Majestic-12

UFOs and Government Part 1

Previous sections have covered details of the U.S. government’s awareness of and involvement with the UFO phenomenon, including the possession of alien technology and bodies at least since the end of World War II. The sections on underground bases and alien abduction contain claims that go further: that on some level, aspects of the government work in collusion with alien species, and that aliens have engaged in a program to surveil, infiltrate and influence or control governments. They have done this by using abductees as Manchurian candidate–like monitors (e.g. at JPL), as well as direct infiltration by their agents in all relevant fields, including as heads of state. This series will delve further into these areas, focusing on the history of government knowledge of the subject and collusion with non-human intelligence.

October 9, 1994

Q: (L) What, exactly, does the U.S. government know about aliens?

A: That they exist.

According to Canadian government scientist Wilbert Smith, he was told by American defense scientist Dr. Robert Sarbacher in 1950 that the facts in Frank Scully’s book were “substantially correct.” In his notes of the conversation, Smith records himself asking, “Then the saucers exist?”, to which Sarbacher responded: “Yes, they exist. […] All we know is, that we didn’t make them, and it’s pretty certain they didn’t originate on Earth.”

In 1998, Oscar Wayne Wolff (aka “Agent Kewper/Stein”) told Linda Moulton Howe something similar. According to him, in the late 1950s, his CIA boss asked Langley where the Grays came from, and they “told him they had no knowledge of actual origin. [He] was told there were tremendous discrepancies. The Greys they had captured in crashes telepathically gave numerous different stories as to where they were from. So, the CIA did not really know where the Greys were from, but they thought it was outside our solar system.” He added that in one meeting with Eisenhower, the president had said: “We can’t continue in the same mode we are in. We aren’t accomplishing a thing. We don’t know anything more than we did in the late 1940s and we need new people.” This has seemingly not changed much in the intervening decades.

November 19, 1994

A: All major military exercises are plagued by UFOs.

In his 2023 Congressional testimony, former U.S. Navy F/A-18 pilot Ryan Graves said under oath:

It has been more than a decade since my squadron began witnessing advanced UAP demonstrating complex maneuvers on a regular basis [...] As we convene here, UAP are in our airspace, but they are grossly underreported. These sightings are not rare or isolated; they are routine. Military aircrews and commercial pilots, trained observers whose lives depend on accurate identification, are frequently witnessing these phenomena.

Over time, UAP sightings became an open secret among our aircrew. They were a common occurrence, seen by most of my colleagues on radar and occasionally up close. The sightings were so frequent that they became part of daily briefs.

In the early 2000s, a former rear admiral in the Russian Navy similarly told rock musician Billy Corgan:

“It’s so common, our encounters with off-world technology, or whatever.” He goes, “We have to have codes and things, otherwise we’re going to blow each other up.” He goes, “It’s so normal, it’s not even a big deal.”

December 4, 1999

Q: Does any of this increased [military] aircraft activity have anything to do with the increased awareness and activities of aliens in and around our planet?

A: As always. But, this awareness is factionalized and compartmentalized.

This is illustrated by the above quotes. Sarbacher also told Smith that the UFO program in the U.S. was classified at levels higher than nuclear weapons technology as early as 1950. Commander Will Miller (associated with the Wilson-Davis notes) told Joe Murgia:

a former NSA contact of mine […] said within NSA, there was a document known only as “the document” and it was on the subject of UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. And it was so highly classified that only the Director himself and perhaps one or two other people were actually able to view it. Its existence was widely known, but again, very, very close hold information.

In his foreword to Stranton Friedman’s book on MJ-12, Whitley Strieber tells how a UFO group, CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy), brought the CIA and NSA to court in the late 1970s over their failure to declassify UFO documents. The NSA refused to share the documents in question – even with the presiding judge – writing an affidavit justifying their decision. The affidavit itself was classified above Top Secret. The judge was able to read the affidavit after receiving the proper security clearance. Upon doing so, “the judge agreed that nobody should be allowed to read the documents – not even himself!” As such, information is limited on a need-to-know basis within various programs and compartments. Based on several accounts and testimony, the hypothetical structure of such secrecy looks something like the following.

The first group is composed of low-level military personnel like pilots, radar operators or ground crews who encounter UFOs as part of their duties. They might witness an incursion over their ICBM silo or during an exercise, either visually or via sensors. These individuals are not cleared for UFO data, and if they are debriefed, they are often told that the “didn’t see anything” or not to speak of it with anyone. This directive is often accompanied by threats and/or a non-disclosure agreement. This is perhaps the largest group, numerically, though their official knowledge is limited only to their personal experience.

The next group may have Confidential or Secret security clearances and have some basic knowledge on a need-to-know basis. For example, this might include junior officers, intelligence analysts or contractors who are involved in basic data collection and funneling that data through the appropriate channels. They know UFOs are real, and the protocols for siphoning off data, but are not provided with any further information.

Mid-level specialists like certain scientists, engineers or analysts within defense contractors like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman, with compartmentalized security clearances (TS/SCI – Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information), may be tasked with studying materials or data samples such as exotic alloys or metamaterials. However, they may only be told that the material is “foreign” – perhaps Russian or Chinese – in origin.

