Harald Malmgren (1935-2025): his self-glorifying fictions versus his documented prosaic history

Dean

Member
Harald Malmgren, PhD (July 13, 1935-February 13, 2025) had a respectable career as an economist. During the Nixon and Ford administrations he had great influence in the specialized area of trade policy, and served as Deputy Special Representative for Trade Negotiations, with the rank of "ambassador." After that he worked for decades as a consultant, lobbyist, expert for various think tanks, writer on economic issues, and professor/instructor at universities.

However, during the 21st century Malmgren progressively constructed an alternative history for himself, in which he played key roles in many matters of world-shaking import. In this version of his life, he was "a senior advisor to four presidents" (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford), conducting unrecorded secret missions for several of them. He was a behind-the-scenes intergenerational, international powerbroker. He was the repository of deep secrets pertaining to extraterrestrial visitation and government possession of nonhuman technology. Indeed, according to popular YouTuber Jesse Michels, whose 3.8-hour video of Malmgren's last interview ("I Touched a UFO!") has drawn about 700,000 views in five weeks, "Harald is a hero who saved the world (and more than once)."

Malmgren claimed that in 1962 he was personally recruited by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, was immediately made a key personal aide to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and was designated by McNamara as the secretary's personal liaison to the National Security Council. Malmgren said as McNamara's personal agent, he directly faced off against USAF Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay at a critical moment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when LeMay wanted to launch a punitive nuclear strike on sites in the Soviet Union-- an intervention that Malmgren promoters insist prevented a nuclear catastrophe. Malmgren said that in 1962 he held a "Q" clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and that thus empowered, he personally investigated for President Kennedy a nonhuman UFO knocked down by a U.S. nuclear test in October, 1962, with parts recovered by the AEC. He said that McNamara put him in charge of developing a ballistic missile defense system. Quite a heady chain of adventures for a 27-year-old economist!

I am Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent journalist. In an investigation extending over four months, I compared some of Malmgren's key claims to documents that I obtained from various components of the National Archives and Records Administration, the Library of Congress, and other places. These included confidential reports that the FBI prepared for background clearances in 1970 and 1971, which contained detailed recitations of Malmgren's earlier jobs and previous security clearances, signed and certified by Malmgren himself under penalty of law. (I was able to get these key FBI documents declassified on an expedited basis.) I also obtained Malmgren's complete Office Personnel File, the voluminous documentary record of his federal jobs, including federal job applications and histories that Malmgren signed and certified in 1963, 1964, and 1970.

The documents dissolved multiple key cornerstones of Malmgren's tales-- for example, his claim to have held a Q clearance. They showed that Malmgren actually spent 1962-64 working as an unglamorous economics researcher and analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a think-tank Pentagon contractor. He was never an "advisor" to President Kennedy, much less a Q-cleared UFO investigator for JFK and the NSC.

In my 20,000-word initial article published on May 20, 2025, "Harald Malmgren: real-world history vs. grandiose fantasy," I compared Malmgren's true career history with the record supported by documents. I examined ten specific Malmgren claims (selected from a much larger number of dubious tales), as follows:

1. That Harald Malmgren, upon obtaining his doctorate from Oxford University in 1961, was such a singular star that Cornell University offered him a newly endowed chair in mathematics and engineering, thereby allowing him to skip starting out as a lowly "assistant professor," but rather "start at the top."

2. That Malmgren "was one of the first people on Earth to break the four-minute mile, after Roger Bannister," and "could repeatedly break the four-minute mile in his 20s."

3. That McGeorge Bundy, National Security Advisor to President Kennedy, called Malmgren in 1962 to recruit him to work as one of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's group of close associates, known informally but widely as the "whiz kids."

4. That Malmgren's real-world employment starting in July 1962 as an economics researcher and analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a Pentagon-affiliated private think tank, was merely "a paperwork formality," and that he was actually immediately empowered to serve as McNamara's personal liaison to Bundy and to the National Security Council, and spent his days working on missions of the highest sensitivity, such as calming down the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. Malmgren said: "I was appointed liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK– I mean, pretty critical job."

