SUBJECT: WILD GOOSE - MJ12 FILE: UFO2123
Editorial
Wild Goose
Two and a half years ago, the MJ-12 briefing document,
allegedly written in November 1952 to inform President-elect
Eisenhower of two UFO crashes (Roswell, 1947, and the Texas-
Mexico border, 1950) and of a supersecret project called
Majestic-12, was unleashed on the world, by Bill Moore in
California and Timothy Good in England. Today the issue remains
unsettled, though at the moment the skeptics seem to have the
upper hand. (They argue that the signature of President Truman
on another alleged MJ-12 document, which arrived on the same roll
of 35mm film that the briefing document did, is identical to
Truman's signature on another, undisputed, non-UFO document from
the same period, the implication being that a hoaxer appended a
real signature to a bogus document.) Within a few weeks Stanton
Friedman will have submitted his report on his investigation to
the Fund for UFO Research, which gave him $16,000 with which to
conduct the inquiry.
At that time perhaps we will be able to come to a fully-
informed judgment. And perhaps then, too, we will have a chance
to reflect on whether it would have been wiser to spend that
money on further investigation of the Roswell incident, next to
which MJ-12 (for which so far evidence barely exists) is a
distinctly secondary issue. It is sadly true that the MJ-12
uproar, for all the paper it has generated, has produced not much
of substance (and not a single serious researcher, even Friedman,
willing to identify himself as a "proponent" of the document).
Certainly the MJ-12 affair has done little to enhance any real
understanding of how the United States government dealt with the
UFO phenomenon, including the presumed hard evidence from the
Roswell crash.
This is not to say that the briefing paper is unworthy of
investigation; it certainly ought to have been, and to be looked
into, at lease as time and resources permit. But in retrospect
it seems clear that Roswell, not MJ-12, should have remained the
primary focus. It is too bad that the issue of the cover-up was
allowed to drift from something substantive (just how substantive
will become clear next year when IUR reports in full on what
CUFOS' Roswell investigation has uncovered) to a document sent
anonymously and presumably by individuals already implicated in
what everyone now acknowledges to be the spread of
disinformation. It must also be noted that it was out of the MJ-
12 swamp that the lurid pulp fantasies of John Lear, Bill Cooper
and Bill English bubbled to the surface. According to Bill
Moore, himself a central figure in the MJ-12 controversy, those
tall tales about man-eating aliens were cooked up (so to speak)
by intelligence-agency people seeking further to confuse an
already deluded UFO buff. Moore acknowledges that he helped the
process along. As he told an audience at this year's MUFON
conference, "The entire story of a secret treaty between the U.S.
government and the aliens, of exchanges of technology between us
and the aliens, of battles between aliens and American armed
forces, and of aliens allegedly having implanted human
beings...came about as a result of this process. I know because
I was in a position to observe much of this process as it
unfolded and I was providing regular reports on its effectiveness
to some of the very people who were 'doing it'..."
It requires neither imagination nor paranoia to conclude
that it was also done to Moore, who over a period of years (and
continuing even now) has been the recipient -- not the only one
-- of astonishing but unverifiable tales about Extraterrestrial
Biological Entities, including live ones in government custody.
Moore's informants, said to be military-intelligence people,
produced (despite promises) no documentations for any of these
claims, which had at least the advantage of being less
insultingly illogical than Lear-Cooper-English's brainless
scenario. As I remarked in an earlier editorial (IUR,
September/October 1988), these sorts of claims "make a certain
hypothetical sense," given what might have followed from a
Roswell incident (such as an attempt to contact the controlling
intelligences behind the attempt to contact the controlling
intelligences behind the UFO phenomenon to learn what their
purpose is), but "the evidence supporting them is all but
nonexistent."
One of the interesting features of the MJ-12 paper, not
often remarked on, is that it is not in concordance with the EBE
story. As the EBE story (or at least a part of it) goes, in 1949
one EBE survived a UFO crash and spent the next three years at
Los Alamos before expiring in 1952. Supposedly EBE was blabbing
the full story of the ET visitation to his captors -- a detail
curiously absent from the Eisenhower briefing document. At the
same time, as IUR readers will learn in future issues, the
briefing paper's account of the Roswell event is essentially
accurate. That is, I suppose, of some small comfort to whoever
still harbors hope for the briefing paper's authenticity.
