James Farrell Marrs Jr. (December 5, 1943 – August 2, 2017) was an American newspaper journalist and New York Times best-selling author of books and articles on a wide range of alleged cover-ups and conspiracies. Marrs was a prominent figure in the JFK assassination conspiracy theories community and his 1989 book Crossfire was a source for Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK. He wrote books asserting the existence of government conspiracies regarding aliens, 9/11, telepathy, and secret societies. He began his career as a news reporter in the Dallas–Fort Worth–Arlington metroplex and taught a class on the assassination of John F. Kennedy at University of Texas at Arlington for 30 years. Marrs was a member of the Scholars for 9/11 Truth.
A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Marrs earned a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Texas in 1966 and completed graduate work at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas from 1967 to 1968.
Beginning in college, he worked as a reporter, cartoonist, and photographer for several Texas newspapers, including the Denton Record-Chronicle, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, and Lubbock Sentinel. In 1968, he took a position with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where he served as police reporter and general assignment reporter covering stories locally, in Europe, and in the Middle East. From 1969 to 1970, he concurrently served in a stateside United States Army Reserve intelligence unit (under the aegis of the Fourth United States Army) as a translator of French and German periodicals; when the Army offered to remedy a longstanding shoulder ailment prior to his scheduled mobilization or release him from his service obligation, he accepted the latter option. He later became the newspaper's military and aerospace writer and an investigative reporter. After leaving the Star-Telegram to take a position with Jerre R. Todd and Associates (a public relations firm in Arlington, Texas) in 1972, he returned to the newspaper in 1974 before leaving again in 1980.

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