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April 2004
BACKGROUND
Equally unsurprising is the fact that a number of phony or hoax or fraudulent MJ-12 documents have been released as well.
Clearly if the original documents:
...are genuine, then the consequences are enormous.
Man is NOT alone and the government has covered
up the biggest story of the millennium at least since 1947.
This contained many pages of SOM 1-01: Majestic 12 Group SPECIAL OPERATIONS MANUAL: "Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal.”
Meanwhile Tim Cooper, a researcher in Big Bear Lake, California, began receiving loads of supposedly related MJ-12 documents.
There would appear to be no connection between the original three
documents and the SOM 1.01 (Mailed from Wisconsin rather than Albuquerque,
NM) or the mass of Tim Cooper documents which were usually in the form of
Xerox copies, often only legible with difficulty and received by him by mail
or dropped off at his PO Box.
In much of the discussion one finds the use of the four basic rules for debunking of any controversial idea:
Another important rule for some of the attackers is that “Absence of Evidence is Evidence for Absence.”
Karl Pflock and others cite numerous documents, mostly only classified Secret, that say nothing about Roswell or MAJESTIC 12. This, of course, neglects the fact that there are still numerous documents from the Truman and Eisenhower eras 1945-1961 that are still classified, that we rarely see documents that have classification stamps of TOP SECRET Code Word (TSCW).
I was told in November, 2003, by an archivist at the Ike Library that they still have about 300,000 pages of classified documents.
We know that the NSA classified 156 UFO documents (found in response to a Judge’s directive) as TOP SECRET UMBRA when they finally released a highly expurgated version (about two lines per page are not covered with Wite-Out), supposedly because that information is about sources and methods.
Why would it be listed under UFOs if only 5% is
about UFOs?
The best documents for comparison with the EBD would be the four National Security Briefings for President-Elect Eisenhower presented by DCI Walter B. Smith in the time period between Ike’s election on November 4, 1952, and January 9, 1953, when Smith informed President Truman of his security briefings for Ike before and after the election.
Unfortunately, despite my FOIA request to the
CIA and a subsequent appeal to their response ("We have nothing in response
to your request” even though I gave the dates and times of two of the
briefings), we have no such documents for comparison.
For example, Carl Sagan (Ref.10) said,
He seemed to be unaware of the fact that Klass had paid me $1000.00 for providing more than fourteen documents done in exactly the same Pica typeface as the Cutler-Twining Memo though Klass, on the basis of nine Elite Typeface documents (obtained by him by mail, he had never been to the Ike Library) of the 250,000 pages of NSC material at the Ike Library, had insisted the CTM should have been done in Elite!
Some lexicographic research! Our correspondence
and a copy of his check to me are in Ref. 2.
Goldberg is a Professor of History at the University of Utah.
Anybody spending much time at the Truman and Eisenhower Archives would find many different date formats in classified, limited distribution, old documents.
In Ref. 2 I published three brief cover memos from CIA Director Allen Dulles to White House Staff Secretary Colonel Andrew Goodpaster, done within a ten-day period, using these three date formats:
...and even noted one file folder that had seven date formats and found examples of both Roscoe Hillenkoetter and W.B. Smith (DCIs and MJ-12 members) using the day, month, comma, year format of the EBD.
Goldberg didn’t bother to check the Oxford Dictionary. Both “media” and “impacted” were in use at the time.
I will discuss military titles below.
This was a truly incredible proclamation and is totally false.
One might be forgiven for thinking Ed was claiming to have reviewed all of RG 341. Record Group 341 has 9787 cubic feet of material (about 1000 4-drawer filling cabinets). I have, since 1985, had a 56-page Preliminary Inventory of the Records for RG 341 which lists various entries and how many feet of files are in each and how much of the total is TS: typically only a few percent.
For example "Unclassified through Secret, Incoming and Outgoing messages 1946-Dec. 1957,” 1743 ft. Entry 21 of RG 341. “Top Secret Incoming and Outgoing Messages, Oct. 1947-Jan, 1958,” 51ft. Entry 23 of RG 341.
In other words there were only 3% (51 of 1743) as many TS messages as those through SECRET. Furthermore many of the documents are still classified. I pointed this out on the UFO Updates Internet interest group.