5. That in 1962, Malmgren held a "Q" clearance from the Atomic Energy Commission, allowing him access to nuclear secrets, and empowering him to lead the White House investigation into the details of a October 1962 nonhuman-craft (UFO) knockdown and recovery.

6. That Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara made Malmgren a leader in developing plans for a ballistic missile defense system, and that Malmgren's ideas were a major factor in the development of missile-defense thinking.

7. That Malmgren was an expert on nuclear issues, later closely associated on such matters with famous nuclear strategist Herman Kahn.

8. That Malmgren had a close relationship with Richard Bissell, Jr., one of the storied leaders of the early CIA, who imparted to Malmgren many amazing secrets of nonhuman visitation and other things.

9. That Malmgren was "part of the clan" and "an accepted inner-circle person" in the eminent Kennedy family, due to a close relationship with President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, who "talked to me all the time."

10. That Malmgren was "senior advisor to four presidents."

Besides uncovering documents that shed light on many of these claims, I communicated directly with persons who were in a position to evaluate some of them. For example, with respect to claim no. 9, I communicated with Sargent Shriver's son, Mark Kennedy Shriver; the head of the Shriver Foundation, Lucy di Rosa; and Sargent's biographer, Scott Stossel; none of the three knew anything of Malmgren. With respect to claim no. 3, pertaining to McGeorge Bundy, Kai Bird, author of an acclaimed biography on McGeorge Bundy and his brother, told me, "Sorry, I never heard of him."

I intend to soon publish soon a sidebar article dealing specifically with Malmgren's tale of facing off against General Curtis LeMay in a Pentagon war room at the height of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Sheldon M. Stern, former chief historian (1977-2000) at the Kennedy Presidential Library and 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."

In a recent controversy over edits to Malmgren's Wikipedia profile (a matter in which I was not involved), Jesse Michels suggested that it was "shameless" for Wikipedia editors to delete various Malmgren claims, stating, "This man served his country for decades and just passed away. He can't defend himself." In my view, the premise is absurd, antithetical to fundamental requirements of historical research and investigative journalism. 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– Richard Bissell, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Curtis LeMay, and Sargent Shriver, among others. Malmgren put words into the mouths of these men that they never said, and imputed to them actions that they never took. Each of these men "served his country for decades," at least by his own lights. Malmgren manufactured fan fiction about these men only long after they were dead – when they "can't defend" themselves against Malmgren's counterfeits. But the claims will not go unchallenged.

Moreover, Malmgren's most "interesting" claims demand scrutiny because if any were true they 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. When the allegations are that serious, the credibility of the person making them is the first test--and it deserves serious vetting before such claims are publicly embraced and widely disseminated.

On May 21, 2025, I published a separate article examining the theory that the Bluegill Triple Prime high-altitude nuclear test of October 26, 1962, knocked down a nonhuman UFO. Harald Malmgren attached himself to this story in 2024 and adapted it for his own narrative purposes, but the theory itself goes back to 2022 or earlier. I set aside the clearly bogus Malmgren overlay, and examined the evidence that proponents of the theory had previously cited for such a UFO event, consisting primarily of interpretations of three movies of the test, as well as certain entries in logs of ships in the Navy instrument-recovery fleet. My examination and provisional conclusions are found in "Bluegill Triple Prime: Did a nuclear test knock down a nonhuman craft in 1962?"
 
Last edited:
I am Douglas Dean Johnson, an independent journalist.
Welcome Dean. Just read your article on Malmgren. Your article sorta highlights how easy it is to make claims and how much work is needed to refute them. In the UFO, cryptid, paranormal types worlds claims are often treated as facts and the burden of proof gets shifted from the claiment to those asking for evidence of the claim.

I also used your debunk of the Trinity UFO case for a number of threads, useful stuff.
 
This reminds me a of another guy. Anyone remember Walter O'Brien? A staggering genius, and the head of a huge private security organization.

