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: Skeptical Inquirer magazine
: May/June 2000 : Buy this back issue
Special Report
The New Bogus Majestic-12 Documents
The new crashed-saucer documents, like their 1987 predecessors, are riddled with flaws.
Philip J. Klass
"Majestic Twelve"-better known as "MJ-12"-first achieved international fame in
the world of UFOlogy in mid-1987. It was then that UFOlogist William L. Moore
and two associates made public three (purportedly) "Top Secret" documents which
indicated that President Harry Truman had created a super-secret MJ-12 group
forty years earlier to deal with extraterrestrial (ET) visitors. Truman's
(alleged) action was prompted by an alleged crashed-ET craft that had been
covertly recovered near Roswell in mid-1947.
The Roswell crashed-saucer claim had been the centerpiece of a book published seven years earlier (1980) which
Moore had coauthored with Charles Berlitz. (Berlitz previously authored a book describing the "mysterious dangers" of the
Bermuda Triangle.)
Recently, a large batch of additional "Top Secret Majestic Documents" have
emerged, provided by another UFOlogist named Tim Cooper, who claims he obtained
them from several covert sources. Their authenticity has been endorsed by
Robert Wood, a respected, retired McDonnell Douglas scientist and his son
Ryan. (Wood is a member of the nine-person Executive Council of Peter
Sturrock's Society for Scientific Exploration.) Based on the Woods' assessment,
wealthy Silicon Valley software expert Joe Firmage, who recently revealed his
conviction that some UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, also endorsed Cooper's
documents in mid-1999.
However, on November 25 the International Space Sciences Organization (ISSO),
which Firmage recently created to pursue his UFO interests, issued a statement
that "ongoing research indicates that many, possibly all, the so-called
MJ-12 UFO documents were officially fabricated as instruments of U.S. covert
psychological warfare . . ." (emphasis added). This is ridiculous! The new
Cooper documents, like their 1987 predecessors, are so riddled with flaws that
they could never fool Soviet or Chinese intelligence experts. Even some
long-time pro-UFOlogists have denounced them as obvious counterfeits.
One of the original MJ-12 documents released by Moore and his two partners (UFO
lecturer Stanton Friedman and TV producer Jaime Shandera) purported to be a
memo from President Truman to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, dated
September 24, 1947, which authorized the creation of the MJ-12 group. My
investigation revealed that the Truman signature was a pasted-on photocopy of a
genuine signature-including accidental scratch marks-from a memo that Truman
wrote to Vannevar Bush on October 1, 1947 (see "New evidence of MJ-12 hoax," SI
14[2], Winter 1990).
A second MJ-12 document released by Moore et al. purported to be a November 18,
1952, briefing for President-elect Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral
R.H. Hillenkoetter, who had been director of the CIA and, purportedly, was now
head of MJ-12. There were numerous flaws in the "Eisenhower Briefing Document"
(EBD), the most obvious being its reference to the (bogus) Truman memo of
September 24, 1947.
Further, the EBD repeatedly used a very unusual date-format-a hybrid
combination of civil and military formats with a superfluous comma, i.e., 18
November, 1952. This unusual hybrid date-format was one repeatedly used by
William L. Moore in his personal letters - until I pointed out this "curious
coincidence" in my first article debunking the original MJ-12 papers (see SI
12[2], Winter 1987-1988). The third of the MJ-12 documents made public by Moore
et al. in mid-1987 purported to be a brief memo, dated July 14, 1954, from
Robert Cutler to USAF Chief of Staff General Twining informing him of change of
date to brief the President on the "MJ-12 Special Studies Project."
Investigation revealed that on the date that Cutler allegedly wrote the memo,
he was out of the country. Moore claimed that he and Shandera had found the
Cutler memo in an unlikely location when they visited the National
Archives. The memo, which had been double-folded, could easily have been
carried into the Archives in Moore's or Shandera's coat pocket. Less than two
years before Moore made public the initial MJ-12 papers-on April 16, 1983-he
had confided to then-close friend and UFOlogist Brad Sparks that he was
contemplating creating and releasing some hoax Top Secret documents-as first
revealed in the March 1997 issue of my Skeptics UFO
Newsletter. Moore explained to Sparks that he hoped such bogus documents
would encourage former military and intelligence officials who knew about the
government's (alleged) UFO coverup to break their oaths of secrecy. Sparks
strongly recommended against the idea.
It was not until nearly seven years after release of the original MJ-12
documents that a new "MJ-12 document" surfaced on March 14, 1994. On that date,
Don Berliner, a long-time pro-UFOlogist, received in the mail an undeveloped
roll of 35 mm film from an anonymous source. When the film was processed,
Berliner found photos of what purported to be copies of pages from a "Top
Secret/MAJIC/Eyes Only" special operations manual (SOM 1-01) intended to inform
military crews how to recover crashed saucers and their ET crews. SOM 1-01,
purportedly printed in April 1954, contains many flaws. For example, it stated
that crashed ET craft should be sent to "Area 51 S-4" in Nevada. But that
portion of Nellis Air Force Base was not given the name "Area 51" until several
years after SOM 1-01 allegedly was printed.
