In my book “UFOs, Area 51, and Government Informants” I spent a lot of time looking at the evidence that backed the idea of an inside control group known as MJ-12. The idea of this MJ-12 group started to appear in the early 1980s, through a researcher known as Bill Moore. Moore had written a book known as the Roswell Incident which sold many copies and was the forerunner of the modern obsession with the Roswell crash.Days after Moore released the book he was contacted by US intelligence which started to tell him the story of MJ-12, the super-secret group that had been established by President Harry Truman to deal with the extraterrestrial presence on earth. Moore was fed information by both USAF master sergeant Richard Doty and a second person attached to the CIA that Bill Moore gave the code name Falcon. Later 10 more intelligence sources would come forward to provide information to Moore. It is believed that some of these may actually have been ex-CIA directors.
The Moore involvement with the MJ-12 story culminated in a document release made in 1987 by Moore and two other researchers by the names of Jamie Shandera and Stanton Friedman. The document released, marked Top Secret Restricted, purported to be a briefing document presented to then President-elect Dwight Eisenhower about the 12-person group of high level scientists and military officials who made up the elite Top Secret MJ-12 committee.
In “UFOs, MJ-12 and Government Informants” I wrote that I believed the document had been a leak of true and false material that had been authorized by present day MJ-12 type group to desensitize the public about how the flying saucer problem had been handled by the White House.
I also wrote that although some of the material in the document did not appear to be correct (like the failure to mention that there was a live alien recovered at Roswell), there was lots of evidence that indicated that this mythical MJ-12 group mentioned in the document had existed. The reason for altering the document was to avoid breaking the law by releasing classified material and to protect the overall UFO program that needed to remain classified. The evidence indicating that there actually was an MJ-12 group included the following items:
• My co-author T. Scott Crain had come across a woman (USAF NCO) who had been on a 1979 declassification team in Okinawa, Japan. While declassifying documents in a General’s office the team came across a document that she told us may not have been the same document but appeared to contain all the same material. This woman was hassled when we first released the book in 1991.Since the release of the book in January 2013, there have been two new pieces of evidence that help to confirm that there was a MJ-12 UFO control group.
• In conversations with the former President of Penn State University he confirmed the MJ-12 group. His first confirmation came in 1987 just days after Moore made the MJ-12 document public. Walker said, “Yes, I know of MJ-12. I have known of them for 40 years. I believe that you’re chasing after and fighting with windmills!!”
• Moya Lear, the wife of Lear Jet inventor Bill Lear, phoned her friend four-star General James Doolittle to ask if the group had existed. Doolittle confirmed the group had existed but said that is all he could say. She was prodded to do this by her son John Lear who had just become aware of the MJ-12 document.
• Edgar Mitchell, the Commander of Apollo 14, is another high level person who confirmed that the group MJ-12 did exist based on sources he had.
• General Arthur E. Exon, who was at Wright Field in 1947 when the alien bodies were shipped from the Roswell crash site, said he “was aware of a UFO controlling committee made up primarily of very high-ranking military officers and intelligence people. He did not know the name of the group but called them the “Unholy Thirteen.”
• In July 1989, Bob Oeschler provided some of the most dramatic evidence supporting the existence of a group known as MJ-12 when he taped a conversation on the MJ-12 subject with Bobby Ray Inman. Inman stated “that MJ-12 meant something to him.," and that “he has been aware of a program to ‘indoctrinate the public’ in UFO matters prior to his retirement,” and that he had "some expertise" in the area of UFOs but his information was out of date at the time of the conversation.
• Another person who gave some confirmation to the existence of MJ-12 was an archivist at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, who approached me after a lecture in Eureka Springs, Arkansas in 2005. His job was to declassify documents for release which meant that he worked right inside the classified vault and saw all government documents before their release. He stated that a colleague had reported seeing documents with the MJ-12 designator on them years before doing declassification on Joint Chiefs of Staff documents.
• Harold Stuart, a former member of the Truman administrative. He had been listed as a member of an advisory committee for MJ-12 in Robert Collins’ 2005 book Exempt from Disclosure. In replies to letter from researcher Brian Parks Stuart stated, “. I have a vague recollection of MJ-12, but not significantly specific to make a comment… I was not on the MJ-12 Advisory Board and only have a faint recollection of this project or group. I did know most of the Generals you mentioned in your letter, but sorry I cannot shed any light on your request.”
