So Supernatural - ALIEN: Majestic 12

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

A series of allegedly leaked documents suggest that, in the aftermath of the infamous 1947 Roswell crash, the U.S. government put together a top-secret task force called “Majestic 12” to conceal the truth about UFOs.

Today I've got a story for you that's a conspiracy, wrapped inside a conspiracy, wrapped inside another conspiracy. It's a top-secret military project that started in the 1940s and it might still be going on today. The FBI and the Air Force have tried to debunk the whole thing as a hoax, but in the process, they actually confirmed the central issue. There is a government conspiracy to hide the truth about UFOs. And the real cover-up goes way deeper than anyone imagined. This is Supernatural, and I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. This week, I'm looking at Majestic 12, the alleged government committee that was created

to investigate UFOs. If you've seen Men in Black or The X-Files, this story will seem familiar to you. A shadowy organization, classified documents, unidentified flying objects, layers and layers of disinformation. But this isn't fiction. It's real. And it all starts with an envelope that was dropped through Jamie Chandra's mail slot. Jamie was a TV producer who mostly did documentary work, nothing too big or controversial. He definitely wasn't used to getting strange tips from anonymous sources. But one afternoon in December of 1984, a manila envelope arrives at his North Hollywood home. It has no return address, but it's postmarked Albuquerque, New Mexico. Inside is another smaller envelope. And inside that envelope is a third envelope, unmarked except a Marriott Hotel logo on the back flap. When Jamie opens that last envelope, there's a roll of film inside.

Before he even develops the photos, he has an idea of what this might be about. A few years ago, he'd started production on a fictional movie about UFOs. It eventually got axed because of funding problems, but he kept in touch with the screenwriter Bill Moore, who's a passionate ufologist. Bill does a lot of his research in New Mexico, where the envelope is postmarked from, so Jamie figures it might have been sent by one of his sources. Coincidentally, Jamie's supposed to have dinner with Bill that same evening, so he brings the roll of film with him. Now, when Bill hears about this, he's intrigued because he doesn't know anything about this either. So they immediately leave the

restaurant, go back to Bill's house, and develop the film in his kitchen sink. Looking at the negatives through a magnifying glass, they realize these aren't regular pictures. They're photos taken of documents, eight pages in all. They're typewritten and stamped at the top and bottom with the words top secret slash magic semicolon eyes only. Now magic is spelled M-A-J-I-C, and it's a shortened code name for the project in question, Operation Majestic 12. The first five pages are a general briefing for the incoming President Eisenhower. It's dated November 18, 1952, just a couple of weeks after he won the election. According to the briefing, Majestic 12 is a top-secret committee that reports directly to the president. It was created by the previous president, Harry Truman, after a mysterious object crashed in a desert near the Roswell Army airfield.

Now, if you know anything about UFO lore, you've probably heard about the Roswell incident. In July 1947, something fell from the sky and landed on a ranch in small town New Mexico. The army scooped up the wreckage and told the press that it was just a flying disc. Later that day, they clarified that it was just a weather balloon. But by that point, it was already a huge media story. Dozens and dozens of people had seen the wreckage, and they said it didn't look like any weather balloon that they'd ever seen. Some of them claimed they'd even seen alien bodies

at the crash site. According to the Majestic 12 memo, that was all 100% true. A secret team was sent out to recover the wreckage along with four dead bodies that were definitely not human. After examining the aircraft and the corpses, the team was positive that this thing did not come from Earth. This obviously had to be kept under wraps or there would be chaos. So President Truman appointed a top secret committee of 12

people to investigate it, codenamed Operation Majestic 12. They would report directly to him and no one else would hear a word about it. Attached to the briefing is a classified executive order from the president dated September 24th, 1947, which officially authorizes the creation of Majestic 12. Bill and Jamie know that if this document is real, it would be explosive. For one thing, it's proof that aliens

exist and are visiting Earth. And it's also proof of a cover-up so big it makes Watergate look like a joke. It almost seems too good to be true. Now, Bill and Jamie aren't idiots. They know this is probably a hoax. And they can't do anything until they figure out whether the document is real or not. If they go public with it now and it turns out to be fake, they'll lose all their credibility as researchers. And on the other hand, if it is real, it's still a classified document. Sharing it would be considered espionage. So they have to tread carefully or they might end up in prison. That leaves the tricky question of how to authenticate it.