As a result of numerous flaws in SOM 1-01, a statement denouncing it as
counterfeit was released on March 14, 1999. It was signed by Berliner and
several other prominent pro-UFOlogists. By this time, a new batch of more than
a dozen Majestic documents obtained from Tim Cooper had recently been made
public by Robert Wood and his son Ryan at a UFO conference in Connecticut. They
had strongly endorsed the authenticity of the documents, although Wood admitted
that there were flaws in them. But he claimed that these anomalies "tend to
indicate authenticity. . . . [Document] hoaxers generally try to make sure they
are perfect."
No mention was made by Wood that his long-time good friend, UFO lecturer
Friedman - who remains one of the staunchest supporters of the original MJ-12
documents - had earlier investigated several of Cooper's documents and
concluded that at least one was counterfeit. Friedman had reported his findings
and suspicions about other Cooper documents in his book Top Secret/MAJIC, published three years
earlier.
British UFOlogist Timothy Good, who in 1987 had strongly endorsed the
authenticity of the original MJ-12 documents in his best-selling pro-UFO book
Above Top Secret, has more
recently characterized them as bogus, largely on the basis of the phony
signature on the Truman memo of September 24, 1947. But in the early 1990s,
prior to Good's disavowal of the original MJ-12 papers, he began to receive
some of the "new" Majestic documents from Cooper.
Good's suspicions about the new Cooper documents were aroused by some factual
anomalies in their content. More important, Good noted that mechanical flaws in
the typewriter Cooper had used to write two letters on October 4 and October 7,
1991, resembled those of the typewriter used for one of his Majestic documents,
allegedly typed in 1952. At my request, Good provided me with copies
of Cooper's two letters for analysis.
Cooper's two 1991 letters to Good not only had the same typeface as the
(purported) 1952 Top Secret MJ-12 Annual Report, but more importantly the
upper-case (capital) G and N were slightly elevated relative to the
adjacent lower-case letters. However, an experienced questioned document
examiner informed me that it was conceivable, though unlikely, that both Cooper
and the 1952 document typist might have failed to depress the "shift key" to
its lowest possible position when typing G and N.
Figure 1. "Elevated 8" in Cooper's letters and in one of his "MJ-12
documents."
Top: Cooper's letters of October 4 and 7, 1991 (enlarged slightly)
Bottom: From Cooper's "MJ-12 Annual Report" (enlarged slightly)
However, both Cooper's letters and the 1952 document also have an "elevated
8"-which does not require the use of the typewriter's shift-key (see
figure 1). This curious coincidence was reported in the November 1999 issue of
Skeptics UFO Newsletter, a copy of which was provided to Wood. His
response of December 13 (via e-mail) was: "The question is whether that
["elevated-8"] is a characteristic of that typewriter design as distinguished
from any particular machine serial number. We need other examples from the same
typewriter design and I would hope to find some."
In other words, Wood suggests that this mechanical flaw was a possible
uncorrected characteristic of all of the typewriters produced
by this manufacturer for at least several decades. Nothing further has been
heard from Wood on this key issue since mid-December 1999.
Meanwhile, Tim Cooper posted a lengthy treatise on the Internet on December 30,
offering his assessment of his "new Majestic documents." Highlights of Cooper's
views are quoted below:
The question of whether they [Cooper's documents] are genuine,
authentic, or real is not the issue here. The important point . . . is the
information contained in the documents themselves. . . . In my own humble
opinion, the Majestic documents are basically reliable as far as content is
concerned with the exception of the questionable hypothesis that there are
other intelligent, thinking, machine building cultures visiting planet earth on
a regular, day to day basis [emphasis added].
Yet the opening page of the Web site that the Woods have created to promote
MJ-12 states: "The Majestic Documents: Evidence That We Are Not Alone. Curious
about the documentary record of military and government participation with
UFOs, wreckage retrieval, and extraterrestrials? This site is all about it! The
documents, the forensics, the military and intelligence history, and stunning
validating evidence. Join us on a journey into the beyond Top Secret world that
a government cabal has been hiding since 1941." (One of Cooper's documents
claims a crashed saucer was recovered in the spring of 1941 near Cape
Girardeau, Missouri, six years before the alleged Roswell Incident. If true,
the Eisenhower Briefing Document completely forgot to mention this historic
event.)
About the Author
Washington-based aerospace journalist Philip J. Klass is
author of numerous books critically evaluating UFO claims, chairman of CSICOP's
UFO Subcommittee, and editor of Skeptics UFO Newsletter.
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