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 ================================================================= ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************