• Researcher Lee Graham wrote many letters and filed dozens of FOIA requests to try and validate the MJ-12 document. On May 24, 1990, the Defense Investigative Service (DIS) responded to one of Graham’s FOIA requests by sending him back a copy of the MJ-12 document, each page of which was stamped “UNCLASSIFIED” across the lower part of the page. This indicated the document had been declassified. Graham was never able to obtain clarification on who had done the declassification.
• In a 1987 letter written by John Andrews to his good friend Lockheed Skunk Works President Ben Rich, Andrews stated that he had known of MJ-12 for years “even though officially it didn’t exist.” In a discussion with Lee Graham he said he had heard of MJ-12 in early 1984 which was almost a year before researchers Moore and Shandera reviewed copies of the MJ-12 briefing document for President Eisenhower in the mail.
The first piece of new evidence came from a story that was told by Jesse Marcel Jr. who was the son of the intelligence officer at the Roswell Army Air Base that handed the July 1947 UFO crash. Marcel told his story in front of the May 2013 Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure in Washington D.C.
According to Marcel “a number of years ago” he was called to Washington D.C. by Dick D’Amato for a meeting in a secure room in the Senate Building. D’Amato was chief counsel and chief investigator for Senator Byrd’s Senate Appropriations Committee. When the Area 51 story broke in 1989 in Nevada, Byrd and other senators on the committee (responsible for all budget spending) wondered if they were in fact financing back-engineering of flying saucers at Area 51 without being told what they were paying for. D’Amato was provided the appropriate security clearances and sent to investigate. D’Amato confirmed the alien projects but was not able to penetrate them. He told Steven Greer, “"I've been asked by Senator Byrd and some others to look into these things, and we've gotten close enough to know that these projects do exist. But I'm telling you that with a Top Secret clearance and a subpoena power from the Senate Appropriations Committee, I cannot penetrate those projects. You're dealing with the varsity team of all black projects, so watch out. And good luck."[i]
Marcel stated that he and D’Amato met around a huge conference room table. On the table was a novel that had been written by Whitley Strieber called “Majestic.” The book is about the Roswell crash and the MJ-12 control group that was established to deal with the extraterrestrial appearance on earth. D’Amato said, “I want to tell you something. This (pointing to the book) is not fiction.”
Marcel asked, “When are you going to tell the public?”
D’Amato replied talking about the MJ-12 control group that oversees the UFO cover-up, “If it were up to me I’d have done it yesterday, but it is not up to me. I am just here to investigate the cost of keeping it secret. In reality there is a black government. They have control of the debris. They answer to no one and they are not elected. They have unlimited money to spend. They are the ones who have control over it.”
The second piece of new evidence came from a very unlikely source – Dr. John Alexander. John was a Colonel in the US Army, and had been interested in the UFO mystery since a young boy in 1947. He also had done work on “esoteric projects, specifically in the intelligence community with psychokinesis.”
Alexander wrote a book on his UFO investigations called “UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities.” In the book Alexander pointed out that although UFOs are real, they are of no interest to the American government, and therefore there is no cover-up of the facts by American officials.
Alexander is also well known in the UFO community for hosting a Top Secret – Special Access series of meetings in the mid-1980s to look at the UFO problem for a possible new government look at the problem. The group was called the Advance Theoretical Physics Group and interestingly had exactly the same “Top Secret- Restricted Classification” as the MJ-12 document.
In a June 15, 2013 interview with radio show host Nancy Du Tetre Alexander, Alexander suddenly announced that the MJ-12 group had existed.[ii] This sudden disclosure was strange. That is because the MJ-12 controversy is central to the whole government cover-up theory believed by most in the UFO community. Yet Alexander did not talk about the MJ-12 idea in his book which had as its basic premise that there is no government control group dealing with the UFO mystery.
This is the transcript of the interaction:
Alexander: I think that there actually was a group and they were created something known as COG – continuity of government – and it was to prevent nuclear decapitation of the United States. It was really super super sensitive.Even though Alexander’s personal opinion of what the group might have been differs from the UFOP control group interpretation, the significance of what Alexander said cannot be emphasized enough. MJ-12 existed and the names on the UFO document that appeared on a film in the mailbox of Jamie Shandera in 1984 were correct.
Nancy Du Tetre: Well let me ask you this. Does MJ-12 as far as you know exist today?
Alexander: I don’t think so. I had someone whisper to me that it had existed. I didn’t think it had existed at all, but when I looked into it and asked if the names were correct, and they said yes and that should tell me what I need to know to figure it out. That’s how we came up with this particular occupation because most of them were into nuclear warfare. That was one common thread of all the people on the list, and much more so certainly than with UFOs.[iii]
.jpg)