The program managers and overseers of the SAPs and CAPs (special access and controlled access programs within the defense and intelligence communities) have broader access. This group includes high-ranking military officers and civilian officials. However, their knowledge is still limited only to those SAP compartments to which they are “read in.” These might include data aggregation, threat assessments, biological analysis and specific aspects of crash retrievals and reverse-engineering programs. Access is limited to specific individuals on a “bigot” list. Some high-level executors of such programs may have more wide-ranging knowledge spanning multiple SAPs and CAPs.

The core leadership of various WUSAPs (waived unacknowledged special access programs, the details of which are kept from the legislative branch) may have a more integrated but selective overview of the topic. This would include flag officers, high-ranking DoD civilians and select intelligence directors (e.g. heads of the CIA’s Directorate of Science & Technology). Even here, where cross-silo information may be extensive (knowledge of worldwide retrieval efforts, ongoing threat assessments, technological progress and integration), bigot lists are tightly controlled.

Those with the most comprehensive, holistic knowledge – if such a group exists – would comprise only a small cadre of select individuals in or out of government. James Fox was told, for example, that perhaps only 20 people globally have the “bigger picture.”

December 21, 2024

Q: (Joe) With all the denials from the government saying there’s nothing going on here, do they actually know fully what is going on?

A: No.

Q: […] (L) They know what they’re doing and they know that the aliens are doing something, but they don’t really fully know what the aliens are doing. (Andromeda) What their plan is. […]

A: Yes. […]

Q: (L) So people like the Pentagon spokesman, at that level of government, overt government figures... Did they know of this alien presence?

A: Yes.

In other words, at least some public-facing government officials know about the UFO and alien reality, but they do not know much. While specific aspects of the government may have a lot more data than the general public to allow them to theorize, they are largely in the dark as to origins and intent due to the nature and source of that evidence – and the inability to verify it. In that sense, the current standard DoD response that “AARO [the government’s official UFO office] has discovered no evidence of extraterrestrial beings, activity or technology” may technically be true – with “extraterrestrial” being the key word. As David Grusch put it:

Certainly there is the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and they could be coming from elsewhere off Earth. But I don’t usually go there because I did not see that data, and I’m not conversant in the high-confidence theories that the U.S. government had.

However, that is not to say that some individuals within these programs – or adjacent to them – may not have a fuller understanding, even if their theories are only “high confidence.”

June 24, 2023

Q: (L) [DeSouza] mentions a group that’s over all governments, and he’s not the only one who mentions that. Some people have written entire books about, you know, the secret government and so forth, and that they’re like “bloodline” members. So do those individuals in that so-called secret government – are they aware of the full nature of the phenomenon and what it means for the future of Earth, humanity and even themselves?

A: They are aware of the nature but believe that they can control it. Wishful thinking dominates at all levels of the STS hierarchy.

Q: (L) And there are, I guess, families that have bloodline connections off the planet to 4D STS, is that correct?

A: Yes.

Recall that the C’s connected the “secret government” to those human agents programmed to work for the alien-run underground operation, saying: “Secret government aware to some extent, but not in control of [the abduction/programming/replacement] operation.”

MJ-12

In the late 1980s and 1990s, several UFO researchers publicized alleged classified documents related to a UFO control group established in 1947 called Majestic-12 or MJ-12. Television producer Jaime Shandera had received an anonymous envelope in December 1984 postmarked from Albuquerque, New Mexico. It contained undeveloped film with photographs of a September 24, 1947, memo from President Harry S. Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal authorizing the group’s creation, as well as a November 18, 1952, briefing document for President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower. Shandera discovered a third document (the Cutler-Twining memo) apparently purposefully misfiled in the U.S. National Archives the following year. Author William Moore first publicized the documents at a 1987 press conference, followed just days later by British ufologist Timothy Good, who had independently received the Truman-Forrestal memo and the Eisenhower briefing document that March from an anonymous U.S. intelligence-connected source.

Technically, the first document referring to MJ-12 surfaced in 1981: the Project Aquarius briefing document. Moore reportedly received it from an anonymous source, widely believed to be AFOSI agent Richard Doty. A fifth document, an alleged CIA memo from the 1980s with multiple references to MJ, also circulated around this time, but is less well known. (Both these documents will be discussed later in this series.) The “Special Operations Manual” surfaced in March 1994 after Don Berliner received an anonymous package postmarked from Quillin’s Drug Store in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Similar to the above documents, photographs of the SOM1-01 were contained on a roll of undeveloped film. Berliner shared the document with Friedman in December of that year, soon after which details regarding it were publicized.

Beginning in late 1992, Timothy S. Cooper (whose father’s account of a landing at White Sands has been mentioned previously) began receiving a large collection of documents from a number of sources – eventually numbering in the thousands of pages. These arrived anonymously via his post office mailbox or through personal contacts, from sources including a retired U.S. army counterintelligence agent using the pseudonym “Thomas Cantwheel” (1993 to 1996), Cantwheel’s daughter “Salina” (June 1996) and anonymous insiders labeled S-1, S-2 and S-3 (all in 1999). The documents included alleged classified memos, reports, intelligence assessments and manuals, including MJ-12’s 1952 Annual Report, the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Intelligence Assessment dated July 22, 1947, and a “Burned Memo” (9 pages) seemingly related to the JFK assassination. Cooper initially shared the materials privately with ufologists like Friedman, who analyzed a number of them in his 1996 book Top Secret/Majic. Many of the documents were later published in their entirety by Robert and Ryan Wood (now available on their website).

