a high elevation while Kennedy’s wounds were low to high for the single bullet to allegedly traverse his body and hit Governor Connelly, besides the trajectory angles being incorrect. It was a political solution to the problem. There could only be one gunman.
But there is much wrong with it and too much to go into here and Bara’s response to it is no different than what a standard Warren Report defender would say. Probably the most complete rebuttal comes from the testimony collected by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in 1996. Namely the testimony under oath of four autopsy witnesses. They were FBI special agents James Sibert and Francis O’Neill, and autopsy technicians James Jenner and Paul O’Conner. All four men testify witnessing at the autopsy the sounding probe (flexible aluminum rod—used to trace bullets through bodies) inserted into Kennedy’s back. The probe went a few inches in and downward. It was not a pass-through. So there is no exiting bullet through Kennedy’s throat. Bara has shown in his sloppy research that he knows nothing about this and does great disservice to his readers by ignoring this important fact.
Likewise for his handling for the CE-399 the so called “pristine” bullet found on Connelly’s stretcher and was alleged to have passed through two men breaking bones along the way. Of course it is not pristine and shows marked flattening on one side. Bara believes this bullet could have done all the damage it did, especially to Connelly breaking three ribs and fracturing the radial bone in the wrist and still remain largely undeformed.
As I stated in one of my posts regarding this issue: “The Warren Commission in 1964 tasked ballistic experts doctors Dolce and Light to conduct tests on cadavers using Oswald’s rifle at the U. S. Army Edgewood Arsenal. As Dr. Dolce stated in an interview in 1986, each of the ten test fired bullets were in his words, “markably deformed.” Dr. Dolce was not called to give testimony to the Warren Commission and his findings were buried in a report, published in March of 1965, that was classified “confidential” for 8 years before being placed in the NARA.”
Mostly likely CD-399 was a low velocity bullet with not enough grains in the shell hence the shallow impact. It’s the one that fell out. Bara while writing of the magical properties of CD-399, failed to mention the numerous bullet fragments found in Governor Connelly’s body and also in the interior of the limousine. One fragment he carried in his left thigh for the rest of his life. As can be plainly seen, CD-399 is not fragmented.
Officer Tippit as Badge Man
This has to be the most unfortunate part of the book. In my study of the Tippet killing I have never found anything that suggests he was the grassy knoll shooter. Bara hangs his theory on the scant evidence of a Jack White digital reinterpretation of the Mary Moorman photo. The famous Badge Man image cloaked in shadows on the grassy knoll. There are various versions of this online and they all have one thing in common. They are blurry. Yet somehow Mike Bara finds enough data in the image to confidently state it was Tippit there and he was firing the fatal shot.
Due to Tippit’s movements and behavior that day, Tippit did not have the time to arrive in Dealey Plaza in order to assassinate the President. He would need to be there early, at least by noon. The President was killed at 12:30. At noon Tippit was called to Hodge’s SuperMart to arrest a woman for shoplifting. He was 7 miles away from Dealey Plaza at that point. He would need to drive the woman back to headquarters to be booked, wasting valuable time if he was going to be an assassin. No witnesses saw him in the Dealey Plaza location.
Some have suggested that Tippit may have been involved in the outer edges of the conspiracy. His actions on the 22nd were peculiar as documented by Myers, Armstrong, McBride etc. Tippit that morning was racing here and there. At one point he rushed into the Tiptop record store and made a frantic call to someone who never picked up. Whatever it was he did not display the actions of a normal police officer on patrol. He was acting nervous and agitated. Was his job to meet up with Oswald and take him out? That seems far more plausible than looking at a blurry Photoshopped image and coming to a conclusion.
Officer J. D. Tippit as Badge Man is another poorly researched area of Bara’s book and a huge insult to the Tippit family. All Bara has is a blurry picture. Even the minimal facts I have presented here are not in Bara’s book. Whatever Tippit’s involvement was that fateful day, he does not deserve this.
Conclusion
Overall, the Kennedy assassination chapters in Ancient Aliens & JFK are flawed. The rest, including the secret space program, moon landings, etc, are competently researched and presented. Sometimes as a researcher you can get into fire fighter mode. So much incorrect information flows around the subject you are researching that the need arises to stamp it out. It’s a constant process of reeducating and setting the record straight. Mike Bara’s book is an example of that. Obviously, this is not a serious look into who JFK’s killer was or other aspects of the assassination. The absurd notion that JFK had inside info on Aliens and what they are doing on earth is a joke. Bara is trading on the Ancient Aliens TV show name for traction. It’s a pot boiler. Reader beware.
Notes
p.100, Oswald was court martialed twice in the Marines. Not three times as Bara wrote.
p.103, James Jesus Angleton was Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence. Not the Deputy Director of the CIA as Bara states. This error implies Angleton was #2 at the CIA. He was not.
p.107, Bara calls Oswald a good marksman. He was starting out but faded. His first marksman test was excellent. His score was lowered in the second test and barely qualified in the third test. After the Marines during the Russia phase, when Oswald went hunting with friends he was loaned the shotgun—for obvious reasons.
A reviewer on Amazon S. Harris, charged that some pages and at least one whole chapter of Ancient Aliens & JFK, are cut and pasted from Bara’s other books such as Dark Mission and Who Mourns For Apollo. As Harris said “Self-plagiarism is no crime…” yes, just the habit of a lazy writer. As I said previously, a pot boiler. (Highly recommended you read the review on Amazon. The reviewer points to other factual errors not mentioned in my review.)
Researcher Jones Harris once told me his theory that the grassy knoll shooter was Roscoe White. Roscoe was former military intelligence. He was seen walking around Dealey Plaza wearing a Dallas police officers uniform but not wearing the required hat. But he wasn’t officially a police officer. He wouldn’t attend police training till early December of 1963. He was working for them as a clerk at this time. As told to me by Harris, only those people that had completed training would be allowed to wear the uniform of the Dallas police department. Could Roscoe White be Badge Man? I suppose it makes for a better story to pin the crime on a more well known man rather than one who is not.
Sources
Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer by Jack Myers. A very detailed and accurate account on the Tippit murder and Tippit’s movements the day of the assassination.
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/why-officer-tippit-stopped-his-killer
John Armstrong’s detailed account of the movements of J. D. Tippit on 11/22/63.
JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Introduction by Seamas Coogan. All nine articles are listed on this page.
Briefer account here by Philip Coppens:
https://www.eyeofthepsychic.com/majestic12/
Book.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1939149991/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