From his newer website, which is still up:

https://www.scorpioncomputerservices.com/index
Since its founding in 1988, Scorpion's team of world class experts have worked with clients globally across all industries to add real, measurable value to mission-critical initiatives from planning, to implementation, to execution. Scorpion's senior management has a collective knowledge of more than 413 technologies, 210 years in IT, and has completed 1,360 projects to date. Scorpion has conceived many unique technology inventions including ScenGen (in use by U.S. Military) and WinLocX (sold to Microsoft) and is one of the world's leading experts in the application of computer science and artificial intelligence.

In 2014 he went on a PR tour when his TV show - Scorpion - a bit of Real Person Fiction, was first starting. Lots of local radio talk shows.

It turned out that everything he said about himself was a lie. Not too many years before the TV show he'd been working at an ordinary job in an ordinary company in S. Cal where he had a reputation as a "head case" and was eventually laid off.

There's so much more to this story, which I'd collected together on a MB that no longer exists. He had an entire fantastical life story starting as an adolescent when he hacked into U.S. government computers and his rural home in Ireland was raided by U.S. Homeland Security forces. (Years before that agency existed.)

The interesting part of the story was his relationship to the Media reporting on him. His story about his International Organization was believed without question. And in subsequent months the reporters who had been fooled stubbornly held onto the story.

Well, maybe he exaggerated a bit here and there...
O'Brien has some detractors who allege...


No, you idiots! Everything he told you was made up. There is no such organization. Suffering Succotash. All you had to do was check.

And he had passionate followers among the ordinary folk... who bravely stood up to the lies being told about their Great Hero - the Magnificent Walter O'Brien.


The lesson: All you have to do is tell a story about yourself that's entertaining... and instantly your lies are the Truth. And the people who tell you the real truth about your hero are sour faced "detractors."

A mirrored version of O'Brien's original Scorpion website, dating to before the TV show, when he was still a random crackpot.

Scorpion Computer Services (©) Copyright 1997-2002
http://www.gbppr.net/scorpion/

Scorpion Computer Services was founded in the mid eighties by Walter O'Brien - then and now known by his Net or Hacker name of "The Scorpion". It was a company based on the fact that the Scorpion had a natural affinity for understanding the logic behind the early machines and the fact that he was in the right place at the right time, just like Bill Gates. From the age of eleven the Scorpion painstakingly taught himself all there was to know about the fledgeling computer industry in Ireland. By the age of thirteen he had proved himself as a competent programmer with excellent communication abilities . By fourteen, diagnosed as child prodigy and using the revenue generated from contracting IT support to local companies (investments & insurance), he managed to fund his own research into Artificial Intelligence, Speech Recognition and Robotics. By sixteen the customer base had swelled, his research was noted by Hitachi for fifth generation computers and he had a full prospectus for tutoring courses in all the major software applications in use at the time.

Today the company involves over fifty administrators, accountants, suppliers and legal staff and one hundred and fifty of the worlds best consultants in every major field of computing (Networks, Hardware, Storage, Encryption, Security, Robotics, Space Exploration, Fighter Jet Systems, Atomic Engineering, Stock Control, Accountancy, Databases, Virtual Reality, Localisation, Military Ops, Missile Guidance Systems, Autonomous Vehicles (Tanks) etc.). Today, Scorpion Computer Services operates as an extension of it's founder's expertise, it provides services from repairing a child's old 8086 PC or Home computer Joystick to consulting to the largest computer companies, banks and government agencies in the world. The Scorpion's bandwidth is almost infinite (See I.A. Philosophy) which allows him to keep his feet very much on the ground and be personally involved to some degree in every single project.

Needless to say, this organization was nothing more than a fantasy.

https://www.techdirt.com/tag/walter-obrien/
O'Brien also leaves out the fact — as seen on his own LinkedIn page, that he was a QA guy at The Capital Group from 2002 to through March of 2009 — at which point, in the storyline, we're supposed to be believing that he was saving the world at Scorpion Computer Services.
[QA stands for Quality Assurance. The process of ensuring that software or products meet quality standards before they are released to the public.]


