Marilyn Tenenoff met John Judge four years before his death, finding him on the internet dating site Plenty of Fish. She had been married for 30 years and was recently widowed – and she was seeking a new relationship.

When she first got in touch with Judge, she had no idea what he did. They corresponded over the internet for a while. She met him in person when he made the two-hour drive to York to attend one of her poetry readings at a now-defunct Borders bookstore. Friends asked her whether she had checked the guy out before meeting him. “Do you know who this guy is?” they asked.

She didn't.

She looked him up on Google, and her first impression wasn’t the best. Judge might not have been the king of the conspiracy theory community – actually, he preferred to be called an alternative historian – but he was certainly among its royal family.

“I thought he was a conspiracy theorist nut,” said Tenenoff, 72, a poet and part-time bookkeeper. “Then I met his friends, and they didn’t treat him like that. They treated him like a revered professor. The more he told me about why he did what he did, I started to understand.”

Why did he do what he did?

He sought the truth, Tenenoff said. He sought to change the world.

Judge and Tenenoff were together until his death, on April 15, 2015 – Tax Day, Tenenoff points out – at age 66. His collection of books, papers, videotapes, audiotapes and assorted materials fell into her possession.

And she had to find something to do with the mountain of material.

That's how the Museum of Hidden History and the Hidden History Center wound up in a nondescript strip of office suites in the suburbs of York, Pa.

How 'alternative historian' John Judge got started

This wasn’t exactly how John Patrick Judge saw his afterlife playing out.

He had envisioned, at one time, a $40 million museum in the heart of the nation’s capital, serving to house exhibits that would expose tourists to his vision of American history. It would contain his voluminous collection of books and papers, making it available to researchers from around the globe for whom the truth was out there, somewhere.

He had amassed an impressive collection of books and papers over the years, his home in Washington jammed with materials that revealed an alternative vision of American history.

After his death, Tenenoff sought a proper repository for the boxes and boxes of materials, a place where the collection could be inventoried and cataloged into a library that would serve the needs of like-minded researchers, something that would truly reflect the mind of the man who made the collection his life’s work.

Initially, she housed the materials in a storage unit in northern Virginia. It became too much, driving back and forth from her home in York Haven – a small town in south-central Pennsylvania, about a two-hour drive away – so she began looking for a suitable place to keep the collection closer to home.

And so the museum came to be housed in Suite 2 of Hayshire Plaza, a one-story strip of office suites at 2915 N. George St., wedged between a temp service and an orthodontist's office.

Tenenhoff selected the location for one simple reason: “I didn’t want to move (to northern Virginia),” she said. “This is five minutes from my house.”

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Some within what’s generously called the alternative history community – people who support the museum with their donations – were upset with her for moving Judge’s repository two hours away from the capital. “They wanted it to stay in D.C.,” she said. “They said, ‘You moved it to the boondocks.’”

Certainly, the alt-historians might have other ideas about why the center of their universe moved to a small office suite in York County, Pa. Maybe they’ll look into it.

Who is historian John Judge and what did he believe?

First off, despite the fact that Judge devoted a great amount of time and energy into investigating the assassination of the 35th president of the United States, and the Jonestown massacre, and the CIA's experiments in mind control, and 9/11, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Tupac, and the impeachment of the nation’s 42nd president, and the United States government’s various forays into meddling in the affairs of countries that practiced a form of self-governing frowned upon by the moneyed powers that profited greatly from autocratic control, he really despised being labeled as a “conspiracy theorist.”

He didn’t market in conspiracy theories, Tenenoff asserts. He preferred the label "alternative history." As Judge himself was famous for saying, “You can call me a conspiracy theorist if you call everyone else a coincidence theorist.”

Tenenoff puts it this way: “He believed he was shifting the paradigm, that he was asking the questions that other people didn’t ask – and by doing so could wake people up to what was really happening.”

The boxes and boxes of materials stacked along the walls of the office suite might contain some of the answers to those unasked questions.

John Judge and the Kennedy assassination

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It began in earnest with the Kennedy assassination. But it really began before that.

Judge’s parents worked for the Pentagon, and he grew up playing in the courtyard of the massive building. His parents would take him along to gatherings of co-workers, parties in which adult beverages loosened lips and spilled some notions that the general public knew nothing about.

He had always been skeptical, Tenenoff said. When he was in elementary school, she said, he refused to participate in civil defense drills in which students, in case of nuclear attack, were instructed to cower under their desks. “That’s not going to save me,” he reasoned.

Then, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited Dallas.

Judge's life changed that day.

Like a lot of people, he didn’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He thought it wasn’t coincidence that Oswald’s assassin, strip-club impresario Jack Ruby, had connections to the CIA and organized crime. He thought nothing could explain the trajectory of Bullet 399, the so-called Magic Bullet. From his study and analysis, he came to believe that the fatal shot came not from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, or from the infamous grassy knoll, as others theorized, but from a storm drain that, as researchers who worked with him found, led to the Dallas jail.

“He was more interested in who had control of the shooter, who ordered it,” Tenenoff said. “His theory was it was the joint chiefs of staff, that it was a military coup.”

