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For those of you who tuned into Midnight in the Desert to listen to me discuss the latest MJ-12 document release, well, I was bumped early in the evening because Heather Wade had “overbooked the show.” At least I wasn’t dragged off by security for refusing to give up my place at the microphone… which couldn’t have happened since I was at home and she controlled the telephone system anyway. But I did listen to the beginning of the program because like so many others, I wondered what Stan Friedman would say about the authenticity. Like many of us, he was interested in the source of the

By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 6-18-17

documents. They had seemed to excite him in earlier statements, but he now was somewhat more neutral though a careful reading of them should have given away the false nature of them... The mere mention that the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was involved should have been a huge red flag. The IPU has been identified and it has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs or anything of the nature. For more about the IPU see HERE.

I found one point hilarious and which nearly everyone has failed to mention. The first page says, “READ-AND-DESTROY. I have to wonder how the document survived with that instruction on the first page, which also argues against authenticity. I will note here that a top secret document’s destruction must be documented saying that it has been properly destroyed. Whoever “stole” this one would have had to violate that rule because he would have had to sign the destruction form.

Heather wouldn’t name names, and in one respect I understand that but that also tends to undermine the validity of the documents. She did say that the person who “stole” them originally had died so that he or she can’t be questioned about how he or she gained possession of them.

Heather hadn’t received the originals either. They had come to her in a .pdf file, which, as I have noted in the past, does not allow for much in the way of a forensic analysis of the paper, ink or anything else that might be gained by examination of the originals. We are left with a study of the format, the font, if the documents conformed to others created at the highest-levels of the government and if the documents fit into our current understanding of the situations being discussed in them.

Instead of analysis of these latest documents on the show, we were treated to another waltz down MJ-12 memory lane from the alleged moment the original documents first arrived at Jaime Shandera’s house in 1984 to the point we have reached now. There was nothing new here, other than listening to Stan talk about all his visits to archives, and he enjoys to do so (and hey, that is fun going through all this material, looking for that single and often elusive nugget) and things he had learned about the men who were named to the original MJ-12 committee, all of which was irrelevant to understanding these new documents.

For those who haven’t looked at them yet, though they can now be accessed through a variety of websites including that for Midnight in the Desert. You can still find them HERE if you are still interested.


According to the document, on March 25, 1948, the craft was watched on three radars “belonging to the recovery network of the White Sands Test Range and located in classified areas of southwest New Mexico.” In 1948, it was the White Sands Proving Ground, and if the radars were in southwest New Mexico, that would have prevented tracking of the object to low altitudes in northern New Mexico because the mountainous terrain would have been in the way. In fact, once you get very far north of White Sands, their radars aren’t much good for an object below 10,000 feet. Radar is line of sight.

Again, according to the document, the crash site was secured by 10:45 p.m. that night, which meant that no civilians would have been gathered at the site on the morning of March 25 to watch the military arrive because the object had yet to crash according to these new documents. And, if the civilians were on hand to see the military to arrive, it would have had to be on the morning of March 26, but then the site was already secured and the civilians would have been prevented from getting near.

We are treated to a reference to the base at Flat Rock, Nevada, which, of course, was the scene of much of the action in The Andromeda Strain. We learn that the Blue Berets (whoever they are… no, they don’t exist) came in disguised as National Guard, but I’m not sure how you pull that off since the uniforms worn by the National Guard are the same wore by those on active duty with the Army. I suppose they removed their Blue Berets and wore regulation headgear.

But there really doesn’t seem much reason to drag this out. The documents are faked. I spoke with Stephen Bassett yesterday afternoon, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he too thought the documents faked. We discussed some of the bloopers in text, the problems with the classification markings, and all the other errors. Bassett said that he didn’t think these were disinformation, but more likely just someone outside the government who had too much time on his hands. I’ll add someone who didn’t actually know much but who had gotten his hands of William Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec.

What we need to do now is place these documents in the same file folder with the Roswell Slides, the alien autopsy and little grey men who like strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music. Footnotes in the great journal of UFO information, or maybe, even better, have them all deleted from anything to do with UFO research because they have only distracted us. They have added nothing to our knowledge.
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Just like an over-the-hill, bloated rock band that doesn’t know when it’s time to retire and go away forever, the notorious saga of Majestic 12 is hitting the road and touring again. Will this be its final farewell? A tearful goodbye to all of its adoring fans? I sure as hell hope so, but I have grave doubts. ...