Usually with a paper document, the first thing you do is test the ink, the typeface, watermarks, you know, all that stuff to make sure it lines up with other papers from that same era. But all they have is photos, not the original documents. If this document was real, there had to be a copy somewhere in the government's archives. Theoretically, they could just submit a Freedom of Information Act request for it. But at the time, it could take years for a request to be processed. And even then, there's no guarantee they'd actually get anything. I mean, if it's still classified or it concerns national security, the government doesn't have to hand it over. So instead of

verifying that the papers are real, Bill and Jamie tried to debunk them as fake. They look for any fact or detail that can be proven false. Bill had been studying the Roswell incident for years. He wrote an entire book on the subject. At first glance, everything in the briefing lines up with what he already knew from his own research, the timeline, the specific air base that the wreckage was taken to. For a second opinion, though, Bill and Jamie call in their friend Stanton Friedman. He was the first person to seriously investigate Roswell, years before Bill started looking into it. When Stanton looks at the documents, the first thing he notices is that almost all of the listed members of the Majestic 12 Committee have already come up in his own research as possibly being connected to Roswell.

There's Lieutenant General Robert Montague, who was the deputy commander at Fort Bliss in Texas, where the debris from Roswell was taken. Air Force General Nathan Twining, who spoke to the press about the incident right after the wreckage was found, two other military higher-ups, James Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense, and Gordon Gray, who was Assistant Secretary of the Army. There was also Roscoe Hillenkotter, the CIA director, the two previous CIA directors, Hoyt Vandenberg and Sidney Sowers, and four big-name scientists who have worked on naval aircraft development. So far, it all checks out. If there was a secret committee to investigate Roswell, these 11 people would definitely be on the short list. There's only one final name that raises a red flag, an astrophysicist named Donald Menzel. Menzel is one of the most vocal anti-UFO

skeptics in the entire country. He'd written three books debunking UFOs, but the MJ-12 briefing says he was there in Roswell examining the wreckage and that he believed it had come from another solar system. Now, that's a completely out of character for him, not to mention, why would an astronomer be looking at aircraft wreckage in the first place? I mean, the whole thing seems really fishy. But Stanton isn't ready to dismiss it all as a hoax just yet. Maybe there's something about Menzel's background that he doesn't know.

So he heads the library, the Library of Congress to be specific, and he finds a letter from 1951 written to Menzel by Dr. Vannevar Bush, another member of Majestic 12. The content of the letter is even more interesting. The Air Force has cleared Menzel of his charges of disloyalty, and he's allowed to keep his security clearance. Now, these were the McCarthy days, and pretty much everyone was under investigation for disloyalty. That part's not weird.

But it begs the question, why did he have an Air Force security clearance to begin with? Stanton does some more digging, and it turns out Menzel did classified intelligence work for decades, starting in the 1930s. He consulted for the NSA and the CIA. He had a whole folder full of correspondence with JFK, which was just tucked away in the Harvard archives. And the nature of that work? He was a cryptanalyst, a codebreaker. The Roswell wreckage was covered in strange symbols, so he might have been brought on to translate them. And the final kicker, in 1947, the year of the Roswell crash, Menzel made a number of trips to Washington, D.C. and New Mexico. Suddenly,

this red flag is starting to look like something else. If Menzel really was involved in Majestic 12, his UFO skepticism could all be an act. In fact, he might have been ordered to do it to hide the truth from the public. So after checking out all the names, it seems reasonable that all 12 of them would have been part of Majestic 12. The next step is to look at the dates and see if all those people could have actually met at the given time and place. Now, the executive order creating MJ-12 is dated September 24th, 1947, and it was supposedly given from President Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, along with Dr. Vannevar Bush. Well, according to Truman's appointment book, he only met with Forrestal and Bush together

one time in 1947. And it was on September 24th. And what's more, that same afternoon, Forrestal went to the D.C. Police Department and registered for a concealed firearm permit. There's no clear reason why he thought he needed to arm himself right now, unless whatever he heard at that meeting made him fear for his life. So that first date could definitely be accurate.

