MAGESTIC 12: Recovery, Storage and analysis of UFO technology

Published on Nov 28, 2013

The Show takes a look at the top secret government committee Majestic 12, appointed by President Harry S. Truman — which is said to be responsible for the recovery, storage and analysis of UFO technology.

Majestic 12 (or MJ-12) is the supposed code name of an alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman. The purpose of the committee would be to investigate the recovery of a UFO north of Roswell, New Mexico during July 1947.

Initial indications of such a group’s existence appeared in 1978 in declassified.

UFO conspiracy theories and the popular media based on them sometimes incorporate Majestic 12.

All the alleged original members of MJ-12 were notable for their military, government, and/or scientific achievements, and all were deceased when the documents first surfaced (the last to die was Jerome Hunsaker, only a few months before the MJ-12 papers first appeared).

The original composition was six civilians (mostly scientists), and six high-ranking military officers, two from each major military service. Three (Souers, Vandenberg, and Hillenkoetter) had been the first three heads of central intelligence. The Moore/Shandera documents did not make clear who was the director of MJ-12, or if there was any organizational hierarchy.

In 1978, Canadian researcher Arthur Bray uncovered previously classified Canadian UFO documents naming Dr. Vannevar Bush as heading a highly secret UFO investigation group within the U.S. Research and Development Board. No name for the group was given. Bray published excerpts of the documents in his 1979 book, The U.F.O. Connection. The author of some of the documents, Wilbert Smith, at the time was the chief radio engineer and telecommunications expert working in the Canadian Department of Transport and later headed Canadian government UFO investigations such as Project Magnet. Skeptical researcher Christopher D. Allan has claimed that Smith would not have had any security clearances and concludes that there is no way any such group headed by Bush could have come to his knowledge. On the contrary, Smith’s claims could have inspired the MJ-12 hoax that followed soon after Bray made the documents public. However, there were other classified Canadian documents besides Smith’s referencing Bush and the group. Furthermore Canadian researcher Grant Cameron has also pointed out that Smith must have had a high security clearance because he monitored all radio frequencies in Canada and ran the top secret “Radio Ottawa,” wherein Soviet radio communications were intercepted and Canadian spies could also radio in information to intelligence services. Smith also claimed to have communicated with aliens, using something called “Tensor Beam transmission”.

The earliest appearance of the term “MJ Twelve” was a message of unclear origin dated November 17, 1980. This so-called “Project Aquarius” Teletype message had been given to Albuquerque physicist and businessman Paul Bennewitz in November, 1980, by U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations counterintelligence officer Richard C. Doty. Bennewitz had photographed and recorded electronic data of what he believed to be UFO activity over nearby Kirtland AFB, a sensitive nuclear facility. Bennewitz reported his findings to officials at Kirtland, including Doty. In 1989, the UFOlogist Bill Moore claimed that the documents were actually a hoax created by Doty as part of an attempt to drive Bennewitz insane. One sentence in the lengthy Teletype message read, “The official US Government policy and results of Project Aquarius is [sic] still classified TOP SECRET with no dissemination outside channels and with access restricted to ‘MJ TWELVE.’”

In 1983, Doty also contacted UFO researcher and journalist Linda Moulton Howe, revealing alleged high-level UFO documents, including those describing crashed alien flying saucers and recovery of aliens. Doty again mentioned MJ-12, explaining that “MJ” stood for “Majority” (not “Majestic”).

Because the entire MJ-12 affair made its first appearance only a year after Bray had made public the incriminating Canadian documents about the secret UFO committee, one theory is that the Project Aquarius Teletype message was part of a counterintelligence hoax to discredit the information in the just-revealed Canadian documents. Thus the various MJ-12 documents could be fake, but the secret committee described in the verified Canadian documents could still have been real.