Another small source of comfort has been the absence of any truly
compelling arguments against the briefing document itself, though
plenty of arguments pretending to be that have been advanced.
(As already noted, an MJ-12-related document, part of the
briefing paper's appendix, Truman's supposed September 24, 1947,
order bringing Majestic-12 into being, does appear vulnerable.)
Friedman and Moore have done a good job of showing where the
critics are mistaken, but even they concede this is not an
argument for the briefing paper's authenticity. It is always
possible, and in this case maybe even probable, that the critics
are right even if their reasons are wrong.
Perhaps the most surprising claim the briefing paper makes
is that Donald Menzel, Harvard astronomer and archdebunker of UFO
reports, was a member of Majestic-12, thus making him a conscious
agent of an anti-UFO disinformation campaign. This remarkable
assertion led Friedman to conduct the sorts of inquiries into
Menzel's background that no one had done before. Friedman
learned ("the Secret Life of Donald H. Menzel," IUR,
January/February 1988) that Menzel possessed the highest security
clearances and was well-placed within the U.S. intelligence
community -- just as he would have had to be to be privy to the
Ultimate Secret. This amounts to a finding of the consistent-
with-the-hypothesis variety, but nothing more. No hint that
Menzel secretly took UFOs seriously has come to light, and those
who knew him best, including his wife, reject the idea out of
hand. To this Friedman rejoins, reasonably enough, that Menzel
would not have breathed a word of this even to family members.
Yet Menzel's ferocious UFOobia was far in excess of what he would
have had to exhibit to lead the press and fellow scientists away
from the scent (not that most even knew there was a scent),
suggesting that he was not acting under orders but out of the
sort of manic obsession that has fueled other sincere if
misguided debunkers.
Nonetheless Menzel's appearance on the MJ-12 list is
undeniably curious. Presumably it means something. It may
indicate, since practically nothing of Menzel's secret life in
intelligence was known before Friedman's investigation, that the
hoax (if hoax it was) was perpetrated by individuals privy to
classified information. In other words, this is no ordinary
hoax; it had a serious purpose connected with national-security
concerns. On the other hand, the hoaxer may have erred in making
one extraordinary claim too many. Amusingly, it is not the
briefing document's claim of a UFO crash that is the most
difficult to believe; it is the claim that Menzel knew about it.
The evidence for the crash is substantial, that for Menzel's
knowledge of it is nil. A friend of mine once suggested that
perhaps Menzel's name was put on the list for a reason: to
assure any knowledgeable person within the intelligence community
that the briefing paper was not, after all, a real leak of real
information.
None of this is to say, of course, that the MJ-12 briefing
document has been proven to be bogus, or that no such project
(whether called MJ-12 or something else) could have existed. But
it is to say that, despite the enormous, even heroic, research
efforts of Stan Friedman, the issue is as unresolved -- and
probably unresolvable -- as ever. It could be true. It could be
one of those exceedingly rare instances in human history when
diamonds are found floating in cesspools. That doesn't happen
often. More conceivably (though also unprovably), the briefing
paper was hatched as part of a scheme to distract investigators
form pursuits truly threatening to the cover-up.
To all present appearances (though future events may
radically alter our perception), the MJ-12 controversy has gotten
us nowhere, maybe less than nowhere, since it has consumed
valuable time that might have been spent more productively on
other matters, not the least of them Roswell. From the
beginning, it is true, CUFOS encouraged the MJ-12 investigation
and IUR has reported, and will continue to report, new
developments. But ufology's resources are limited and I think
most would agree, after 2 1/2 years, that MJ-12 has eaten up too
many of them already. Unless Friedman's Fund report brings forth
major new evidence, all of us would be well-advised to move on to
something else. If an answer to the MJ-12 puzzle is to be found,
perhaps we'll get to it one day, while we're looking for
something else. But as a whole new chapter in the Roswell saga
begins to unfold, we have better things to do than to pursue a
wild goose across a barren landscape. -- Jerome Clark
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