In December 1984, a 35mm film cannister arrived, uninvited, in the mail at the home of Jamie Shandera, a television producer and UFO researcher in Hollywood. When developed, it contained photographs of what appeared to be a classified US government document — a briefing paper, dated November 18, 1952, apparently prepared for President-elect Eisenhower.

The document described a secret committee of twelve senior officials — military figures, scientists, and intelligence officers — code-named Majestic 12 or MJ-12. Its purpose: to manage the recovery of crashed alien spacecraft and the bodies of their occupants, beginning with the Roswell, New Mexico incident of 1947.

The FBI investigated. Their conclusion: the documents were forgeries.

The Documents

The original Eisenhower Briefing Document, as it became known, was followed over subsequent years by more MJ-12 documents, also arriving anonymously or found in archives. They described the committee's membership (which included Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, and nuclear physicist Vannevar Bush), their operating procedures, and the details of recovered spacecraft.

The documents were widely circulated in the UFO research community and generated enormous excitement. They were also, from the beginning, deeply suspicious to historians and document analysts.

The Problems

The formatting was wrong. The Eisenhower Briefing Document used a date format — "18 November, 1952" — that the US military did not use in that period. The typeface didn't match period typewriters. The security classification markings used formats adopted after the date on the documents. A reference to a memo from President Truman, cited as evidence, turned out to have a signature that was a cut-and-paste from a genuine but unrelated document.

The FBI's investigation, concluded in 1988, found the documents were "bogus." The Air Force OSI reached the same conclusion. The National Archives confirmed that no genuine MJ-12 records existed in any repository they controlled.

The Trail

Researchers have traced the documents' provenance with reasonable confidence to William Moore — the same William Moore who co-authored the Philadelphia Experiment book — and possibly Richard Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer who later admitted to feeding disinformation to UFO researchers during the 1980s as part of a counterintelligence operation.

Whether the MJ-12 documents were a deliberate government disinformation operation, a hoax by civilian researchers, or some combination remains unresolved. The documents themselves are forgeries. What motivated the forgers is a separate question.

"The Defense Intelligence Agency has no record of any such group as MAJESTIC 12 having been formed or having existed." — DIA response to FOIA request, 1987.

Verdict

DEBUNKED. The FBI investigation concluded the documents were forged. Document analysts identified multiple anachronisms. No genuine MJ-12 records have ever surfaced in any government archive. This does not resolve questions about Roswell or UFOs generally — it specifically means these documents are not evidence of anything except a reasonably skilled forgery.