Contact Info listed on this original Scorpion website
Walter's current contact details:
California Branch
Scorpion Computer Services
3640 S. Sepulveda Blvd,
Suite 2-332,
Los Angeles, CA 90034
An ordinary apartment complex

https://www.apartments.com/3640-s-sepulveda-blvd-los-angeles-ca/yp8evvt/


His fantastical life story was not made up simply to promote the TV show. He'd been working on it for years. On this old site there are links to newspaper stories dating back to when he was 18 and 19 and already telling fantastical tales about himself. Does he himself "believe" it? Interesting question.
 
Last edited:
Billy Cox, a former newspaper feature writer, now a blogger-essayist who believes some UFOs are non-prosaic (a view I share), has posted a very nice piece about my investigation into Harald Malmgren.

https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/the-buzzkill-king
External Quote:

"There's a great number of people who are putting stories out there without any serious vetting – YouTube, podcasts, X, Twitter, whatever, there's no shortage of people who'll take anything that comes along and put it out there without doing any research. But I think there's still a place for people who actually do deep dives into some of these stories.

"I'd be delighted to discover there's a captured alien craft at the end of the rainbow. But I also think there's value in clearing out some of the garbage, the overgrowth, the grifters and the hoaxers and getting all of that out of the way.
I cheered. (Albeit silently to myself, as the cat is sitting on my lap, he is armed with scimitars, and startles easily... but in my head I'm cheering like crazy!)

I wish the bulk of UFOlogists and UFOintersted would grasp this. IF there is a "there" there, and you want to find it, clearing away the silly, the hoaxes, the false data, that's a thing you should want to do. Otherwise the signal that you hope is in there somewhere will get perpetually drowned out in noise.

I know it is hard to let go of a cherished fun UFO story -- but if it can be shown to not be true, knowing that is a good thing when hunting for the truth.
 
Billy Cox, a former newspaper feature writer, now a blogger-essayist who believes some UFOs are non-prosaic (a view I share), has posted a very nice piece about my investigation into Harald Malmgren.

https://lifeinjonestown.substack.com/p/the-buzzkill-king

Interesting read, but I really think the title sums it up:

External Quote:

The buzzkill king
Or, The Lonesome Business of Fact Checking
It seems to be the one thing in UFOlogy, no one is really committed to. If claims are made and evidence presented, can it be fact checked? Not if fact checking kills a good story. Peddling stories is nothing new, in UFOlogy or any other subculture. From Frank Scully's Flying Saucers are Real to Charles Berlitz's The Philadelphia Experiment and The Roswell Incident there have always been people telling and selling UFO stories. The proliferation of social media just expanded the audience and reduced the cost for presenters.

There are those that would like to believe, those that are interested and those that are desperate to believe. Tailoring content for these folks is much easier and potentially enriching than spending months actually fact checking whatever claim is being offered.
 
Did Harald Malmgren "save the world"?

Harald Malmgren said that General Curtis LeMay pushed for a punitive nuclear first-strike on Russia in October 1962, after Soviet Premier Khrushchev had already "backed off," until 27-year-old Harald faced him down in a Pentagon war room. Jesse Michels, Christopher Sharp, Ross Coulthart, Pippa Malmgren, and some others say Harald saved the world on that day. But did anything like that really happen?

I contacted top experts on the Cuban Missile Crisis, who told me that the tale is complete baloney. Eminent military historian Sir Lawrence Freedman: "His claim is nonsense." Philip Zelikow, Stanford University: "Malmgren is a fantasist." Sheldon Stern, former historian of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and author of three highly regarded books on the Cuban Missile Crisis: "Ludicrous."