The other major date is November 18, 1952, the day the briefing was given to Eisenhower. As it turns out, Eisenhower was in Washington on that date for a full day of meetings at the White House and Pentagon. It's plausible that the briefing officer, Roscoe Hillencotter, could have been there, too. He was living in New York City at the time and easily could have made a day trip to D.C. But there's no solid evidence, though. It's all circumstantial. And that's really the problem with all of it so far. After a few months of research, there's no solid proof that the documents aren't real, but they still can't actually verify them. It's starting to feel like a wild goose chase. And then, in March 1985, three months after the roll of film arrived, Bill gets a postcard.

It's postmarked New Zealand, but the return address was Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. There's a bizarre riddle on the back. When doors won't open, search for windows. Add zest to your trip to Washington. Try Reese's Pieces. For a stylish look, shop Suitland. Now this is eerie. Bill and Jamie don't have any travel plans,

but Stanton is in Washington, D.C. at that very moment. He's planning to meet with a man named Ed Reese, who worked at the National Archives. Whoever sent this postcard must be keeping tabs on them, which is horrifying. But at least it seems like they're trying to help if they can figure out this cryptic clue. So Stanton checks in with Ed, and it turns out the Air Force is in the process of declassifying a batch of records from the late 1940s and early 50s. And the files are being kept at a records facility in Suitland, Maryland. On a hunch, Bill and Jamie fly out to Maryland to check it out. And what they find there would change the course of their investigation.

Coming up, there's a new piece of evidence that could suggest Majestic 12 is real. Now, let's get back to the story. In July of 1985, Bill and Jamie fly out to the National Records Center in Suitland, Maryland. They'd gotten a tip about a batch of newly declassified Air Force files, some of which they hope will involve Majestic 12 or the Roswell incident. There's a massive number of records, and they aren't cataloged in any sort of useful way, so sorting through all of them by hand takes forever. They spend days digging through more than 100 boxes

with no luck. On a whim, they try the box labeled 189, since box 189 was the return address on that postcard that started this whole adventure. But still nothing. Then, while putting a file back into the box, Jamie finds a stray piece of paper tucked between the folders. It clearly doesn't belong to this box.

It has nothing to do with the rest of the contents. It's a memo from the National Security Advisor Robert Cutler to Nathan Twiney, the Air Force General, who was sent to Roswell after the crash and allegedly is a member of Majestic 12. It's dated July 14, 1954, and it's marked Top Secret Restricted Security Information. It's a routine update about a meeting that is being rescheduled, specifically a briefing meeting on the MJ-12 Special Studies Project. There's no mention of the full name Majestic 12 and no details on what that project actually

entails. But if this memo is legit, it at least confirms that some operation called MJ-12 exists and that General Twining was involved in it. Bill and Jamie make a copy of the memo since the original records aren't allowed to leave the archive. This one is going to be easier to authenticate because the paper has a watermark from the manufacturer. Bill contacts the company and it turns out that specific watermark was only used on paper that was made between the 1950s and the early 70s, the same era this memo is from. And what's more, that lot of paper wasn't available for retail. It was only sold in bulk to a few major buyers, including the U.S. government.

That's a positive sign, but that's about where it ends. The National Archives can't turn up anything else related to MJ-12. No other records, no minutes for that meeting that was referenced in the memo. This isn't hugely surprising because MJ-12 was supposedly top secret. Any files about it would still be classified. So absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence, at least not in this situation. But it still leaves them essentially at square one. There's no way to

be sure whether any of these documents are real or if it's an increasingly elaborate hoax. Bill, Jamie, and Stanton spend another two years checking out the details of this MJ-12 briefing and this new memo, which becomes known as the Cutler-Twining memo. They travel around to different archives, call libraries, cross-reference calendars and flight logs, and they don't find anything to suggest the documents aren't real. Finally, in May of 1987, they decide they've done everything they can on their own.