Ed’s response after a few days of silence was
Like the kid who takes his marbles and goes
home.
I noted that an archivist at the Ike Library said that often the White House didn’t use TS Control numbers. I had published two TS documents without control numbers in Ref. 2 in 1990.
One would think they were relevant since they came from Robert Cutler and wound up in General Nathan Twining’s papers at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Jan said it would only count if the originals at the Ike Library had no TS Control numbers.
Dr. Herbert Pankratz at the Ike Library graciously supplied me with a Xerox copy of the one memo he found (It indeed had no TS control number) and noted in writing on January 9, 2003,
I should stress that, of course, many TS documents do have TS control numbers - especially when there are multiple copies of a many-page document.
The EBD says “Copy One of One.”
The point is that supposedly this was never used and doesn’t make sense because TOP SECRET is the highest category and RESTRICTED is the lowest.
The Archives in their first version (May 9, 1988) of a commentary about the CTM stated,
They later corrected several false claims in response to data provided by me. I must admit that although I had found Confidential Restricted and Secret Restricted, I had not found TOP SECRET RESTRICTED.
Does that mean it wasn’t used? NO, since we have seen only a small amount of TS material.
It should be noted that often highly classified information from
one administration was carried over to the next at the White House rather
than being sent to the appropriate presidential Library. The Ike Library had
a number of documents from the Truman era that were not at the Truman
Library.
I tried to obtain copies of the materials they had seen. I was told that the materials were still classified.
Clearly absence of evidence was NOT evidence for absence.
I was informed that this was standard practice prior to declassification.
An obscure detail indeed.
Kevin Randle’s major complaint about the MJ-12 papers is that the military ranks are blatantly wrong.
On page 2 of the EBD, Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (DCI 1947-1950) is noted thusly:
The kicker here is that Hillenkoetter was not a
Full Admiral but only a Rear Admiral.
This makes perfect sense in view of three factors:
Early on Randle had asked me for other examples of Hillenkoetter signing memos as Admiral.
I had to point out that there is no
Hillenkoetter signature on the EBD, so the question is irrelevant.
...had no trouble with generic ranks.
Ike himself in his books used them.
Fortunately, because of the work of California researcher Brian Parks, I was able to locate a relevant example of just this same approach. Andrew Goodpaster (by this time a Brigadier General) had written a classified memo dated June 30, 1958, in which he listed the attendees at a meeting on June 27, 1958.
Several were civilians and five were military. All of the latter, including himself, were listed as General or Admiral even though only one was a 4-star. However, his signature is Brigadier General. Goodpaster had been with Ike from the start of his presidency in 1953, so surely knew the right protocol for the White House.
During a visit in November, 2003, I found a
number of these "memcons” from General Goodpaster using generic ranks for
meeting attendees including himself but signing Brigadier General.
After all he was, at the time in 1952, the best known UFO sceptic. By the time of his death in 1976, he had written three very negative books and given a number of papers - all attacking UFO reality.
Often his UFO science, as has been noted by,
...was almost ludicrous.
As I have noted elsewhere, his presence on the committee had bothered Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera and myself right from the start suggesting that the memo was a hoax. There was obviously the problem of all the others, based on readily available information, having had very high level security clearances.
But surely one didn’t need a clearance to teach
astronomy at Harvard?
There I made a shocking discovery that Menzel was up to his ears in very highly classified work for the CIA, NSA, and more than thirty companies.
He had taught cryptography before WW 2, learned a different symbolic language (Japanese) and worked on all kinds of classified problems for many years after WW 2. He told Jack Kennedy he could tell him more about the NSA when they were properly cleared to each other.
Menzel had been associated with the NSA and its navy predecessor for thirty years as of 1960!
None of this was noted in an eight-page appreciation in Sky and Telescope after his death (Ref. 13). I published an article in IUR (Ref. 14) and gave more details in Ref. 2 and Ref. 3. I had early on noted correspondence between Menzel’s attorney and MJ-12 member Bush thanking Bush for his support of Menzel at a terrible USAF Loyalty Hearing.
The file is at the Harvard Archives. Fascinating
reading.