By Nick Redfern mysteriousuniverse.org 6-16-17

The new documents, which run to 24-pages, were recently (very recently) provided to Heather Wade of the Midnight in the Desert show. I have been on Heather’s show several times now and I like her. And when she says that she got the documents from what is described as “a trusted source,” I believe her. But, we don’t know who Heather’s source is. Nor do we know how – and under what circumstances – that same source got the documents. There is no doubt, however, that these are not the real thing.
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Okay, I’ve had time to review the document carefully, or rather given it a solid first reading and I have some points to make. I will note here that in my talks with Stephen Bassett, he suggested that all of us, meaning Stan Friedman, Richard Dolan, him and me, create a list of what our first impressions are, and the things that we spotted right off the top. I thought that idea had some merit. We’re not looking to authenticate or debunk, only at the things that disturbed us in some fashion. I did ask Heather Wade about the source, or sources, and she didn’t

By Kevin Randle A Different Perspective 6-15-17

give me names, only that they were ex-military and had possessed the documents for a very long time. She didn’t know which government agency had originated them, and there seemed no way to verify them through government sources. We also seem to suffer from the same problems that we’ve always had and that is that we’re working from copies and not originals. This makes the whole process problematic… and I think we can point to many cases in which copies of documents have turned out to be forgeries (think CBS and George W. Bush’s military records and any number of MJ-12 documents).

The classification markings on the documents do not seem to be consistent with authenticity, that is, the classification is not marked at both the top and the bottom of the document.

The dating format, 07 July, 1947, is not one that was in use in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that this format is consistent with the other MJ-12 documents even if it is more consistent with a dating format used by Bill Moore.

The use of “Ultra Top Secret” also raises questions. Ultra was the British code name for their operation to intercept and read high-level, highly-classified Nazi message traffic. This code name seems inappropriate for use by the US government or military. In keeping with that, there are several mentions that these documents are classified “Above Top Secret,” but really is a misnomer… Top Secret is the highest classification, but the number of people allowed to review certain documents can be further restricted by adding code word. Only those who are code word cleared would have access to the document and by adding a second code word you restrict the numbers even further. So, if there are two code words, you have a document that can be said to be two points above top secret, though that is not actually fact. While we can argue the semantics of this, I don’t believe someone on the inside would talk of a document being classified two points above top secret, but rather suggesting it was double code word protected.

The description of the Roswell case, and the chronology is not accurate based on all the documented evidence available. As but a single example, the document tells us that Mack Brazel alerted the authorities at Roswell Army Air Forces base (which is not the correct name of the facility) at “05:18” (which should have been written as 0518 hrs) though it is clear that it was the sheriff who alerted the Army and Major Marcel himself said that he learned about it as he was eating lunch.

One of the major red flags is, “At his arrival in Roswell, General Twining relieved Colonel Blanchard of command…” There is no evidence of any such order. The relief of a commanding officer is a major event. Had Twining arrived in Roswell and assumed command by virtue of being the senior officer present, that is not the same thing.


I’m now going to skip all the trouble with the Aztec aspect of this simply because there is so much that is simply wrong. And if this is a real briefing, where is the mention of Del Rio, Plains of San Agustin and Kingman?

Anyway, we are now treated to the transcript between an EBE and an assortment of interviewers who are never named for a reason that I can’t fathom (unless, of course, they don’t exist). At first glance, I was drawn to the comment about why the aliens had coming to Earth for centuries and learned, “And we like trees?” I wondered if this was the same group of aliens that liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music.

I did mention this to Stephen Bassett who wondered if someone had gone to all the trouble to fake the documents, all the study that it had taken and the time to create it, if he or she would then sabotage the effort with some ridiculous, off the wall comment about liking trees.

My first reaction was to think that was an interesting point, but I had yet to carefully read the document. Having now done so, I see that there really is nothing new here. The information about Roswell is wrong, the name of the base is wrong, the chain of command is wrong, and even the higher headquarters at Fort Worth is wrong (it wasn’t the 5th Air Force, but the 8th).

The Aztec material is derivative of Steinman’s book, the MJ-12 information is taken from there (or maybe from any of Stan Friedman’s many writings on it), and there is nothing that is suggestive of advanced scholarship. The writing does not sound as if it came from a government source, and without names, without government agencies, without any way to check things out, this just doesn’t seem to be authentic. I withheld my opinion on this, just announcing it so others would have a chance to review the documents, but it is now clear that this does nothing to further our knowledge and just confuses an already confused issue.
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Everyone knows the story of the alien craft that supposedly crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, but who was appointed to deal with it?

