As former Ambassador Harald Malmgren told it, his adventures in 1962 would have put to shame the young Jack Ryan of fiction.
Before his death on Feb. 13 at age 89, Malmgren said in multiple interviews that in 1962, when he was 27 with a doctorate in economics, he was personally recruited by President John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy. He said he was then immediately assigned to serve as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s personal liaison to the National Security Council. As McNamara’s representative, he faced down Gen. Curtis LeMay in a Pentagon war room at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, averting a nuclear catastrophe.
Malmgren further asserted that he had held an unlimited Q security clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, and that so empowered, he had investigated on Kennedy’s behalf a nonhuman unidentified flying object, knocked down by the Oct. 26, 1962, Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test and recovered by the AEC. Malmgren said he went to Los Alamos, New Mexico, and personally handled UFO pieces. Malmgren also said he was “an accepted inner circle person” in the Kennedy family, close with Sargent Shriver, the president’s brother-in-law.
Malmgren carried an air of credibility because he held influential positions during the Nixon and Ford administrations, albeit in the specialized area of trade policy. From 1972 to 1975, he served as the Senate-confirmed deputy special representative for trade negotiations, with the rank of ambassador. After that, he worked for decades as a consultant, lobbyist, think tank expert, college professor, and lecturer.
Despite that respectable pedigree, my four-month journalistic investigation found that Malmgren’s claims about his purported high-level 1962-64 associations and extraordinary tasks were brazen fabrications. I have now published on my free blog, Mirador, a 20,000-word article comparing 10 specific Malmgren claims to the historical record, embedding much of the primary contemporary documentation that I uncovered. None of Malmgren’s marvelous claims emerged intact from this scrutiny.
In response to my FOIA request, the National Archives and Records Administration declassified key documents from Malmgren’s 1970-71 FBI files. I also obtained Malmgren’s complete Official Personnel File, the voluminous documentary record of his federal jobs, including federal job applications and histories that Malmgren himself signed and certified in 1963, 1964, and 1970.
The documents dissolved multiple key cornerstones of Malmgren’s tales. They show that Malmgren actually spent 1962-64 working as an unglamorous economics researcher and analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a think tank and Pentagon contractor.
They also show that on Aug. 25, 1971, Malmgren signed and certified under penalties of law a detailed Standard Form 86, Security Investigation Data for Sensitive Position, which the FBI used in a field investigation related to the clearance he needed for his work in the Office of the Special Trade Representative.
Question 27 on that form required Malmgren to list every time he had been the subject of a background investigation by any federal agency. Malmgren listed four security-clearance background checks, the first being for a 1962 top secret clearance granted by a Navy component — perfectly consistent with his true work history as an IDA economist. However, Malmgren did not list any AEC security clearance — the key credential claim in his 2024-25 UFO-alien stories. Omitting such an impressive credential from his Form 86 would have been absurdly self-defeating. It would also have been a federal crime to attempt to conceal such a material fact.
It was Malmgren’s 2024-25 claim to have held an AEC clearance that was the lie.
None of the documents show any evidence of association between Malmgren and Kennedy or his National Security Council, or with Bundy, or with McNamara personally — all great resume-builders had they been real. Nor could professional archivists or I find such evidence at the NARA facilities in Washington and its Maryland suburbs or at the pertinent NARA-affiliated presidential libraries.
Shriver’s son, Mark Kennedy Shriver; the head of the Shriver Foundation, Lucy di Rosa; and his biographer, Scott Stossel, all knew nothing of Malmgren. Kai Bird, author of an acclaimed biography on Bundy and his brother, told me, “Sorry, I never heard of him.” Sheldon M. Stern, the chief historian from 1977 to 2000 at the Kennedy Presidential Library and the author of three books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, told me, “Malmgren’s claim to have been appointed as ‘liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK’ is ludicrous. There is no such record at the JFK Library on tape or on paper.”
Tall tales such as those told by Malmgren are not innocent fun.
Malmgren hijacked the personas of real people to serve as characters in his self-glorifying fantasies — McNamara, Bundy, Shriver, and LeMay, among others. He put words into the mouths of these men that they never said and imputed to them actions that they never took. Richard Bissell, a leader of the early CIA, suffered the worst misuse at Malmgren’s hands, as Malmgren attributed to him corroboration of various unsubstantiated UFO-alien stories, including a tale of an alien survivor of the 1947 Roswell incident.
Some of the Malmgren claims are now receiving wide exposure in certain quarters. A final interview, issued as a 3-hour, 49-minute video by YouTube channel owner Jesse Michels on April 22, drew over 650,000 views in less than a month. Ross Coulthart of the NewsNation network has repeatedly and enthusiastically promoted Malmgren’s claimed credentials and adventure tales without any evident attempt at serious fact checking. Others are similarly engaged.
In a recent controversy over Malmgren’s Wikipedia profile, Michels suggested that it was “shameless” for editors to challenge Malmgren’s claims because Malmgren “can’t defend himself.” The premise is absurd, antithetical to fundamental requirements of historical research and investigative journalism. Malmgren’s claims, if true, would have the most profound public policy implications, including his claims that the U.S. government gained possession of nonhuman craft in 1933, 1947, 1962, and perhaps other times, with the corollary that the government has lied about this for decades. That would be important, if true. When the allegations are that serious, the credibility of the person making them is the first test — and it deserves serious scrutiny before such claims are publicly embraced and widely disseminated.
Yet, this is far from the first time that the credibility of persons making similar claims has collapsed under a modicum of sustained scrutiny. I have personally investigated three other such cases, all of which proved beyond a reasonable doubt to be hoaxes, including the shoddy “Trinity UFO crash” hoax that ufology icon Jacques Vallee continues to promote. The enthusiastic audience for exciting made-up stories appears to outstrip the demand for the products of tedious, time-consuming fact-checks.
I’d be delighted if it were definitively revealed that the government actually has alien craft squirreled away, although I would also be very unhappy that officials had lied about it for so long. But if a claimant cannot produce old-fashioned evidence, such as contemporary documents of unquestionable authenticity, videos of impeccable provenance, hardware, or the like, he had better at least be able to prove, for starters, that he was who and where he claimed to be.
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Malmgren flunked that test. Badly.
Those who promote his fabrications do a disservice both to their audiences and to the real people whom he cast as cardboard cutouts in his egocentric fan fiction.
Douglas Dean Johnson is an independent journalist who investigates things that interest him and publishes the results on a free blog, Mirador, and on X and Bluesky as @ddeanjohnson.