All admitted that they knew nothing of his clandestine postwar activities. Some, many years later, were able to obtain some government files on Menzel. None have shown that these were known prior to my discoveries in 1986.
I should point out that many very bright spies led double lives for years such as Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who were Soviet spies working for many years in British intelligence.
Claus Fuchs who spied at Los Alamos certainly
led a double life.
This is another one of those “absence of evidence” claims.
Certainly I had never claimed to have found any
direct evidence. But none of Menzel’s files at the Harvard Archives were
classified despite all his classified activities. He had already spent
thirty years (as of 1960) working for the NSA and its Navy predecessors. No
rational person would expect him to have left classified materials about a
TOP SECRET Code Word black budget activity, whose very existence was
classified, in the open.
He mentions the CIA but never mentions the NSA
connection which was the focus of my articles.
Dr. Wescott reviewed these and the EBD and stated in an April 7, 1988, letter to Bob:
Phil Klass in a fast press release after Bill Moore publicized the EBD, TFM, and CTM, had claimed it was an obvious fraud since it made all kinds of mistakes compared to real Truman letters. He used the word “letter” nine times even though it is clearly headed “Memorandum.”
Many have claimed that the typewriter was obviously from 1960 proving it was a fraud (no forensic document analysis was provided).
Most claimed that the signature was identical to that on another memo from Truman to MJ-12 member Vannevar Bush. First measurements clearly indicated it was not an exact copy since the lengths of various segments seemed not to match. Randle provided the off-the-cuff opinion of Peter Tytell, a world-class Questioned Documents examiner.
Moore, Shandera and I had sent a copy of the documents to PT who didn’t want his name used anywhere, and prepared no report, but apparently claimed the typewriter typeface was not in use until the 1960s. Randle quotes him thusly “It was just perfect because the whole thing of the twelve pages or however many pages it was.
Most of the pages were just blank pages with just five words written on them like Top Secret or Appendix A or something like that.” In reality there were eight pages and only one, page 7, (not included by Randle) had “Appendix A.”
Fortunately Dr. Robert M. Wood hired an expert, James A. Black, to perform a professional examination.
On November 13, 1998, Black stated,
Black also added that that the disputed signature is most likely a reproduction.
Does this prove the document is a fraud? The real question is where would there have been an original of the memo with a signature?? Forrestal’s ORIGINAL would have been signed, but who else would have received a signed copy?
One expects that Dr. Bush and the DCI (Hillenkoetter) noted in the memo would have had copies. Most likely unsigned.
Forrestal died in May, 1949, three years earlier. Since we know that W.B. Smith was briefing Ike at this time (1952) on National Security matters, presumably Hillenkoetter, then at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, may well have had the EBD typed at the CIA. Smith (who worked very closely with Ike during WW 2) might well have said that Ike likes documents with signatures.
Surely the CIA had the capability of lifting a
signature from the memo from Truman to Bush (ironically I had found that in
the Bush papers at the LCMD).
George Elsey, who worked for Roosevelt at the White House and then for Truman during his entire term in office, told me that most of what a President signs is prepared by other people and sometimes the documents have to have the date typed later when it is clear which date is appropriate. He could find no reason to say the EBD, TFM, or CTM were fraudulent.
Truman was very busy at that time as the New National Security apparatus was being installed, the USAF was separated from the Army, the CIA was created from the Central Intelligence Group, etc. etc. Why would a hoaxer use two different typewriters and put a period after the date?
Forgers normally do as little as possible to
call attention to idiosyncrasies in the forgeries - whether paintings or
documents.
Klass had even claimed the Osborne book was
published in 1978, when it would have covered Xeroxing, when it fact it was
published in 1910 and the chapter involved is entitled “Traced Forgeries.”
A lot were trivial such as the date given, August 1, 1950, for Smith having permanently replaced the deceased Forrestal as an MJ-12 member. I obtained from the Truman Library the fact that that was the only date when Truman and Smith met during a many-month period of time before Smith succeeded Hillenkoetter as DCI.
They had not provided that information to anyone
else.