October 7, 1994

Q: (L) Are the Majestic-12 documents…

A: Semi-factual.

By the time of this session, only the first five documents were publicly available, though Cooper had already received a handful of new documents from Cantwheel. From the 1990s until recently, even most UFO researchers dismissed the documents as clever forgeries – with the exception of Friedman, the Woods and a handful of others. However, in recent years that opinion seems to be shifting, with new analyses by researchers like Geoffrey Cruickshank, Richard Geldreich and others. Recently declassified – and seemingly unrelated – documents have confirmed obscure details found in them.

In other words, the MJ-12 documents contain information that was still highly classified (or extremely obscure) at the time of their release. If the documents were forged, they were done so by individuals with access to a range of classified materials, and great effort was expended to make them historically accurate and to pass the test of time. As Geldreich writes: “Whoever composed these documents had insane levels of obscure 1947 era knowledge. When they were released to the public (80’s-90’s) the microfilm wasn’t searchable or even digitized yet.”

For example, one of Cooper’s documents is a letter from JFK asking CIA Director Dulles for a full briefing on MJ-12 operations on June 28, 1961. Dulles’s recently declassified calendar shows two meetings with JFK that day (the only time this occurs from late 1959 to January 1962). (See also here, here, here.) Other such details are included below.

Q: (L) Were they dummied up?

A: Near.

Friedman and the Woods are convinced the original MJ-12 documents are genuine, i.e. written and typed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. If they were “forged,” they were probably done so at that time. The above description better matches the Project Aquarius telex and some of the Cooper documents. According to Richard Hall, Moore told him in 1983 that he had done a “cut and paste job” and then “retyped” the document. Similarly, Cantwheel, in his final letter to Cooper (dated February 22, 1996) announcing that he was dying of cancer, wrote:

I must assume that you have had [the documents] investigated by the so-called ‘experts’ by now and have determined that some were obvious fakes. Sorry about that. The others were copies and Xeroxed from originals. These came from my personal files. […] it was necessary to construct them in a way so as to protect you from criminal prosecution. But, I assure you that the names, dates and places are valid.

Friedman identified at least three such “constructs.” The documents in question were copied from other materials that had nothing to do with MJ-12. For example, a letter allegedly from General Marshall to Humelsine was actually “a retyped and slightly reworded version of a well-known letter from Marshall to Republican presidential candidate Thomas Dewey.” And the 1948 Hillenkoetter memo “was really a doctored version of a memo that would have been sent to President Roosevelt during World War II.” He discovered three of the originals in a best-selling book from 1957 (General Albert Wedemeyer’s Wedemeyer Reports).

Q: (L) Who did this and why?

A: To leak information and disinformation. Many were involved. ONI [Office of Naval Intelligence] and CIA.

The factual information in the documents suggests two broad possibilities: at least some of the documents are genuine, or they were part of a broader counterintelligence operation. Jacques Vallee was of the latter opinion, writing in volume 6 of his Forbidden Science journals:

Further research has clarified the nature of most, if not all, MJ-12 documents. The leaked papers were never hoaxed; they were official active measures documents produced by CIA counterintelligence Chief J. J. Angleton in the 1960s to track the flow of stolen classified USG documents through Soviet espionage. […] I’m told the ‘leak’ of the false MJ-12 documents through noted ufologists may have been a botched, ill-conceived attempt by DoD.

According to Grant Cameron and T. Scott Crain:

Cameron was told [by a source inside the so-called “Aviary,” perhaps Vallee’s source for the above] that it was [Admiral Edward A.] Burkhalter who was actually the man who mailed the MJ-12 documents to Jamie Shandera. The documents, created to catch Soviet spies, were recovered from the files of CIA counterintelligence director James Angleton’s files, and released as a disclosure move.

However, as Blocked Epistemology argues:

It certainly remains a possibility that the Majestic drop is disinformation. Even if it is disinformation, dismissing it on that grounds however would be facile. There are different kinds of disinformation. Disinformation can be a hoax of the fraternity prank variety. Disinformation can be a feint by intelligence services to get an adversary to believe something that is the opposite of reality, such as misdirecting from a prosaic advanced weapons program. Disinformation may also be a reflection of reality, but soiled with genuinely bad information or of salted provenance so as to deter or discredit citeable investigation. In other words, if your job is to give cover to a genuine program by, say, rewriting all the genuine records in purple crayon and passing them off as official records to the would-be investigator, it may successfully discourage formal investigation, but on the receiving end one has to ask, what is actually being hidden by the effort? In other words, how far off from reality can it actually be and still be useful as an attention-soiling tool?

There is some support for the Angleton connection mentioned by Vallee and Cameron. Besides his signature appearing on some of the documents, the vast majority of them are dated from 1947 to 1963. Angleton served in the CIA from 1947 to 1975 (and as its first chief of the counterintelligence department beginning in 1954). For example, the “burned memo” has a handwritten annotation saying “DO NOT REMOVE FROM SAFE – Inventory of JJA.” Cruickshank argues that the source of this document (S-1) was Newton “Scotty” Miler (1926-2007), Deputy Chief of Special Investigations under Angleton’s Counterintelligence Division’s Special Investigations Group and “the man tasked with loading [Angleton’s] documents into the CIA’s incinerator for destruction.” Cruickshank also notes that “MJ” appears to be a CIA “digraph”:

Other digraphs of known CIA projects include “MK” (MK-ULTRA, MK-NAOMI) and “MH” (MH-CHAOS). In his 2014 book The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, author Kai Bird states on page 95 that the MJ compartment related to “Palestine.” […] the 2025 JFK Assassination Files released the full, unredacted testimony of […] Angleton. In his testimony, Angleton revealed that he was not only in charge of the CIA’s “Israeli Desk” but also that he directly participated in the negotiations during 1947-1948 regarding the creation of that nation-state out of the British-administered Mandatory Palestine.