Eric Grundhauser www.slate.com 12-7-16

According to UFOlogy diehards, it was a group known as the Majestic 12, and there are top-secret documents to prove it. The FBI says the whole story is "bogus." Yes, that's a quote. It wrote “BOGUS” across the documents.

The relevant files can be easily accessed on the FBI’s website, and nothing in there has been redacted. But no matter how many times the Majestic 12 case gets debunked, true believers stay interested.
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Following my recent appearance on Coast to Coast (6/20/16) I have received a great many emails from persons asking me to elaborate on one subject or another, including the MJ-12 affair. Given this, I hereby offer an article I wrote in 2014:

Stan Friedman and I once had a brief face-to-face debate about the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents, as I was helping him move his luggage from his hotel room to the lobby, to await the taxi to the airport, following the III World UFO Forum in Curitiba, Brazil in June 2009, at which we both spoke. One of those documents, the key Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD), purports to be a Top Secret report to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, in which the Roswell Incident—the recovery of an alien spaceship and the

By Robert Hasings The UFO Chronicles 7-1-16

bodies of its crew—is outlined for the soon-to-be new chief executive.

Along with this earth-shattering news, Eisenhower is told of the existence of a Top Secret group, the Majestic 12 or Majik 12, a “Research and Development Intelligence” operation whose 12 members oversee basically everything related to the case.

After I pressed him on the point, Friedman actually agreed with me that the obscure elements in the EBD—which he publicly claims prove its authenticity—could have been researched by counterintelligence personnel, military or civilian, and planted in the “document” to lend it an air of legitimacy. This includes the mention of UFO skeptic Dr. Donald Menzel as a member of MJ-12—whose covert relationship with the National Security Agency was only exposed after the EBD was made public—as well as other items.

In other words, if the MJ-12 affair is a disinformation scheme involving a counterintelligence group, and not just a simple hoax—as I maintain—the arcane aspects of the Eisenhower Briefing Document (and Cutler-Twining Memo and Truman-Forrestal Memo) that Friedman holds up as evidence of their authenticity, might instead be explained by the spooks who created them having done their homework. If their task was to muddy the waters, so to speak, certainly they would have been allowed access to various relevant historical materials that would have assisted them in the creation of passable forgeries.

As one of the first investigators of MJ-12, who helped expose its bogus origins—together with Barry Greenwood, Kevin Randle, and the late Bob Todd—I have detailed information about the early manifestations of the caper. My widely-circulated March 1, 1989 paper, “The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments” is available at www.sacred-texts.com.

● While Greenwood and Randle believe that a simple hoax, designed to make money, was perpetrated by researcher Bill Moore and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard Doty, I contend the available evidence strongly suggests that the MJ-12 fraud, while originating as a hoax, was quickly co-opted by AFOSI and perhaps other intelligence groups, as a means to disinform/misdirect ufologists and the public-at-large, regarding the nature and extent of the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.

I am fully aware that Stan Friedman will never agree with this scenario—and may claim that our conversation in Brazil never happened—so I am merely going to itemize the following for the benefit of others who have an open mind about the subject:

According to files donated to MUFON by the late Bob Pratt, the name “MAJIK 12” was assigned to a proposed work of fiction about UFOs, the official cover-up of them, and one intelligence agent’s quest to expose the facts. The novel was to be co-authored by journalist Pratt and researcher Bill Moore, probably with the assistance of Richard Doty.

All of this was discussed some three years before the first supposedly real Majestic-12/Majik-12 “document” surfaced. MAJIK 12 was the book’s working title; IAC, for Identified Alien Craft, was an alternate title. However, at some point, The Aquarius Project was unilaterally selected as the title by Moore. The terms “Project Aquarius” and “IAC” later appeared in the allegedly real Majestic-12 documents, as did “EBE” for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, another term associated with the proposed fictional work.

● Two years before the MJ-12 documents were released to the public, Moore suggested to researcher Brad Sparks that fake documents relating to the Roswell UFO recovery be created and disseminated, the idea being that military veterans with a knowledge of the event would be enticed to come forward with their stories, thereby breaking the case wide open. Sparks states that he strongly recommended that Moore not do it.

● The undeveloped roll of film containing images of the EDB and Truman-Forrestal (TF) documents was mailed to Moore’s associate Jaime Shandera from Albuquerque, New Mexico, coincidentally the location of Kirtland AFB—where OSI agent Richard Doty worked.