It's time to go public. Bill sends copies of the MJ-12 papers and the Cutler-Twining memo to every media outlet that he can get a hold of, along with a one-page press release that says, quote, although we are not in a position to endorse its authenticity at this time, it is our considered opinion that the document and its contents appear to be genuine. End quote. The story immediately takes off. It's reported in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Stanton is interviewed about it on ABC's Nightline.

But understandably, not everyone is taking it seriously. Just three days after the original press release, the London Observer does their own investigation into the Cutler-Twining memo. The journalist, Martin Bailey, contacts the National Archives and speaks to the worker who'd been helping Bill and Jamie. She confirms that the memo, quote, was found in the files of the U.S. Air Force Director of Intelligence and is certainly genuine, end quote. The reporter, though, isn't so sure. He notices that the memo isn't signed, which to him suggests that it's fake. However, there's an easy explanation for this. Robert Cutler was out of the country at the time this memo was written.

It came from his office, not him personally. It would actually be more suspicious if it was signed, since he couldn't have possibly been at the White House to sign it. The article also suggests the obvious. Bill and Jamie could have planted the memo in the archive themselves as a hoax. But the thing is, security at the National Archives is insanely tight. The files are locked in vaults, which you need a special clearance to get into. You have to ask a staff member to retrieve them for you one box at a time. And then to get into the viewing room,

you have to go through security. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out. No backpacks, no notebooks, no scraps of paper. The workers watch you like a hawk to make sure everything is put back into the proper box before they bring you the next one. So I mean technically it's not impossible that Bill and Jamie could have forged the memo and smuggled it into the archive but it would have been really difficult and when you think about it they flew all the way across the country and spent

days digging through files before they found this memo. Surely there are easier ways they could have pulled off this hoax. But soon, even other ufologists are poking holes in the Majestic 12 documents. The main critic is a researcher named Philip Klass. Klass points out that in the MJ-12 briefing, the date is formatted as day, month, comma, year. But the standard for government documents at the time was month, day, comma, year. This argument is kind of shaky because, you know, that's just like a guideline. It's not a hard and fast rule. There are plenty of papers from that time that use nonstandard date formats.

Klass also says that the signature by Harry Truman on the original briefing is too accurate of a match. He claims that it's identical to the signature on a certain letter Truman sent in 1947. So he says it must have been copied. But here's the thing. If you actually look at the two signatures side by side, they are clearly not identical. Even with the naked eye, you can see the differences. So this actually ends up calling Klass's credibility into question more than the documents. And what about that Cutler twining memo?

Klass says that the typeface is wrong. It's written in a larger font called PICA. And according to Klass, all the documents from Cutler's office use a small font called Elite. As a challenge, he actually offers Stanton $100 for each verified memo he can find from Cutler's office that uses the PICA font. And lo and behold, Stanton mails him $34. There's one thing Stanton, Bill, and Jamie can't explain away, though.

The briefing refers to MJ-12 member Roscoe Hill and Cotter as Admiral, when his actual rank is Rear Admiral. Now, they sound the same, but there's actually a huge difference. Rear Admiral is a one- or two-star rank. Admiral is four stars. If the document was made by a civilian, this would be an understandable mistake. But who's listed as the author? Roscoe Hillencotter himself.

He would never have gotten his own rank wrong. In the end, that is the best debunking class is able to do. We're still essentially at square one. No one can either confirm or deny Majestic 12 except the U.S. government. And initially, they're completely silent. Bear in mind, leaking classified documents is considered espionage. Forging classified documents is also a crime. So whether they're real or not, the FBI should absolutely be looking into this.

When they finally do look into it over a year later, it's only because the Air Force tells them to. An agent from the Office of Special Investigations, or the OSI, finds a copy of the MJ-12 briefing and brings it to the FBI. This agent doesn't know anything about MJ-12, but some of the other classified projects in the briefing actually existed, so he assumes it's real. He wants them to check and make sure this document was properly declassified. The FBI responds a month later saying that the Air Force OSI has advised them that, quote, The document was bogus and the case should be closed. How they came to that conclusion is a complete mystery because there's no record of any investigation apart from asking the OSI, which doesn't make any sense because it was an OSI agent that asked the Bureau to look into it in the first place.