After Cantwheel’s apparent death in 1996, Cooper began receiving documents from a source claiming to be his daughter, “Salina,” who also claimed a long career in CIA counterintelligence and an association with Angleton. Based on correspondences between their respective career descriptions, Cruickshank believes Cantwheel was CIA operative Boris Tarasoff and Salina was Ann Goodpasture, who worked under Angleton from 1954 to 1973 and with Tarasoff at the CIA station in Mexico City from 1962-1964. Goodpasture was born in Celina, Tennessee. (However, Tarasoff died in November 1995, whereas Cantwheel allegedly sent at least two more documents to Cooper after that, in January and February 1996.)

January 21, 1995

Q: (L) OK, now, I have a list of names, and I want a yes or no as to whether these individuals – because I believe most of them are deceased right now [the last of them, Jerome Hunsaker, had died only three months before the document was leaked in 1984] […] – were involved in the cover-up of the UFO activity and phenomenon in the U.S.

• [Admiral] Roscoe Hillenkoetter (A: Yes)

• Dr. Vannevar Bush (A: Yes)

• Secretary James Forrestal (A: Yes)

• General Nathan Twining (A: Yes)

• General Hoyt F. Vandenberg (A: Yes)

• Dr. Detlev Bronk (A: Yes)

• [Mr.] Jerome Hunsaker (A: Yes)

• [Admiral] Sidney Souers (A: Yes)

• [Dr.] Donald Menzel (A: Yes)

• [General] Robert Montague (A: Yes)

• Dr. Lloyd B. Berkner (A: Yes)

• [The 12th member, Gordon Gray, was not mentioned. Neither was Forrestal’s replacement, General Walter Bedell Smith.]

According to the Eisenhower briefing document, these men were MJ-12’s founding members upon its creation on September 24, 1947. This date was Bush’s only recorded meeting with Truman between May and December of that year, and he was accompanied by Forrestal. According to the SOM1-01 document:

Operation Majestic–12 was established by special classified presidential order on 24 September 1947 at the recommendation of Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal and Dr. Vannevar Bush, Chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board. Operations are carried out under a Top Secret Research and Development–Intelligence Group directly responsible only to the President of the United States.

Together, these 12 represented the U.S. military, intelligence and scientific communities, with six civilian and six military personnel (two from each branch). They included the first four Directors of Central Intelligence: Souers, Vandenberg, Hillenkoetter and Smith. Smith replaced Forrestal in MJ-12 after his position was left vacant after his alleged “suicide” in 1949. August 1, 1950, the alleged date of the replacement, was the only time Smith met with Truman prior to November 1950. Souers, Hillenkoetter, Menzel, Hunsaker, Forrestal, Bush and Berkner all had ties to Naval intelligence. (Most of these and the following details come from Stanton Friedman’s 1996 book, TOP SECRET/MAJIC.)

The scientists in the group all had high security clearances: Berkner (physicist; AEC/CIA); Bronk (biophysicist; AEC – he applied for his clearance the day the Roswell capture was announced); Bush (engineer; AEC); Hunsaker (aeronautical engineer; aviation/defense); Menzel (astronomer; CIA/NSA). Bush had close ties with a number of important organizations at that time, including: as a key figure in the formation of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission, established 1946 to oversee nuclear energy/weapons development) and the RAND Corporation (founded 1948 as a nonprofit think tank for Air Force/military policy/analysis); and as lead administrator of the Manhattan Project, chairman of the JRDB (Joint Research and Development Board, 1946–1947; coordinated military R&D between War and Navy Departments) and NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 1915–1958; precursor to NASA, focused on aeronautical research). He also pioneered the strict compartmentalization of classified information among scientists working on special projects.

Twining, Vandenberg, Hunsaker and Bronk all served on NACA. Berkner and Bronk served under Bush in the JRDB or its predecessor, the OSRD. (Bush also ran the JRDB’s successor, the RDB, created on September 30, 1947, the week after MJ-12.) The day before MJ-12 was formed, Twining – chief of Air Materiel Command at Wright Field – sent his famous memo to Brigadier General Schulgen (classified Secret, meaning it could not include any Top Secret information) recommending that the Army Air Force send all relevant UFO data to the above-mentioned Bush-connected groups.

As head of the OSRD during WWII, Bush oversaw thousands of military contracts for projects such as the atom bomb, radar, proximity fuzes and submarine detection. One of these contractors was GSI (which became Texas Instruments in 1951), whose sole customer became Division 6 of the OSRD. Most of the scientists the Ramseys believe comprised Frank Scully’s “Dr. Gee,” who studied the Aztec crash, were tied to GSI. This included Cecil Green, Patrick Haggerty (who worked on laser guidance and infrared nightvision), John Jonsson (transistors, semiconductors), Otto Schmitt (magnetic anomaly detectors, degaussing) and John Tate. Green, GSI’s vice president, was a fellow MIT alumni of Bush. And Tate was recruited by Bush as head of Division 6, whose mission was subsurface warfare and anti-submarine development. Incidentally, William Shockley (mentioned already for his work on transistors) was one of the founding members of the JRDB, the OSRD’s successor organization.