● In April 2009, the late Gabe Valdez, a retired New Mexico State Policeman famous for his cattle mutilation work, told me that fellow state trooper Richard Doty had confessed to him that he had forged “lots” of UFO-related documents while working as an OSI agent. Doty became a New Mexico State Policeman after retiring from the Air Force in 1988.

Doty’s fraudulent “Craig Weitzel letter”, “1977 Ellsworth AFB incident document”, and “Aquarius Telex”—the first document to surface that actually mentioned MJ-12—were exposed in the 1980s. Three fakes hardly constitute “lots” of forgeries. What other “documents” did Doty foist on ufology and the rest of the world?
Gabe Valdez asked me not to tape our 2009 conversation or to quote him publicly; now that he is dead, I feel I can do so.

●In May 2009, I posted various MJ-12-related statements on a blog, at one point referring to Doty as “a government disinformation agent who forged documents.” On May 24, 2009, Doty emailed me, angrily saying, “A simple fact, Mr. Hastings, everything I did during my intelligence days were [sic] sanctioned.”

This is classic Doty, notorious for his frequent grammatical and spelling errors. I note here that the MJ-12 documents have a number of such errors sprinkled throughout them.

Not that Doty is necessarily a candidate for the forgery of the EBD in particular; its somewhat complex content required a level of sophistication arguably beyond Doty’s rather limited abilities. Instead, higher-level intelligence types, and Bill Moore himself, must be considered to be high on the list of persons who might be responsible for its creation.

Remember, Moore once told researcher Lee Graham that he was an intelligence operative, and even showed Graham an ID badge that Graham said was “identical” in appearance to the badges shown to him by two members of the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) who had once visited him.

When I published Graham’s comments in 1989, Moore quickly said that he had only been joking with the hapless researcher and that the badge was actually a laminated MUFON field investigator’s card. However, Graham remains adamant that the badge he was shown was a genuine government ID card.

But if Doty is not responsible for the creation of the EBD, the ridiculous mumbo jumbo found in the so-called “MJ-5 Memo” is right up his alley. On October 14, 1988, Doty appeared anonymously (back-lit and voice-altered) as “Falcon” on the absurd TV farce UFO Cover-up Live!, together with USAF intelligence officer Capt. Robert M. Collins, who also appeared anonymously as “Condor”. The pair claimed to be high-level intelligence insiders who knew about multiple UFO crashes, live aliens being held captive by the U.S. government, and other such fare. Apparently the aliens liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music, according to Doty and Collins.

In November 1987, the same Capt. Robert Collins showed Linda Moulton Howe a ring-binder full of MJ-12 documents at his home in Albuquerque. According to Howe, Collins had been “frantically” trying to reach her so that he could present those supposedly important files. The EBD was prominently featured, as was the MJ-5 Memo, together with another memorandum that mentioned the live aliens held at Los Alamos—among other items.

Howe swallowed it all, of course, soon sharing information about the bogus evidence with ufologists and the public, following-up on her earlier “revelations” about alleged secret U.S./alien treaties, underground alien bases, and other such disclosures—all of which had been provided to her by OSI Special Agent Doty.
In 2009, Collins denied showing documents to Howe (and John Lear) at his house in 1987. Fortunately, I recorded my conversation with Howe less than a year after the event and she described the goings-on in detail. A summary of all of this, as well as my telephone transcript, may be read in my Operation Bird Droppings article.

According to his self-written bio at Amazon.com, appearing with a summary of his book, Exempt From Disclosure, Robert Collins is a “former Air Force Intelligence Officer, Capt, O-3 (Chief Analyst/Scientist in theoretical Physics holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance) at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD)...Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, with an extensive background in Aircraft Avionics Systems, Ground Communications, and Engineering Physics (graduate school—Electro-Optics, Plasma, and Nuclear Physics) totaling over 22 years…”

Gee, not a single word from Collins about his appearing on a national television program masquerading as a “high-level intelligence source, code-named Condor” who also “frantically” disseminated disinformation relating to MJ-12.

Summarizing here, in the early days of the ruse, two of the leading proponents for the legitimacy of the now-discredited MJ-12 material were a counterintelligence OSI agent, who later confessed to forging UFO-related documents, and a positive intelligence officer who willingly posed as something he was not—someone having intimate knowledge about various crashed UFOs and captured aliens being held by the U.S. government.