Now, a few years later, another FBI agent finds a copy of the MJ-12 papers floating around. Not knowing what it is, the agent calls the Department of Defense. They don't know what it is either, but again, a lot of the info checks out, so they tell the agent to send it on to the FBI headquarters and to have them look into it. Once again, the FBI sends the briefing on to the OSI, asks them to find out where it came from, and that's where it ends. There's nothing else in the FBI's file from the investigation, not even a response from the OSI, if they ever got one. The entire FBI file was released to the public in December of 1993.

It's only 22 pages and 13 of them are copies of the MJ-12 briefing with the word bogus scrawled over each page in black marker. Obviously, this does nothing to stop the controversy, especially because around this same time, a congressman from New Mexico is lobbying the Defense Department to release all their files about Roswell. He gets stonewalled at every turn. He writes the Secretary of Defense, the National Archives, the General Accounting Office. The more he's ignored, the more he is sure that whatever crashed in Roswell was not a weather balloon.

If they have nothing to hide, why are they being so cagey? And then, finally, in September 1994, the Air Force admits the truth. It was not a weather balloon. The Roswell incident was a cover-up. Coming up, we'll look at the Air Force report and the whole new branch of conspiracy theories that followed it. Now, back to the story. In the early 90s, a New Mexico congressman started pressuring the Defense Department to release their files on the Roswell incident.

They refuse, delay, ignore requests. Finally, the General Accounting Office opens an official investigation. They ask for any and all government records concerning Roswell. And that is when they discover the problem. There are no Roswell files. Huge amounts of Roswell Army base records from the late 40s were destroyed with absolutely no explanation. There's not even a record of when they were destroyed or by who. Now, the military guidelines in 1947 said that all air accidents had to be reported and the records had to be kept permanently. Several other crashes in July of 1947 are reported, but for some reason, the infamous Roswell crash is completely absent. And it's not just the Army

base files. The Department of Defense, CIA, National Security Council all said they had nothing related to Roswell or Majestic 12. The FBI has exactly one document, a single-page memo from the day after the wreckage was found. And that's it. The investigators had no way to verify whether these agencies were telling the truth, but they did go to a dozen different archives to search the files on their own. Their report says that, quote, our search of government records was complicated by the fact that some records we wanted to review were missing and there was not always an explanation, end quote. Before this report is released to the public, the Air Force comes out with their own report in September 1994. They confirm what everyone is about to find out. There was a cover

up at Roswell. But they weren't hiding a UFO and alien bodies. It was a top secret defense project called Project Mogul. Mogul was a short-lived program from 1946 to 1950. The goal was to develop a surveillance balloon that could detect sound waves from atomic bomb tests in the Soviet Union. What they came up with was basically a huge weather balloon with a bunch of sensors and radar reflectors attached to it. As the New York Times described it, quote, to the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, like a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil, end quote. It sounds a lot like descriptions of the wreckage from Roswell. And a lot of the testing for Mogul happened at Alamogordo Airfield, which was only about 130

miles away. In fact, they launched a number of balloons from that base at the beginning of June 1947, a month before the wreckage was found in Roswell. And two of those balloons lost their radar tracking and were never found. Project Mogul was highly classified, so no one at Roswell Army Base had any idea it existed. That's why there was so much confusion in the aftermath of the crash. They didn't know what they were dealing with until the higher-ups arrived and told everyone, you know, nothing to see here, definitely not a top-secret project,

it's just a weather balloon. So it sounds logical, right? No aliens, no secret committees, just a surveillance project. But the thing is, there's no actual evidence that the Roswell crash was a Project Mogul balloon. It's just a theory, a most likely explanation that they put together to explain why there was a cover-up. Is it more likely than an alien spacecraft? Sure, but there are still some pieces that don't add up. Project Mogul ended in 1950. It was declassified in the early 70s. If that's all that was going on, why didn't they

just say so before now? And if it really was just a Project Mogul balloon and they'd figured that out right away, why is there no record of it? There are plenty of other files from Mogul, none of which mention a balloon that crash-landed in Roswell. It makes no sense why they'd keep all the other records but destroy anything related to Roswell. If we do accept this explanation, just for the sake of argument, it means the Majestic 12 documents have to be a hoax. But then who sent that roll of film to Jamie?