Following up on the broad examination of Harald Malmgren's claims discussed higher in this thread, which was published on May 20, 2025, I wrote a new 12,000 article focusing solely on Malmgren's "war room story," published June 9, 2025, and linked below. I found that the negative judgments of the historians were well justified. In summary, the reasons are as follows:

(1) MALMGREN DID NOT HAVE A POSITION THAT WOULD HAVE GIVEN HIM ACCESS TO HIGH-LEVEL STRATEGY MEETINGS.
External Quote:

In a 2018 presentation in Ireland, Malmgren described his purported 1962 role this way: "I was the go-between between McNamara and JFK and McGeorge Bundy, who was the NSC [National Security Council] director." In a January 2025 interview with Jesse Michels, Malmgren said, "I was appointed liaison between McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and JFK–I mean, pretty critical job."

In reality, there is abundant documentation that beginning on July 23, 1962, Malmgren was a new-hire economist-researcher-analyst at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), and that this organization employed him full-time for 27 months. In an application for federal employment that Malmgren signed and certified after eight months at IDA (March 24, 1963), he described his professional duties at IDA as follows: "Economic and strategic analysis of active defense; research on military aid and economic development, the balance of payments and foreign policy, etc."

This application and other documents embedded in my long article of May 20, 2025 demonstrate that Malmgren did not during the 1960s or 1970s even claim to have had any direct connection to Secretary McNamara, National Security Advisor Bundy, or President Kennedy himself. During the last month of the Kennedy Administration he got a part-time gig (paid by the hour) as an economist-consultant for the State Department, but he was still employed full-time by the non-governmental IDA. He did not become a full-time federal employee until October 1964 (the Johnson Administration), when he joined the staff of the trade representative in the EOP.

I noted that Richard Bissell Jr., the president of the IDA during Malmgren's period of employment (and thus, the boss of Malmgren's bosses) wrote to his son on October 24, 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, indicating that both he (Bissell) personally and IDA as a whole were not involved in sensitive deliberations over crisis management. "This has not touched IDA or me particularly because the kind of work we do is not related to immediate crises...I feel very much an outsider." But a new-hire four levels down is throwing his weight around at an eleventh-hour meeting of the Joint Chiefs?
(2) MALMGREN BADLY GARBLED THE WELL-ESTABLISHED BASIC CHRONOLOGY OF THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS.

Cuban Missile Crisis calendar October 1962.jpg

External Quote:

In Malmgren's telling, the tension is high because Soviet ships were approaching a blockade line around Cuba. In front of everybody, a "senior general" sends his wife a message to drive to Maine "as fast as you can." Suddenly word arrives that the Soviet ships have stopped–Khrushchev has, in Malmgren's words, "backed off." Yet General Curtis LeMay pushes for nuclear strikes "to teach them a lesson"–nuclear strikes on Moscow, or if not Moscow, then at least on other strategic sites within the Soviet Union. After Malmgren's remarks deflate the general's evil scheme, LeMay leaves in a fury. At that point, both the LeMay crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis have ended. The unnamed "senior general" sends a second message to his wife, informing her that it is no longer necessary to leave Washington. So goes the story.

In reality, the Kennedy-ordered blockade took effect not in "the last hours" of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on Wednesday, October 24, at 10 AM. Top U.S. leaders received word early that day (October 24) that a number of Soviet ships already had changed course to avoid approaching the blockade line. That development, while welcome, certainly did not resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis–far from it. Indeed, tensions continued to increase progressively over the four full days that followed (Wednesday through Saturday, October 24 through 27).

The situation appeared most dire on Saturday, October 27, "Black Saturday." Surveillance photography showed that Russian troops in Cuba had brought some of the ballistic missiles to the point of being operational, or nearly so. A U-2 was shot down over Cuba by a Soviet missile and the pilot killed, perceived by American leaders as a deliberate act of escalation by the Soviets. Negotiations were confused and had led to no resolution. Secretary McNamara said he felt that an invasion was "almost inevitable," and the Joint Chiefs were strongly urging that airstrikes commence no later than Tuesday, October 30. President Kennedy apparently felt that by October 30 he would have no other viable option.