The reasoning was that Kennedy wasn’t as excited about this country’s involvement in Vietnam as the generals were and that, according to Tenenoff, “there was a lot of money to made in that war.”

Every year, Judge and his Coalition on Political Assassinations would gather on the grassy knoll on the anniversary of Kennedy’s death. He would speak through a bullhorn, saying “they killed my president” and sharing his notions about the assassination and who he believed was behind it. On the 50th anniversary of the assassination, those organizing a traditional memorial in Dealey Plaza asked him to move to a different location so as to not interfere with the event. After contentious discussions, he moved to a nearby parking lot.

He believed JFK’s assassination was connected to those of Robert Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. They were preaching about hope and change, she said, and “the powers that be didn’t want that," the same reasoning that led him to believe that the government ordered the assassination of John Lennon in 1980.

The Kennedy assassination, of course, is the wellspring of conspiracy theories. And as such, the Hidden History Center has, in some of the numerous boxes that line the walls of the office suite, two complete copies of the Warren Commission Report.

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There is also a box that is labeled “Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.”

Did the actress’ April 1962 death, ascribed to a barbiturate overdose, have anything to do with JFK being murdered in Dealey Plaza?

Judge was just asking the question.

What's in all those boxes at the Hidden History Center?

The boxes that line the walls of the center contain material about the country’s worst moments – Watergate, Iran-Contra, the CIA’s meddling in Central and South America and the Middle East, the Jonestown massacre. Some of the boxes bear cryptic descriptions. One is labeled "CIA psyops," another, "Nazis." Dozens of boxes contain books and papers Judge acquired from a disgruntled CIA agent named McGehee.

It is a mountain of books, magazine and newspaper articles, transcripts of hearings, cassette tapes of radio shows, VHS tapes of television appearances and speeches, correspondence with like-minded researchers and journalists and more. Organizing it is a huge task, one in which Tenenoff is assisted by an intern from York College, a young woman who, on a recent Saturday, was tasked with cataloging a box of cassette tapes of radio shows by a theorist named Mae Brussell.

Tenenoff uses the back room of the office suite as her office. Inside, the shelves on a bookcase contain some of Judge’s favorite things – a clown doll, a duck, rubber fish, figurines of a marching band, a Winnie the Pooh collection. He loved Winnie the Pooh and often sought solace in the gentle world inhabited by the honey-loving bear, a respite from the dark corners of human existence that he often probed. The boxes lining the walls contain his personal library, the books he kept shelved in his bedroom. Among them is a box of vintage Golden Books.

“He never threw anything out,” Tenenoff said.

John Judge tried to impeach Bush

Judge’s life's work was his research. But he did hold some day jobs, most notably as an aide to former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, a Georgia Democrat best remembered for striking a Capitol Police officer when she was asked for identification once. (In 2008, she ran for president on the Green Party ticket and received 0.12 percent of the vote.)

It was a perfect match. McKinney was a 9/11 truther and had called for new investigations into the assassination of Martin Luther King and the murder of Tupac Shakur. Like Judge, she was anti-war. (Judge, during the Vietnam War, worked for an organization that assisted draftees in obtaining conscientious objector status and was a life-long peace activist.)

As part of his job, Judge drafted articles of impeachment, introduced by McKinney in the House, against President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

The legislation went nowhere.

John Judge and Rep. Dennis Kucinich

Former Ohio congressman and failed Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich was a friend of Judge’s and spoke at his funeral. In Judge’s obituary in the Washington Post, Kucinich was quoted as describing Judge as “brilliant” and “an original, independent thinker and someone who immersed himself in hidden history.”

He added, “I may not have agreed with him on everything.”

John Judge: 9/11 was not an inside job

Judge wasn’t a 9/11 truther, though. Tenenoff said, “He thought those people were fanatics."

He formed a 9/11 Citizens Watch to counter the 9/11 Commission, asking the questions that weren’t asked. He didn’t believe, as some truthers do, that the twin towers were brought down by a controlled demolition. He thought that was preposterous, Tenenoff said. How would they get the explosives in the buildings? Were the explosives built into the buildings’ steel frames? He didn’t buy that. Nor did he buy the notion that the Pentagon attack was staged and that a plane did not crash into it. He lived close enough that he felt it.

No, all of that was distraction, he believed. He did have some questions. Were the suspected terrorists identified as being on the planes really on them? Did George W. Bush know about the attacks and let them happen to give him a pretext to invade Iraq?

He was more interested in the aftermath, Tenenoff said, the loss of civil liberties, the constant state of war, the amount of power shifted to the government.

“He just wanted to know what really happened,” she said.

The truth, it seems, is out there, contained somewhere in the 270 boxes and 8,000 books and hundreds of audio and video tapes housed in a small, nondescript office suite in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania.

To visit the Hidden History Museum

The Hidden History Museum and Research Center is at 2915 N. George St. in Manchester Township and is open by appointment only. For more information or to make an appointment, call executive director Marilyn Tenenoff at 717-379-0597 or visit hiddenhistorycenter.org.

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