And that postcard from Ethiopia? And that memo that was planted at the National Archives? The answer is Jamie and Bill could have started the hoax themselves. As it turns out, the year before that roll of film appeared in Jamie's mailbox, Bill had told a friend that he was thinking about releasing fake top secret documents in the hope that it would bait actual military officials into coming forward with the truth about UFOs. Now, it's one man's word against another, and even if Bill did say that in passing, there's no proof that he actually did it, and it's hard to say whether he could if he even wanted to. I mean, consider the massive amount of work it took for Bill and

Jamie and Stanton to check out all of these claims. If they cooked this whole thing up themselves, it means that they would have had to do years worth of research beforehand and then redo it again to quote-unquote verify their own hoax documents. And they would have had to been able to forge documents so accurately that they fooled the National Archives staff and the FBI and at least briefly the Air Force. If someone else besides them was behind it, I mean, that's a lot of effort to go through for no material benefit. Who would have a reason to do all of that and access to all the information they needed to pull it off. Well, in 2007, 20 years after the MJ-12 documents were published,

we got an answer. There was another ufologist named Bob Pratt who worked with Bill in the early 80s. Bob had a habit of secretly tape recording his conversations for his own reference, including conversations he had with Bill and an Air Force intelligence agent named Richard Doty. had a habit of secretly tape recording his conversations for his own reference, including conversations he had with Bill and an Air Force intelligence agent named Richard Doty. Those recordings revealed that Bill had been meeting with Special Agent Doty since 1980. Bill told him where he was at in his Roswell investigation, and Doty passed along insider

information to lead him on the right track. In December of 1981, Doty dropped a bombshell. All the top-secret intel about UFOs was compiled into a briefing in 1952, which was given to the incoming President Eisenhower. He didn't personally give that document to Bill, but when a copy showed up in Jamie's mailbox three years later with a postmark from Albuquerque, where Doty lived, there should have been no doubt about who sent it. So it came directly from an Air Force intelligence officer. But if you think that means it's real, think again.

Richard Doty was a disinformation agent. His job was to infiltrate UFO circles and feed them false information to keep them from getting too close to the military's classified projects. If you look at everything that's said on the tapes, it's pretty clear that Doty had taken all of Bill's theories and crafted fake documents to confirm them. That's why the Roswell information matched his research. The names were all people he and Stanton had already looked into. That anti-UFO scientist Donald Benzel could have just been thrown in as a joke. The Majestic 12 briefing isn't a one-off occurrence. Doty had been doing this kind of thing for years, and there's tons of evidence. Around this same time, he was involved in an elaborate disinformation scheme against an Air Force contractor named Paul Benowitz. Paul was digging into projects he wasn't supposed to be digging into,

so Doty and a few other agents distracted him with conspiracies about an alien invasion. They even broke into his house to plant fake evidence. It spiraled so out of control that Paul ended up in a psychiatric hospital. All of this was well known among UFO researchers as early as the 1990s, but Doty's involvement in Majestic 12 wasn't known until 2007 when the secret recordings of Bill finally surfaced. Doty himself practically confirmed it in 2014 that he was behind the Majestic 12 documents. Now, the Air Force refuses to comment, but that's to be expected.

If they really went through all this effort to keep the ufologists out of the way, we have to wonder why. What were they hiding? We know it isn't Project Mogul because that was already declassified by the 80s. We can assume it isn't aliens either because that was the diversion they wanted everyone to look at. Or maybe that's just what they want us to think. Maybe they created these hoaxes just for the sake of debunking them and making ufologists look like frauds.

I mean, what better way to convince the public that aliens aren't real? We could go in circles like this all day and never get closer to the truth. It's safe to say there's definitely a conspiracy here, but it's impossible to know who's behind it or what they're trying to hide. What I can say is this. If you're going to look for an answer, be careful. You never know who you can trust. Thanks for listening.

I'll be back next week with another episode. To hear more stories hosted by me, check out Crime Junkie and all other Audiochuck originals.