It took me two years to get the latter via mandatory classification review through the Ike Library as it was still classified when I found a withdrawal sheet noting it. I had also discovered that earlier that day (July 14, 1954) Lay had met with Ike and they had a phone conversation at around 4:30 PM.
George Elsey told me that Lay and Cutler worked very closely together and Lay would certainly have sent a brief note for Cutler to Twining making a trivial change in schedule. How did the forger know NOT to sign the memo nor use /s/ since it was some time after the discovery of the CTM that Robert Todd found the memo from Cutler to Lay saying he would be gone???
Todd is strongly opposed to Roswell, MJ-12, Bill
Moore, Jaime Shandera, Jesse Marcel, etc. It is also interesting that the
Cutler-Lay memo underlines a few words as does the CTM. This is uncommon in
documents of that era, but apparently was used by Lay and Cutler about NSC
matters.
How did anybody know that date fit?
Some have even falsely suggested that I noted the letters to Kennedy, etc., at the readily accessible APL Menzel UFO Correspondence file. They weren’t there. No permission signatures were required for that access.
I am reminded of people who claim “I could have
bought that land for a song 25 years ago” - but they hadn’t.
With the exception of a lengthy piece on the history of UFOs (Bowen Document) which is on original paper but only has a magenta TOP SECRET MAJIC stamped on it, they are Xerox copies. In a number of instances the originals were very hard to read which meant much time was spent trying to decipher the words.
To some this means authenticity.
One had bothered me because it was supposedly a memo from Admiral Hillenkoetter to President Truman (Feb. 17, 1948) noting that President Truman wasn’t getting much of the MAJIC material being received in large quantities every 24 hours.
Marshall would prepare special black books for Truman (see Figure 1).
This made no sense. Truman wasn’t an engineer or scientist. What was the purpose of so much material going to him?
It sounded to me like it would have been from Marshall to Roosevelt about the MAGIC material being processed by the ton after we broke the Japanese codes during WW 2.
I was also concerned by the recently discovered
“machines” and so much “product” being received every day. Sounded very much
like what would have been a letter from General Marshall to President
Roosevelt during WW 2 talking about the “intelligence product” of code
breaking using a cipher machine.
Marshall was in New York according to the archives, hence the need for using the referenced secret telephone. (But then look carefully at Figure 4, clearly an emulation.)
There were a number
that were questionable. A real breakthrough came when I asked for an opinion
from Archivist Larry Bland at the Marshall Archives about a letter
supposedly from Marshall to Humelsine (see Figure 5).
Marshall noted that he couldn’t be seen with Dewey. The emulation said he couldn’t be seen with Humelsine!!
But Humelsine had been his executive secretary
during WW 2 and was again playing that role to Marshall as Secretary of
State. They saw each other almost every day. Also it was addressed “Dear
Carl:” but Marshall essentially never used first names except for
contemporaries. Marshall was decades older than Humelsine.
I also asked Bland if he could see any reason why General Albert C. Wedemeyer (his signature is on one of the Cooper documents) should be connected with MJ-12.
His field was China. He had served there during WW 2 and was sent in 1947 to make a study about what the effects would be if the US did or did not get heavily involved in fighting the communists.
Bland agreed that he couldn’t see the connection either. He mentioned that there was an entire book "Wedemeyer Reports” (Ref. 16).
I located it at the nearby University of New Brunswick Library. Almost immediately I found three documents that were the models for three phony emulations. The technique was straightforward.
Retype an existing document with an old typewriter, making a few changes (dates etc.) to conceal the chicanery, scan or Xerox the handwritten portions of documents, combine, and voila, a genuine-looking phony.
I checked other books at the library and sure enough the book “The American Magic” had both the original of the Dewey letter (Figure 6) and the original Marshall Magic letter (Figure 2).
Bob Wood had located the original (Figure 4) of the letter supposedly from Marshall to Truman via Humelsine letter. It was from Marshall to Truman about Wedemeyer, not Twining. (Figure 4).
I hadn’t
paid attention to the fact that I knew from Twining’s pilot log that he flew
to DC on Sept. 26, not Sept. 25.
Even though there was a Truman signature, a handwritten date (July 9, 1947) and “I approve.” Spacing was perfect. See the emulation (Figure 7) of a supposed July 9 Directive to General Twining. Compare it to the Genuine item from Wedemeyer’s book (Figure 8).
