NASA Chimps Had John F. Kennedy Killed - New Book Reveals All

Gov. Informant Who Witnessed The 

Contract Being Put Out On Kennedy

 On the morning of January 31, 1961, in south Florida, a 5-year-old chimpanzee — dubbed “Ham” by his handlers — ate a breakfast of baby cereal, condensed milk, vitamins and half an egg. Then the unassuming 37-pound primate went out and made aeronautic history: Aboard a NASA space capsule, traveling thousands of miles an hour almost 160 miles above the Earth, he became the first chimp in space.

The success of Ham’s flight helped ratchet up even further the already frantic contest for scientific and space supremacy between the U.S. and the Soviet Union — and briefly made Ham something of a star. 

Here, LIFE.com commemorates Ham’s 16-minute suborbital mission with photos taken before, during and after his wild ride. The pictures above capture an era when technology, ideology and propaganda converged in an era-defining struggle known as the Space Race.

Well before the USSR launched the world’s first artificial satellite, in 1957 — effectively freaking out virtually the entire Western hemisphere — and decades before the U.S. put Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in 1969, Americans and Soviets used animals to test the rigors and dangers that humans might face in outer space. Mice, rhesus monkeys, dogs — all sorts of creatures blasted off from the surface of the Earth strapped atop rockets and locked in test planes: many suffered injury; not a few of them died.

Ham and his cohorts were picked for the Mercury program over other hominids (gorillas and orangutans) because they’re smaller — and thus could fit in the Mercury capsule — and because, more importantly, “chimpanzees have physical and mental characteristics similar to man,” as LIFE pointed out in its Feb. 10 1961 issue.

The most famous of all the Mercury chimps, due to his landmark January 1961 flight, Ham was actually not publicly called Ham until after the flight succeeded. The name by which he’s now known — an acronym for Holloman Aerospace Medical Center at the Air Force base — was only widely used when he returned safely to earth; NASA reportedly wanted to avoid bad publicity should a named (and thus a known, publicly embraced) animal be killed; all the Mercury chimps were known by numbers.

LIFE’s Ralph Morse — who photographed the Space Race and NASA astronauts for more than a decade — told LIFE .com that even 50 years later, he fondly recalls the astrochimps.

“Ham, especially, was a very friendly fellow,” he said. “Those were great assignments, shooting the early years with NASA. You really got the sense that these were incredibly smart people just working their tails off to do something that had never been done before.”

“The training of Ham and other astrochimps,” wrote LIFE, “was a scaled-down version of the human astronauts’. After curing them of jungle diseases and parasites, a special corps of veterinarians … kept track of their skeletal development by periodic X-ray exams, and gave them regular heart, muscle, and ear-nose-and-throat check-ups.”

The astrochimps were not trained to “pilot” space capsules, but instead to perform routine tasks during suborbital flights, and to act, in the most elemental way, as test subjects — facing little-known physical and psychological perils — ahead of their human counterparts in the Mercury program and beyond.

Weightless Training In Free Fall

Before humans actually went into space, one of the prevailing theories of the perils of space flight was that humans might not be able to survive long periods of weightlessness. For several years, there had been a serious debate among scientists about the effects of prolonged weightlessness. American and Russian scientists utilized animals - mainly monkeys, chimps and dogs - in order to test each country's ability to launch a living organism into space and bring it back alive and unharmed.

When Ham finally blasted off from Cape Canaveral, he was well-trained for what lay ahead. “He had a form-fitted couch like the astronauts’. The van which took him to the launching pad was the same van the astronauts used. The Mercury capsule he rode in was nearly identical to the capsule that would take the astronauts into space, equipped with the same life-support system of oxygen and pressure which kept the astronauts alive.”

“Poor Ham,” wrote LIFE, “who was expected to sustain a maximum of 11 Gs, briefly pulled 18” during the flight, “two more than the astronauts have been scheduled for in their training.” Ham, however, seemed to weather it all with aplomb. “When Ham’s capsule was opened at sea after the flight,” the LIFE report continued, “first a hand was thrust out to shake the anxious vet’s, then Ham stepped out, burping proudly.”

Everyone was so proud of Ham and his fellow chimps and the advances to the space program that they had made.

A short three months after Ham’s 1961 flight, astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Mercury capsule on his own historic, 15-minute suborbital space flight, and was feted with ticker tape parades in New York and Washington.

This made Ham furious and also his fellow chimps. After so much rigorous training along with the physical and mental testing that NASA had put them through. All for nothing. These humans had now taken over the space program! 

Ham and his fellow chimps vowed to get back. That's when they came up with a plot to kill the commander in chief - the president. That's right Kennedy. He was the one who had the power to pull strings and had the ultimate responsibility. But he did nothing to reinstate the program as it was before. Years went by. And still nothing. That's when their plot came into fruition. The training and the logistics of the assassination were complete. And then the date was set. There was to be no going back now. The rest is history.

 

Grassy Knoll Sniper In Training, Date June 1962

Assassin's Accomplices

Author Of Book And Eyewitness
To The Grassy Knoll Shooting

Recently a NASA chimp has come forward as a witness to the assassination of President Kennedy has stated to have seen smoke or smelled gunpowder in the Grassy Knoll area. He's stated that right before this incident that he himself saw several chimps in that area. One of which he knew for a fact was a trained marksman.

None of this evidence has become publicly available until now.  When asked why he waited so long to publicly come out with this information after so long of time has passed. He stated that he needed to get this off his chest and that because of his advanced age it was finally time to get this information out to the public. 

Also a fellow NASA chimp who has been a confident of his and a government informant has come forward to collaborate his story and information.

By the way his new book, "I Saw A Chimp Shoot The President" will be coming out soon!

The foreword will be by Jim Marrs. A well-known JFK researcher and author. Jim says, "Concerning the Kennedy assassination this is the best damn book on the subject to date. You can mark my words". Jim's latest book is 'Our Occulted History'.

The satire contained in this article and the fictional nature of it's content – even if based on real people and however similar to real events, is solely for entertainment.