Try as he may, Stan Friedman cannot credibly distance the supposedly “good” MJ-12 documents—EBD, CT, TF—from the “bad” ones that were circulating in the 1980s. They were all lumped together and presented as equally important and legitimate by two Air Force intelligence operatives—clearly acting as disinformation agents—who were aggressively foisting them on well-meaning but gullible people such as Linda Howe.

Once the shenanigans perpetrated by the Kirtland AFB Cabal were effectively exposed, by Greenwood, Todd and myself, Bill Moore saw the writing on the wall and finally acknowledged much of what we had written.

During his infamous “confession” speech, at the MUFON conference in Las Vegas, on July 1, 1989, Moore said, “Disinformation is a strange and bizarre game. Those who play it are completely aware that an operation’s success is dependent upon dropping information upon a target, or ‘mark,’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it to others as if it were true. Once this has been accomplished, the work of the counterintelligence specialists is complete. They can simply withdraw in the confidence that the dirty work of spreading their poisonous seeds will be done by others.”

Linda Howe and others—including Stanton Friedman—certainly did their part in the game, helping to create a mythology that endures today.

As I wrote earlier, the available evidence strongly suggests that while the MJ-12 Affair began as a legitimate money-making project, involving the writing of a novel, it eventually became a hoax, involving forged documents—with money again being the objective, resulting from various related schemes—before finally morphing into a disinformation ploy orchestrated by intelligence and counterintelligence groups within the U.S. Air Force.


I am distressed that the MJ-12 debate (actually, debacle) continues to have ramifications 30 years later, perpetually polluting the legitimate UFO research database.

For example, MJ-12 was prominently featured during the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, held in Washington D.C. in May 2013. Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly characterized the MJ-12-related SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual—which directs military personnel how to recover crashed UFOs and dead aliens—as having “stood the test of time”. Hardly! Military document expert and longtime UFO researcher Jan Aldrich has discovered over 50 factual errors and/or discrepancies in military protocol in the so-called “manual”.

Another high-profile personage in ufology, self-described “historian” Richard Dolan, has repeatedly vouched for the legitimacy of the MJ-12 materials in various UFO “documentaries” on television.

And Robert and Ryan Wood, at their Majestic Documents website, still regularly churn out pro-MJ-12 “evidence” and commentary. As I pointedly said to them, from the podium at the 2012 Society for Scientific Exploration conference, if one is going to have any hope of deciphering the U.S. government’s covert response to UFOs, one must adhere to the fundamental principles underlying academic scholarship or, at least, traditional investigative journalism, to figure out what is real, as opposed to what is not.

In other words, relying only on authenticated documents and vetted witness testimony when evaluating historical developments. In response, the Woods just stared at their shoes and said nothing.

Given that the MJ-12 proponents routinely ignore this valid advice, and spout off incessantly about their supposedly-insightful “findings”, it’s no wonder that the bullshit typed-up by OSI Agent Doty, con artist Bill Moore and, later on, hoaxer Tim Cooper, has only gained ground on the Internet over the years, at least among the less-discriminating members of the public.

At least Cooper has now completely disavowed the MJ-12 2.0 “documents” that he was actively disseminating a few years ago. Oh, you didn’t know about that? See my “Operation Bird Droppings” article addendum. Regardless, questions about Cooper’s possible role in creating those forged files remain unanswered.

Jeez, what a colossal waste of everyone’s time! There are legitimate areas in ufology that go begging for attention by qualified researchers. It’s nothing short of pathetic that so much effort has been spent on the MJ-12 Affair, especially when the basic facts about its dubious origins and early machinations have been well researched and publicized for years.

To the reader, I say this: Please do your homework. The facts are indeed available, if one is willing to take the time to discover them. Start by asking yourself whether any “evidence” offered by the MJ-12 proponents would meet the standards of academic or journalistic investigative research. Can even a single MJ-12 “document” be proved to be genuine, by any accepted definition of that word?

Bizarrely, Stan Friedman has recently asserted that provenance—the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object—is not even an issue when it comes to analyzing the MJ-12 documents! Would any academician or investigative journalist dare make such a claim about a disputed document that has mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, if he/she hoped to have any credibility at all after doing so? Of course not!

The great many documents underlying my own UFO-Nukes Connection research can be verifiably traced to a given government department or agency. Can the MJ-12 proponents honestly make that claim? No, they cannot. All they can offer are their opinions about how it might be possible for these supposed documents to be real.

Whoopee...

