| The investigative article "Harald Malmgren: Real-World History vs. Grandiose Fantasy," by researcher, Douglas Dean Johnson meticulously deconstructs the inflated personal narrative of Harald B. Malmgren, a former U.S. trade advisor, by contrasting his public |
By The UFO Chronicles
5-20-25 |
While Malmgren had legitimate roles under Presidents Nixon and Ford, primarily related to trade negotiations, Johnson’s research reveals that many of his grander claims — including key advisory roles to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson — are unsubstantiated.
A particularly sensational aspect of Malmgren’s legacy is his claimed association with the UFOs/UAP, aliens and or UFO crash debris. In his later years, Malmgren claimed high-level insider knowledge of classified UFO programs and extraterrestrial-related national security concerns, painting him as someone deeply embedded in secret government deliberations about non-human intelligence and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
However, Johnson finds no credible evidence to support these assertions. Malmgren’s official records, including declassified FBI files and government employment documents, show no involvement in national security or intelligence matters outside of his economic advisory capacity. Notably, Malmgren’s own job applications from the 1960s make no mention of such roles, describing instead modest academic and advisory functions. Furthermore, thorough searches of presidential archives and correspondence — including efforts by historians affiliated with the JFK Library and the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute — yielded no mention of Malmgren in the contexts he later claimed.
Johnson concludes that Malmgren, while not entirely a fabricator, skillfully blurred the lines between fact and fiction, leveraging real but limited public service into a legacy laced with dramatic and unverifiable embellishments. His late-in-life elevation to quasi-mystical insider status in UFO and conspiracy circles illustrates how unchecked personal narratives can metastasize into accepted lore — a cautionary tale in the age of viral misinformation and selective memory.
The problem I have with Malmgren’s testimony is that he references things that are demonstrably false. For instance, he claimed that MJ-12 actually existed, when in reality we have abundant and unequivocal evidence that the MJ-12 documents are a fabrication. Both the documents themselves and the very name "MJ-12" were created by William Moore and Richard Doty, and there was never any Top Secret committee by that name.
ReplyDeletehttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1s01z0NKjzlDIyFgtcVbiQWTlrUB-dCWs/view?usp=drivesdk
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOSkepticalBelievers/s/1hrpMAsDTk
Another problematic aspect of his testimony is his assertion that an alien supposedly survived the Roswell crash and subsequently provided the U.S. military with knowledge that enabled the United States to develop technology that eventually allowed them to shoot down a flying saucer in 1962. The problem here is that the idea of an alien surviving the Roswell crash — much like the MJ-12 documents — can also be traced back to Richard Doty and AFOSI. The first mention of an alien surviving the Roswell crash appears in documents shown by Doty to Linda Moulton Howe in 1983, when she was invited to Kirtland Air Force Base.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOSkepticalBelievers/s/1wXf1bHGp1
This story can be traced back to those documents and no further, which clearly indicates that AFOSI itself is responsible for creating and spreading these rumors.
A third troubling aspect of his testimony is his endorsement of the 1933 Italian UFO crash. This story emerged in the 1990s, when Roberto Pinotti, an Italian UFO researcher, claimed to have received a series of anonymous documents allegedly dating back to Mussolini’s regime. These documents described the recovery of a flying saucer that had crashed near Magenta, a town in northern Italy, in June 1933. According to the documents, the Italian government took immediate action to secure the wreckage, and Mussolini himself supposedly established a secret committee to study the recovered technology.
However, the origin and authorship of these documents remain entirely unknown. They have no provenance whatsoever, no official records from the period hint at the existence of the alleged secret committee, and many historians and archivists have noted that the documents contain numerous errors and inconsistencies. As an Italian myself, I can confidently state that within the Italian UFO research community, both the so-called "Fascist UFO Files" and the story they tell are not taken seriously. They are regarded as forgeries riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies, with the only exception being those who are desperate to believe and have not investigated the matter enough. Here you can read a couple of articles published by Italian UFO researchers on the subject:
https://www.cisu.org/fascist-ufo-files-no-thank-you/
https://www.cisu.org/fascist-ufo-files-a-professional-archivists-opinion/