Bush was fond of 12-member boards. The JRDB’s 12 members were composed of six scientists and six military men (two from each branch, like MJ-12). In 1944, Bush and Manhattan Project chemist James Conant had proposed a 12-man commission on atomic energy. It was to include five scientists, three civilians and four military men. (MJ-12 had five scientists, four civilians and three military members. While six were technically military, only three were serving in a military capacity at the time: Twining, Vandenberg and Montague.) The bill eventually made its way to Congressman May and Senator Johnson (May-Johnson, M-J), but never passed into legislation. Blocked Epistemology argues it formed the organizational basis for MJ-12.

Of further note, Berkner would later serve on the infamous CIA Robertson Panel in 1953. Montague was responsible for White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico and headed the Armed Forces Special Weapons Center at Sandia Base. Menzel (famous for his public life as a UFO debunker) had been colleagues with Bush since 1934. Forrestal was a former Secretary for the Navy and current Secretary of Defense. Hillenkoetter went on join the board of governors of one of the first major civilian UFO organizations, NICAP, in 1957.

The only other member not mentioned in any of the above was Gordon Gray, MJ-12’s youngest member at 38 years old. Gray, who had been Eisenhower’s national security adviser, became head of the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which coordinated and planned U.S. psychological operations, during the Truman administration. (According to the documents, “MAJCOM-1” persuaded Truman to establish the PSB on April 4, 1951. Cruickshank has identified MAJCOM-1 as former Secretary of the Air Force and Chairman of the National Security Resources Board Stuart Symington.) He was later chairman of the 5412 Committee, responsible for overseeing covert operations for the National Security Council and CIA. (He was also on the committee responsible for rescinding Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance in 1954, the true motivation for which Donald R. Burleson argues may have had to do with his classified UFO work. Souers advised the president not to reinstate Oppenheimer; Bush defended him. According to Gray’s son, Gray seemed to regret Oppenheimer’s treatment in later years.)

According to the SOM1-01, MJ-12 “considers the entire subject [of UFOs and aliens] to be a matter of the very highest national security. For that reason everything relating to the subject has been assigned the very highest security classification.” It lists among the group’s goals: the recovery and study of alien materials, devices, entities and remains “by any and all means deemed necessary” and anywhere on the planet; the establishment and administration of “Special Teams,” special secure facilities, covert operations (in concert with the CIA) and “absolute top secrecy” to accomplish this. The reason for this level of secrecy “has to do with the consequences that may arise not only from the impact upon the public should the existence of such matters become general knowledge, but also the danger of having such advanced technology as has been recovered by the Air Force fall into the hands of unfriendly foreign powers.”

In MAJIC Eyes Only, Ryan Wood notes that three witnesses were on record claiming to have seen the SOM1-01 in person, including U.S. Navy Yeoman 2nd Class Dale Bailey (in the vault of Admiral Frederick H. Michaelis in 1976) and an investigator known to Wood who tracked down its owner in Wisconsin and was shown the original booklet. Two additional – and unlikely – witnesses went public in 2025: acting director of AARO Tim Phillips and former director Sean Kirkpatrick, who told Douglas Dean Johnson:

I am fairly confident he [Phillips] is recalling the MJ-12 document […] That was all we found by the time I retired [in December 2023]. It was in a bound form, handheld like other military plans of the time. […] My assessment was that it (the book I examined) was the same as what had been released on the internet and debunked some years prior [i.e., the SOM1-01]. It was clear to me that the way it was written, its author was someone familiar with the style of military planning documents. […] Since it was already out in the world, and at the time I did not deem it new, I saw no reason to include it in the [vol. 1 AARO historical] report as a finding.

Neither Phillips nor Kirkpatrick commented on how AARO discovered it, or where.

Q: I would like to know who sent the MJ-12 documents to Jamie Shandera. Who sent those documents to him?

A: Bill Cooper.

Q: (T) Who sent them to Cooper?

A: He discovered them in records review.

Q: (L) […] Does he claim he sent them? (T) Yes. (L) How did you know that and I didn’t know that? (T) I read the Cooper book, the early Cooper papers.

A: Cooper was unintended security leak, then “turncoat.”

Q: (T) OK, so he found all this out when he was working for the government…

A: Yes.

Q: Which is how he got them out of the records?

A: Yes.

“T” seems to have been mistaken. Bill Cooper (not to be confused with Tim Cooper), a former Navy Quartermaster First Class, claimed to have seen various classified briefings during his service dealing with UFOs and MJ-12, but never claimed to have been the source of the MJ-12 documents. Cooper did not enter the UFO field publicly until 1988, four years after the MJ-12 leaks. He was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1975. If he was the source, he never admitted to it. What statements he did make were contradictory. According to Jim Speiser, on August 22, 1988, Cooper wrote: “The documents produced by Mr. Moore et al are photographic copies of genuine documents which were procured at great risk.” Yet a month later, on October 15, he said he could prove they were “obvious and deliberate forgeries.” In his 1991 book Behold a Pale Horse he dismisses Shandera, Moore and Friedman as “CIA agents” and claims he “always knew” the Eisenhower briefing document was a fraud. It seems unlikely that Cooper had the resources to plant the original Cutler-Twining memo in the National Archives or to have had mail redirected worldwide. If he had, that would suggest active intelligence ties circa 1984 and 1985, which contradicts the above characterization of him as a security leak turned turncoat.