For the record, I personally believe that the Roswell Incident—the secret recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—did in fact take place. I recommend a review of the on-the-record statements by the late U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, as presented at roswellproof.homestead.com. While having only an indirect knowledge of the incident and its aftermath, acquired from some of the military participants who were involved in the operation, Exon’s revelations are far more insightful and valuable than anything emerging from the MJ-12 fiasco.
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      Stan Friedman and I once had a brief face-to-face debate about the Majestic-12 (MJ-12) documents, as I was helping him move his luggage from his hotel room to the lobby, to await the taxi to the airport, following the III World UFO Forum in Curitiba, Brazil in June 2009, at which we both spoke.

One of those documents, the key Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD), purports to be a Top Secret report to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower, prepared by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, in which the Roswell Incident—the recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—is outlined for the soon-to-be new chief executive.

Along with this earth-shattering news, Eisenhower is told of the existence of a Top Secret group, the Majestic 12 or Majik 12, a “Research and Development Intelligence” operation whose 12 members oversee basically everything related to the case.

After I pressed him on the point, Friedman actually agreed with me that the obscure elements in the EBD—which he publicly claims prove its authenticity—could have been researched by counterintelligence personnel, military or civilian, and planted in the “document” to lend it an air of legitimacy. This includes the mention of UFO skeptic Dr. Donald Menzel as a member of MJ-12—whose covert relationship with the National Security Agency was only exposed after the EBD was made public—as well as other items.

In other words, if the MJ-12 affair is a disinformation scheme involving a counterintelligence group, and not just a simple hoax—as I maintain—the arcane aspects of the Eisenhower Briefing Document (and Cutler-Twining Memo and Truman-Forrestal Memo) that Friedman holds up as evidence of their authenticity, might instead be explained by the spooks who created them having done their homework. If their task was to muddy the waters, so to speak, certainly they would have been allowed access to various relevant historical materials that would have assisted them in the creation of passable forgeries.

As one of the first investigators of MJ-12, who helped expose its bogus origins—together with Barry Greenwood, Kevin Randle, and the late Bob Todd—I have detailed information about the early manifestations of the caper. My widely-circulated March 1, 1989 paper, “The MJ-12 Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments” is available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/hastings.htm.

While Greenwood and Randle believe that a simple hoax, designed to make money, was perpetrated by researcher Bill Moore and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard Doty, I contend the available evidence strongly suggests that the MJ-12 fraud, while originating as a hoax, was quickly co-opted by AFOSI and perhaps other intelligence groups, as a means to disinform/misdirect ufologists and the public-at-large, regarding the nature and extent of the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.

I am fully aware that Stan Friedman will never agree with this scenario—and may claim that our conversation in Brazil never happened—so I am merely going to itemize the following for the benefit of others who have an open mind about the subject:

● According to files donated to MUFON by the late Bob Pratt, the name “MAJIK 12” was assigned to a proposed work of fiction about UFOs, the official cover-up of them, and one intelligence agent’s quest to expose the facts. The novel was to be co-authored by journalist Pratt and researcher Bill Moore, probably with the assistance of Richard Doty.

All of this was discussed some three years before the first supposedly real Majestic-12/Majik-12 “document” surfaced. MAJIK 12 was the book’s working title; IAC, for Identified Alien Craft, was an alternate title. However, at some point, The Aquarius Project was unilaterally selected as the title by Moore. The terms “Project Aquarius” and “IAC” later appeared in the allegedly real Majestic-12 documents, as did “EBE” for Extraterrestrial Biological Entity, another term associated with the proposed fictional work.

● Two years before the MJ-12 documents were released to the public, Moore suggested to researcher Brad Sparks that fake documents relating to the Roswell UFO recovery be created and disseminated, the idea being that military veterans with a knowledge of the event would be enticed to come forward with their stories, thereby breaking the case wide open. Sparks states that he strongly recommended that Moore not do it.

● The undeveloped roll of film containing images of the EDB and Truman-Forrestal (TF) documents was mailed to Moore’s associate Jaime Shandera from Albuquerque, New Mexico, coincidentally the location of Kirtland AFB—where OSI agent Richard Doty worked.

● In April 2009, the late Gabe Valdez, a retired New Mexico State Policeman famous for his cattle mutilation work, told me that fellow state trooper Richard Doty had confessed to him that he had forged “lots” of UFO-related documents while working as an OSI agent. Doty became a New Mexico State Policeman after retiring from the Air Force in 1988.