This peak tension did not break on "Black Saturday," October 27–the President and other American leaders went to bed that night greatly fearing what was to come. But the next morning, Sunday, October 28, a Soviet state radio announcer read a letter from Khrushchev to Kennedy, in which the Soviet leader said he would withdraw the missiles from Cuba. President Kennedy told his personal assistant, David Powers, "I feel like a new man now. Do you realize that we had an air strike all arranged for Tuesday? Thank God it's all over."

Like a Hollywood script writer who freely takes gross liberties with historical facts for cinematic narrative purposes, Malmgren simply ignored all of that real history. In his story, the ships are approaching the blockade line on the very eve of U.S. military action, and their retreat is the act that resolves the crisis–all completely ahistorical. Malmgren mushed together into one meeting highly distorted versions of events that actually happened on October 24, October 27, and October 28, 1962.
(3) DURING THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS, NOBODY REALLY PROPOSED FIRST-USE OF NUKES BY THE UNITED STATES.
External Quote:

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Joint Chiefs of Staff consistently argued for conventional kinetic (not nuclear) air strikes on the Soviet ballistic missile sites and other military sites, in Cuba. But I found no reference to any authentic historical record indicating that General LeMay or any other military authority advocated the first-use of nuclear weapons against sites in either the Soviet Union or in Cuba, at any point during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

If General LeMay had pushed the Joint Chiefs to recommend punishing the Soviet Union with a nuclear first-strike in October 1962, we would not be hearing about the encounter for the first time a half-century later, in interviews and tweets by the self-styled hero of the tale.

If U.S. first-use of nuclear weapons during the Cuban Missile Crisis had been urged by LeMay, or by anybody important, we would have heard about it many years ago. If the USAF Chief of Staff, or the commander of the Strategic Air Command (Gen. Thomas Power), or any other military leader at any point during the Cuban Missile Crisis had urged a nuclear first-strike on the Soviet Union–or even proposed such an action as a viable option–it would have become known immediately to the President and other top civilian leaders, and they would have talked about it among themselves. It also would have become common knowledge and very widely discussed during the ensuing decades.
(4) THE WAR ROOM STORY DISPLAYS MALMGREN'S CHARACTERISTIC NARCISSISTIC GRANDIOSITY, AND CONTAINS MULTIPLE OBVIOUSLY IMPLAUSIBLE ELEMENTS.
External Quote:

Even if one knew nothing about Harald Malmgren's actual job history, and no details regarding the chronology of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Malmgren war room story incorporates multiple elements that, on first glance, are plainly implausible--in some respects, laughably so.

In the 2025 version, Malmgren sagely observed, "If you hit Moscow, there's no one to talk to." Golly, that boy had a mind like a steel trap. It is puzzling that some commentators seem to have no difficulty with the notion that until Malmgren pointed it out, it apparently had not occurred to the assembled generals and admirals that nuking Moscow might create difficulties in subsequently communicating with someone in Russia holding authority to end the conflict.

(Even more laughable in the 2018 Kilkenomics festival version, in which the generals are impressed by Malmgren's observation that if they hit Moscow, then they had better be prepared to take over governance of Russia.)

In Malmgren's 2018 version, after he points out the obvious, a top general remarks, "That's the best damn question that anybody's ever raised." This is inane. It is truly cringeworthy. But, it is also very on-brand for the Harald Malmgren we see in many interviews and tweets. A major theme of Malmgren's stories is that Harald is a Very Special Person. In the stories, Harald is not only the smartest person in the room–he may be the smartest person on the planet. Not that he characterizes himself that way, mind you, but all sorts of high-caliber people have verbally taken note of his extraordinary attributes, and Harald casually shares their judgments with us.

Malmgren's stories are replete with high-level people– such as MIT Corporation President Karl Compton, famed economist John Hicks, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, storied CIA/IDA leader Richard Bissell, trade representative Christian Herter, and many others--expressing their amazement at Harald's singular abilities.