The common belief that the source was Richard Doty or Cruickshank’s identification of the source as former CIA counterintelligence officer Newton Miler seem more plausible (though just as unprovable). For example, the cryptic messages mailed to Shandera and Moore, and which led to the discovery of the Cutler-Twining memo in box 189 of a collection of materials at the Archives, were postmarked from New Zealand, with a return address of “Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.” Miler had been CIA station chief at Addis Ababa. (Cruickshank argues that Miler could have become aware of Tim Cooper through their shared membership in the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Like Bill Cooper, Tim Cooper had served in the Navy from 1967 to 1974.)

Q: Does MJ-12 still exist?

A: In different form.

Redfern’s source “John” claimed that Majestic was reorganized in 1968 or 1969, with work, data and documents transferred to a centralized location: Area 51, where John acted as custodian for many of those files. In 1997, Cooper’s S-1 (Miler, perhaps) told him:

MJ-12 does not exist as a government intelligence entity. It ceased to exist in 1969 and became a private concern financed by big money and big science. In 1969, President Nixon was briefed by MJ-12 on all aspects of UFO activity and the EBE problem since 1947. Fearing possible leaks within his NSC and national security advisor Kissinger, Nixon approved a Special Classified Executive Order that required the U.S. Intelligence Community to purge all references to MJ-12 in the UFO files.

A number of highly placed individuals have recently confirmed MJ-12’s existence. In response to a question on MJ-12 from Bryce Zabel in 2024, Luis Elizondo said:

There is absolutely a cabal, an organized group of individuals who have a comprehensive understanding of the U.S. government’s involvement in the UAP topic going back decades. They are very influential and they guard this information jealously. In the past they have been able to exercise extreme influence.

In the Age of Disclosure documentary (2025), Elizondo claims:

An extremely, extremely senior person in the U.S. government in the intelligence community told Congress, for the record, that there was a committee of 27 individuals – and I’m not going to go into code names here – that were mulling over the idea of using extreme measures to silence David [Grusch] and myself.

In discussing this with Matt Ford, he suggested a possible link to MJ-12:

I consider this element very much like a shadow government. They’re operating within the confines of their organizations, but their authorities are stemming from somewhere else. Obviously, they are not organizational authorities. They’re some sort of legacy authorities. […] Is that the reason why they can say there’s no MJ-12? […] I’m not saying that that is the case, that this MJ-12 has evolved into MJ-27 […]

In a 2025 interview for the Sol Foundation, Dr. Eric Davis said:

MJ-12, some version of it exists today, but it’s not by that name. Code names change roughly every three years in the defense and intelligence operations. So that code name has gone away decades ago. So there’s some modern incarnation of it operating. […] Their job is handling crash retrievals, reverse engineering studies of NHI or alien technologies that have been recovered.

In another conversation with the Sol Foundation in 2026, Davis expanded on this:

Question: And what was Majestic-12?

Davis: It was a Waived Unacknowledged Special Access Program compartment within the CIA. And it was one of several. It’s just not Majestic-12 or MJ-12 all alone. It’s Majestic-1, Majestic-2, Majestic-3, all the way up to 12. […] Majestic-12 was just crash retrievals and alien contact related. It was just focused on that one umbrella of topics.

Q: Who is in MJ-12 now?

A: Will not reveal as you would be terminated if this information were to be let out, so forget it now!

As shown in the section on Roswell, and implied in the above description of MJ-12’s duties, secrecy was taken very seriously. As such, MJ-12’s responsibilities necessitated a strong component of surveillance, psychological warfare and enforcement to identify and neutralize any potential security leaks or exposure. This surveillance is mentioned a couple times in the transcripts:

December 31, 1994

Q: (T) The FBI is watching people who are involved in metaphysics?

A: And UFOs.

For a history of FBI involvement in the topic, see Dr. Bruce Maccabee’s The FBI-CIA-UFO Connection (2014). While the Air Force Office of Special Investigations is usually the group most often associated with targeting members of the public, the FBI actively monitored contactees (due to their potentially subversive ties to communism) and civilian UFO groups – primarily in the 1950s and 1960s.

July 22, 2000

Q: (A) And that’s who are operating the helicopters [seemingly surveilling the participants]?

A: Helicopters are STS 3rd density, no doubt influenced from 4th-density STS.

Many ufologists report such encounters, which are also associated with cattle mutilations and abductions.

January 21, 1995 (cont’d)

Q: (T) If you gave us the names, how many of those people would we know? Not personally, but how many would we know? How many would we have heard of?

A: One or two maybe.

Q: (T) Which is what I figured. Just like back in the 40s you wouldn’t have known who these people were. Hillenkoetter and Forrestal, maybe, because they were WWII people, their names were in the paper. Unless you were into sciences, you wouldn’t know who these people were.

In early 2026, David Grusch told journalist Megyn Kelly:

Everybody owns a piece. Nobody owns the outcome, and there’s not really a mob boss. The closest person we got that I was aware of was unfortunately now deceased Vice President Dick Cheney. Darth Vader himself. Not shocking that he was involved in this. And essentially when he left in 2009, that was the last time that these activities really had central leadership.