Doty’s fraudulent “Craig Weitzel letter”, “1977 Ellsworth AFB incident document”, and “Aquarius Telex”—the first document to surface that actually mentioned MJ-12—were exposed in the 1980s. Three fakes hardly constitute “lots” of forgeries. What other “documents” did Doty foist on ufology and the rest of the world?

Gabe Valdez asked me not to tape our 2009 conversation or to quote him publicly; now that he is dead, I feel I can do so.

● In May 2009, I posted various MJ-12-related statements on a blog, at one point referring to Doty as “a government disinformation agent who forged documents.” On May 24, 2009, Doty emailed me, angrily saying, “A simple fact, Mr. Hastings, everything I did during my intelligence days were [sic] sanctioned.”

This is Classic Doty, notorious for his frequent grammatical and spelling errors. I note here that the MJ-12 documents have a number of such errors sprinkled throughout them.

Not that Doty is necessarily a candidate for the forgery of the EBD in particular; its somewhat complex content required a level of sophistication arguably beyond Doty’s rather limited abilities. Instead, higher-level intelligence types, and Bill Moore himself, must be considered to be high on the list of persons who might be responsible for its creation.

Remember, Moore once told researcher Lee Graham that he was an intelligence operative, and even showed Graham an ID badge that Graham said was “identical” in appearance to the badges shown to him by two members of the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) who had once visited him.

When I published Graham’s comments in 1989, Moore quickly said that he had only been joking with the hapless researcher and that the badge was only a laminated MUFON field investigator’s card. However, Graham remains adamant that the badge he was shown was a genuine government ID card.

But if Doty is not responsible for the creation of the EBD, the ridiculous mumbo jumbo found in the so-called “MJ-5 Memo” is right up his alley. On October 14, 1988, Doty appeared anonymously (back-lit and voice-altered) as “Falcon” on the absurd TV farce UFO Cover-up Live!, together with USAF intelligence officer Capt. Robert M. Collins, who also appeared anonymously as “Condor”. The pair claimed to be high-level intelligence insiders who knew about multiple UFO crashes, live aliens being held captive by the U.S. government, and other such fare. Apparently the aliens liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music, according to Doty and Collins.

In November 1987, the same Capt. Robert Collins showed Linda Moulton Howe a ring-binder full of MJ-12 documents at his home in Albuquerque. According to Howe, Collins had been “frantically” trying to reach her so that he could present those supposedly important files. The EBD was prominently featured, as was the MJ-5 Memo, together with another memorandum that mentioned the live aliens held at Los Alamos—among other items.

Howe swallowed it all, of course, soon sharing information about the bogus evidence with ufologists and the public, following-up on her earlier “revelations” about alleged secret U.S./alien treaties, underground alien bases, and other such disclosures—all of which had been provided to her by OSI Special Agent Doty.

In 2009, Collins denied showing documents to Howe (and John Lear) at his house in 1987. Fortunately, I recorded my conversation with Howe less than a year after the event and she described the goings-on in detail. A summary of all of this, as well as my telephone transcript, may be read in my Operation Bird Droppings article.

According to his self-written bio at Amazon.com, appearing with a summary of his book, Exempt From Disclosure, Robert Collins is a “former Air Force Intelligence Officer, Capt, O-3 (Chief Analyst/Scientist in theoretical Physics holding a Top Secret/SCI clearance) at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD)...Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, with an extensive background in Aircraft Avionics Systems, Ground Communications, and Engineering Physics (graduate school—Electro-Optics, Plasma, and Nuclear Physics) totaling over 22 years…”

Gee, not a single word from Collins about his appearing on a national television program masquerading as a “high-level intelligence source, code-named Condor” who also “frantically” disseminated disinformation relating to MJ-12.

Summarizing here, in the early days of the ruse, two of the leading proponents for the legitimacy of the now-discredited MJ-12 material were a counterintelligence OSI agent, who later confessed to forging UFO-related documents, and a positive intelligence officer who willingly posed as something he was not—someone having intimate knowledge about various crashed UFOs and captured aliens being held by the U.S. government.

Try as he may, Stan Friedman cannot credibly distance the supposedly “good” MJ-12 documents—EBD, CT, TF—from the “bad” ones that were circulating in the 1980s. They were all lumped together and presented as equally important and legitimate by two Air Force intelligence operatives—clearly acting as disinformation agents—who were aggressively foisting them on well-meaning but gullible people such as Linda Howe.

Once the shenanigans perpetrated by the Kirtland AFB Cabal were effectively exposed, by Greenwood, Todd and myself, Bill Moore saw the writing on the wall and finally acknowledged much of what we had written.