A number of the non-emulation documents had
direct quotes from the phony ones establishing that they were phony as well.
I had sent off copies of the 23 sign offs I had collected to some people including Tim Cooper.
Also, all had mistakes in the text that made no sense such as,
This was to Twining, an emulation of a real directive to Wedemeyer in which it was said,
Korea is not in China, but Sandia is in New Mexico.
The handwritten date on the Wedemeyer directive (which according to Ref. 16, he wrote) is July 9.
But Twining went to New Mexico on July 7. It makes sense for Wedmeyer to take along specialists from State, Treasury, the Navy because he had to look at the total Chinese picture.
Not only would those people make no sense as a
part of the Twining expedition, but we know who went with Twining from an
article in the Alamogordo paper saying Twining had made a routine inspection
of Alomogordo Army Air Field (later Holloman AFB).
Compare the almost identical wording to that of the real items from Wedemeyer to the President’s Office. (Figure 11). Twining’s flight log proves he was only gone from July 7 - July 11 (hardly 2 months).
Could Twining’s small group really have
generated the same exact number of documents - 1200 - as Wedemeyer’s?
It is clearly lifted from the emulation of
the Wedemeyer “…In consonance…” (see Figure 11). Repeating a phony portion of a document in
another document doesn’t make it genuine.
Twining was based in Dayton, was head of the Air Material Command, had been head of the 15th and 20th Air Forces and served on The National Advisory Council on Aeronautics with a very strong technical background.
The two situations (China in a political upheaval) and an alien saucer in New Mexico were drastically different. Wedemeyer needed presidential authority to speak for the US in China.
How could Marshall have used almost identical
language and why would he be instructing Twining??
I can’t find a motive for serial killers, for grown men who sexually attack small children, for parents who abuse their children. But it happens. One quite obvious motivation would be to cast doubts on the legitimate documents, a sort of guilt by association. Another might be to waste the time and money of researchers.
Ryan Wood of Majesticdocuments.com claims that all the Cooper documents are genuine.
However, in his paper (Ref. 17) he talks at length about the various versions of the Truman to Wedemeyer Directive but never shows the full page from Wedemeyer’s book next to the Twining one so that one can’t see the identity in placement and handwriting of the three handwritten comments.
This same problem holds on the Humelsine documents. He shows several different versions of the directive to Wedemeyer, but never shows all the other pairs of original and emulation documents as noted here. He also seems to feel that Marshall was in charge of both Wedemeyer, based in Baltimore, and Twining; though Marshall was Secretary of State and not in the War [soon to be Defense] Department.
Twining was Head of the Air Materiel Department
in Ohio - definitely in the chain of command of the Army.
China was a major foreign policy headache with the communists taking over.
But what sense does this comment make in the Twining Directive,
Assistance to whom for what? Makes no sense at all.
One document claims that Air Force General Carl
Spaatz met with Twining in New Mexico on July 7, 1947. I was able to show
via Spaatz’s flight log, his desk calendar, and a newspaper article, that he
was fishing in Port Aransas, Texas, several hundred miles away.
Other errors are noted in Ref. 7, p. 207.
On balance it appears that the EBD, TFM and CTM are almost certainly genuine, the SOM 1.01 memo is very likely genuine (see Dr. Robert Woods paper - Ref. 18) and the Tim Cooper Documents are emulations and fictional.
It is perhaps not surprising that a documentary movie “Do You Believe in Majic?” (below video) is being prepared by Paul Kimball of Redstar films who had dug into a great deal of UFO material in preparation for the documentary “Stanton T. Friedman IS Real!” (Ref. 19) first broadcast on the Canadian Space TV channel in June 2002.
Do You Believe in Majic?
1 - From YouTube
2 - From Disclose-TV
Critics have been interviewed.
One strange criticism was made by Karl Pflock when he claimed twice that because Menzel was famous for doodling small cartoon Martians that the statement in the EBD that Menzel was saying the aliens were from Mars was an inside joke. I am afraid the joke is on Karl.
The EBD (p. 4) says exactly the opposite:
REFERENCES
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