Ross Coulthart has a separate source that claimed the same thing and even provided Cheney’s personal phone number. Cheney was Secretary of Defense (like Forrestal) from 1989 to 1993. Grusch added two more names:

General [James] Clapper was well aware of the crash retrieval issue, managed the crash retrieval issue, and when he was the DNI [Director of National Intelligence, 2010-2017], USDI [Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence 2007-2010] and DIA director [Defense Intelligence Agency, 1991-1995], he placed people in critical roles to manage this issue, both publicly and, I’ll just say, non-publicly as well, and I’ll allow the audience to distill what I’m saying at the risk of being inappropriate or going too far with my discussion. So General Clapper, Stephanie O’Sullivan, other folks in the IC that are well aware of this issue, that were in rooms discussing this issue.

In addition to being DNI (the contemporary equivalent of the DCI position held by Souers, Vandenberg, Hillenkoetter and Smith), Clapper was also the Director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (for which Grusch worked) from 2001 to 2006. O’Sullivan was the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence (PDDNI) from 2011-2017, under Clapper.

October 21, 1995

Q: (L) OK, the Matrix Material [Volume III] says that Henry Kissinger is the current head of MJ-12. Is this correct?

A: No.

The book, published in 1993, simply claims that MJ-12 “is believed to be headed by Kissenger [sic] at this time,” without citing a source. In volume II (1989/1990), John Grace had previously claimed that Kissinger was “chosen as the head of the alien study group, known as the JASON society” in 1955. In fact, JASON was only conceived in 1958 and officially created in 1960 (by and for [D]ARPA). An independent think tank of scientific advisors, it was run through the MITRE Corporation, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC). The JASON scientists did work for Kissinger later, however, in 1969, after Kissinger became National Security Advisor under President Nixon. Bill Cooper was probably the first to connect JASON with UFOs, arguing that JASON was MJ-12, so he may have been John Grace’s source for the above. Perhaps more relevant, Kissinger began serving as a consultant to Gordon Gray for the Psychological Strategy Board while still a grad student in 1952. (Philip J. Corso was also a member.)

Raymond Fowler and William Steinman focus some attention on Dr. Eric Henry Wang, a scientist believed to have been intimately involved in the U.S.’s early crash retrieval and reverse engineering programs. Dr. Wang was the head of the Office of Special Studies at Wright-Patterson from 1949 to 1956, then at Sandia. Steinman spoke to his widow, who confirmed his involvement in such programs. She told him: “The person you should write to in Government is Dr. H.A.K. [Henry Kissinger]. He is deeply involved in the flying saucer program. In fact, he was completely in charge of it at the time that Dr. Wang was still alive and involved in it.”

In 2006, Dan Burisch – a controversial alleged Area 51 whistleblower – released a list of MJ-12 members. In addition to Cheney and Kissinger, it also included a handful of other individuals with appropriate credentials, such as:

• Vice Admiral Mike McConnell: NSA Director (1992-1996), DNI (2007-2009)

• Admiral Bobby Ray Inman: Director of Naval Intelligence and NURO (1974-1976), Vice Director of the DIA (1976-1977), NSA Director (1977-1981), DD/CIA (1981-1982)

• Porter Goss: DCI (2004-2005), CIA Director (2005-2006)

• Zbigniew Brzezinski: National Security Advisor

• Air Force General Richard Myers: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Inman has been a figure in UFO lore for decades. In 1989, UFO researcher Bob Oechsler (a former NASA mission specialist and Air Force technician) recorded a phone conversation in which Inman seems to confirm that the U.S. government possesses “non-human-made disk technology” and provides guidance to Oechsler on accessing related information, e.g. by contacting fellow admiral Sumner Shapiro (Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence from 1978 to 1982).

Q: (L) Is [Kissinger] just a red herring, so to speak?

A: Yes. MJ-12 is no longer MJ-12.

Richard Dolan argues that a later codename may have been “ZODIAC.” (Recall the Sedge Masters story based on the recollections of TRW employee Mary Elliot.) Dolan had the opportunity to ask Luis Elizondo about the codename in 2021:

Dolan: Have you ever come across evidence that supports the reality of an organization, whether we call it MJ-12 or Zodiac?

Elizondo: Sure, absolutely.

Dolan: OK, so I want to ask about Zodiac, I’ve got reasons for asking, is this something you have come across?

Elizondo: Yes.

Dolan: So can I ask you what you can say about that?

Elizondo: I cannot.

Q: (L) What is MJ-12 now known as?

A: Institute of higher learning.

Q: (L) Are you talking about Brookings Lab, or Brookhaven?

A: Not really.

Q: (L) Is it a specific institute of higher learning?

A: Yes.

No single university has been highlighted by researchers as a hub for a group like MJ-12 (though several early members shared MIT connections). One such candidate might be Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Oppenheimer, Einstein, von Neumann, Sarbacher and Dyson – all alleged to have been connected to MJ-12 or related anti-gravity research – were closely associated with the IAS.