In these flights of imagination, Compton is astonished at Malmgren's command of esoteric concepts of physics at age 13 ("you see beyond the biggest minds") and tries to persuade him to immediately accept a free ride all the way through graduate school at MIT (Malmgren said he declined). Hicks decides Malmgren is an original thinker of the caliber that "only comes along every 30 or 40 years." Cornell University wins a bidding war among major universities by making Malmgren a full professor instantly after receiving his doctorate. [This is a proven fiction.] He was recruited for the Kennedy Administration because "I was like being somebody who was the number one draft for the NFA [sic]. [13] Of course, I did not think of myself that way but they decided they needed me." [He actually did not get a full-time federal job until 1964.] Dobrynin arranges to sit next to Malmgren at a 1963 banquet because "he [Dobrynin] was interested in what was my way of thinking during this crisis," referring to the Cuban Missile Crisis. [Highly implausible.] Bissell tells Malmgren "you were the star" of the McNamara "whiz kids." [No evidence has surfaced that Malmgren had any direct connection with McNamara; I have seen nothing to support the claim that he was among the historically recorded McNamara "whiz kids."] The all-knowing supra-governmental MJ-12 had watched over Malmgren from the start. "They tracked him from a young age, he [Malmgren] says," according to Jesse Michels. "You were chosen," Christian Herter assures Malmgren. Many more such examples could be cited.

I remain baffled at why even some often-serious-minded people have failed to consider the infantile, and in my opinion pathological, content of many of Malmgren's narratives.
(5) THE PREMISE OF THE CLAIM THAT HARALD MALMGREN "SAVED THE WORLD" IS NONSENSICAL, SINCE GENERAL LEMAY HAD NO AUTHORITY TO LAUNCH A NUCLEAR STRIKE (EVEN IF THE JOINT CHIEFS HAD AGREED), AND OBVIOUSLY PRESIDENT KENNEDY WOULD NOT HAVE AGREED TO ANY SUCH RECOMMENDATION.
External Quote:

The premise of the claim that Harald Malmgren "saved the world" is nonsensical, since General LeMay had no authority to launch a nuclear strike (even if the Joint Chiefs had agreed), and obviously President Kennedy would not have agreed to any such recommendation
Even without prior knowledge of the details of the Cuban Missile Crisis or of Harald Malmgren's personal history, it is a preposterous premise that whether a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union occurred was determined by the outcome of an argument between a service chief and a 27-year-old economist. The basic stage-setting for Harald Malmgren's tale (2018: "we have four hours to decide everything, and otherwise everything goes off") is implausible on its face.

Yet Harald Malmgren's promoters have proclaimed that when he verbally bested General LeMay (in his story), Malmgren "saved the world." For example, Harald's daughter Pippa posted on X on February 14, 2025, "At age 27, he [Harald] successfully prevented General Curtis LeMay and the Joint Chiefs from dropping a nuclear weapon on the Soviet Union during The Cuban Missile Crisis, thus averting a nuclear catastrophe." I cite multiple other examples of such tributes.

Yet even if General LeMay had actually made such a nuclear first-strike proposal (which he did not), and even if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had concurred (a bonkers premise), they had no authority "to [drop] a nuclear weapon on the Soviet Union." The most they could have done was recommend that course of action to President Kennedy.

Would Kennedy–who had for about ten days had resisted increasing pressure from both the Joint Chiefs and many of his civilian advisors to quickly launch non-nuclear airstrikes even on Soviet nuclear missile sites in Cuba–now have accepted LeMay-Joint Chiefs advice to launch a punitive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union? The question answers itself.
Many more details and supportive documentation on all of these points are found in the full 12,000-word article, "Harald Malmgren saves the world: a fantasy set during the Cuban Missile Crisis," published June 9, 2025.

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/harald-malmgren-saves-the-world/
 
Last edited:
It is easy today for people to forget that the Cuban Missile Crisis was only 17 years after the end of WW2. The generals serving JFK during the crisis were all veterans of WW2, most at senior levels. General Curtis "Bomb them back into the Stone Age" Lemay was in change of the strategic bombing of Japan. They were very well aware of the issues involved and the consequences of different courses of action. They did not need some 'whiz kid' to enlighten them.
 
Back
Top