During his infamous “confession” speech, at the MUFON conference in Las Vegas, on July 1, 1989, Moore said, “Disinformation is a strange and bizarre game. Those who play it are completely aware that an operation’s success is dependent upon dropping information upon a target, or ‘mark,’ in such a way that the person will accept it as truth and will repeat, and even defend it to others as if it were true. Once this has been accomplished, the work of the counterintelligence specialists is complete. They can simply withdraw in the confidence that the dirty work of spreading their poisonous seeds will be done by others.”

Linda Howe and others—including Stanton Friedman—certainly did their part in the game, helping to create a mythology that endures today.

As I wrote earlier, the available evidence strongly suggests that while the MJ-12 Affair began as a legitimate money-making project, involving the writing of a novel, it eventually became a hoax, involving forged documents—with money again being the objective, resulting from various related schemes—before finally morphing into a disinformation ploy orchestrated by intelligence and counterintelligence groups within the U.S. Air Force.


I am distressed that the MJ-12 debate (actually, debacle) continues to have ramifications 30 years later, perpetually polluting the legitimate UFO research database.

For example, MJ-12 was prominently featured during the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, held in Washington D.C. in May 2013. Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly characterized the MJ-12-related SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual—which directs military personnel how to recover crashed UFOs and dead aliens—as having “stood the test of time”. Hardly! Military document expert and longtime UFO researcher Jan Aldrich has discovered over 50 factual errors and/or discrepancies in military protocol in the so-called “manual”.

Another high-profile personage in ufology, self-described “historian” Richard Dolan, has repeatedly vouched for the legitimacy of the MJ-12 materials in various UFO “documentaries” on television.

And Robert and Ryan Wood, at their Majestic Documents website, still regularly churn out pro-MJ-12 “evidence” and commentary. As I pointedly said to them, from the podium at the 2012 Society for Scientific Exploration conference, if one is going to have any hope of deciphering the U.S. government’s covert response to UFOs, one must adhere to the fundamental principles underlying academic scholarship or, at least, traditional investigative journalism, to figure out what is real, as opposed to what is not.

In other words, relying only on authenticated documents and vetted witness testimony when evaluating historical developments. In response, the Woods just stared at their shoes and said nothing.

Given that the MJ-12 proponents routinely ignore this valid advice, and spout off incessantly about their supposedly-insightful “findings”, it’s no wonder that the bullshit typed-up by OSI Agent Doty, con artist Bill Moore and, later on, hoaxer Tim Cooper, has only gained ground on the Internet over the years, at least among the less-discriminating members of the public.

At least Cooper has now completely disavowed the MJ-12 2.0 “documents” that he was actively disseminating a few years ago. Oh, you didn’t know about that? See my “Operation Bird Droppings” article addendum. Regardless, questions about Cooper’s possible role in creating those forged files remain unanswered.

Jeez, what a colossal waste of everyone’s time! There are legitimate areas in ufology that go begging for attention by qualified researchers. It’s nothing short of pathetic that so much effort has been spent on the MJ-12 Affair, especially when the basic facts about its dubious origins and early machinations have been well researched and publicized for years.

To the reader, I say this: Please do your homework. The facts are indeed available, if one is willing to take the time to discover them. Start by asking yourself whether any “evidence” offered by the MJ-12 proponents would meet the standards of academic or journalistic investigative research. Can even a single MJ-12 “document” be proved to be genuine, by any accepted definition of that word?

Bizarrely, Stan Friedman has recently asserted that provenance—the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object—is not even an issue when it comes to analyzing the MJ-12 documents! Would any academician or investigative journalist dare make such a claim about a disputed document that has mysteriously appeared out of nowhere, if he/she hoped to have any credibility at all after doing so? Of course not!

The great many documents underlying my own UFO-Nukes Connection research can be verifiably traced to a given government department or agency. Can the MJ-12 proponents honestly make that claim? No, they cannot. All they can offer are their opinions about how it might be possible for these supposed documents to be real.

Whoopee...

For the record, I personally believe that the Roswell Incident—the secret recovery of an alien spaceship and the bodies of its crew—did in fact take place. I recommend a review of the on-the-record statements by the late U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon, as presented at http://roswellproof.homestead.com/exon.html. While having only an indirect knowledge of the incident and its aftermath, acquired from some of the military participants who were involved in the operation, Exon’s revelations are far more insightful and valuable than anything emerging from the MJ-12 fiasco.
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