As for modern times, UAP Gerb notes that the current narrative tends to focus on the CIA (specifically its Directorate of Science & Technology) as the apex of the program, with the DOE, Air Force and contractors like Lockheed and Northrop playing a subordinate role. Aside from leaving out or downplaying the role of the DOE, other intelligence agencies (NSA, DIA, NRO, NGA, NURO) and the Navy and Army, this framework also neglects the role of Federally Funded Research & Development Centers (FFRDCs) and University Affiliated Research Centers (UARCs) – what Gerb calls the “missing link” between the U.S. government and private contractors. He writes:

These semi-private [DoD-connected], not-for-profit institutions are “established and funded to meet special long-term engineering, research, development, or other analytic needs that cannot be met as effectively by government or other private-sector resources.” […] these institutions, ESPECIALLY FFRDC, act as program managers and direct consultants to US government agencies issuing exotic RDT&E [Research, Development, Test and Evaluation] contracts, while also providing R&D services and subject matter expertise. The FFRDC then, in turn, provides oversight to the contractors doing work on the program, allowing controlled access to materials and knowledge on the project. Examples of FFRDC include:

• National Security Engineering Center (MITRE)

• Center for Naval Analyses (CNA Corp)

• National Defense Research Institute (RAND Corp.)

Examples of UARC include:

• MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Army)

• Penn State Applied Research Lab (created by Dr. Eric A. Walker) (Navy)

• U of Nebraska National Strategic Research Center (USSTRATCOM)

Gerb believes these institutions are “exponentially more knowledgeable on and crucial to UFO exploitation programs than most defense contractors through their sole source contracts.” One of Steven Greer’s sources, “TB,” wrote: “The SAP and USAP [Unacknowledged Special Access Program] facilities are located everywhere, embedded in University Affiliated Research Centers (UARC) Programs, military bases and nondescript commercial office space.”

While the concept of FFRDCs goes back to WWII, they were only named as such and formalized in 1967. The RAND Corporation was the first official organization of this type, created in 1947. (It was also on Twining’s list of groups to which to send UFO data in his 1947 memo to Schulgen.) One of the first proto-UARCs was the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, created in 1942. (Bronk was president of Johns Hopkins from 1949 to 1953.) UARCs were formally created and chartered decades later, in the mid-1990s.

Dr. Eric Walker, who founded the Penn State UARC and remained Penn State’s president from 1956 to 1970, was also an interesting figure. When researchers in the 1980s discovered Dr. Robert Sarbacher’s name in Wilbert Smith’s private notes, they tracked him down. Sarbacher (himself a consultant for the Bush’s RDB and before that, the JRDB) in turn led them to Dr. Walker, telling them he had been involved in the early crash retrieval and reverse engineering program with Bush. Walker himself confirmed this to researchers in the 1980s, even telling William Steinman in 1987: “Yes, I know of MJ-12. I have known of them for 40 years.”

Walker was executive secretary for the RDB from 1950 to 1951. Starting in 1958, he was also a member of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a major FFRDC for the DoD and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which became DARPA in the 1970s), eventually becoming Chairman in his later years (1981-1986). The above-mentioned JASON group’s work was primarily contracted through IDA. This arrangement continued until the early 1970s, when administrative backing for JASON shifted to SRI International (home of the classified remote-viewing program), followed by MITRE in 1983. By the mid-1960s, the IDA has become “the principal advisory organization serving the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a whole.” (See Cameron and Crain’s book for more details.)

Both Gordon Gray and Henry Kissinger consulted for IDA in 1968, as had Ed Teller the year before. Other members included Deputy Director of the CIA and First Co-Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) Richard Bissell, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Howard Robertson (of the CIA’s Robertson Panel). Harald Malmgren was officially employed by the IDA starting in 1962 (though his position there may have been non-official cover for more secretive work). He claimed Bissell briefed him informally on the UFO problem.

April 26, 2025

Q: (Ryan) Compared to how much Harald Malmgren knew about UAP and secret government activities, what percentage was he able to convey to Jesse Michels?

A: 65[%].

Q: […] (Ryan) And how much does his daughter [Pippa] know compared to the remaining percentage?

A: 15[%].

Q: […] (L) So there’s stuff that he took with him to his grave?

A: Yes.

One of the last things Malmgren related to Michels before he died was something he was told by one of his employers (possibly Christian Herter, the U.S. Special Representative for Trade Negotiations in 1964 and formerly Secretary of State under Eisenhower):

The first Friday I came to the office, I said, “Why am I here?” “I asked for you.” And I said, “Well, who had a record?” He said, “The day that you met the president of MIT [Karl Compton], that day your name went in all the important books of talent that the CIA keeps. Not only CIA, but you know, all Majestic, all these guardians – they all took in on themselves to protect the world. So you were chosen. And when you were brought here, I asked you to come to me and to work with me. So you were on a track. And it’s not not for any of us to understand the world and how the world works. It just is.”

Further Reading

• Timothy Good: Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Coverup (1987)

• Grant Cameron and T. Scott Crain: UFOs, Area 51, and Government Informants: A Report on Government Involvement in UFO Crash Retrievals (1991, 2013)

• Stanton T. Friedman: Top Secret/Majic: Operation Majestic-12 and the United States Government’s UFO Cover-up (1996, 2005)

• Richard Dolan: UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973 (2002)

• Ryan S. Wood: Majic Eyes Only: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology (2005, 2024)

• Donald R. Burleson: UFO Secrecy and the Fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2009)

• Richard Dolan: UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991 (2013)

• Grant Cameron: The Canadian Government UFO Story: The Wilbert Smith Files (2021)