Saucers of the Illuminati (5 page)

"leaked," allegedly secret government documents about UFOs. To me this is astounding. The only reason I can imagine that Moore might betray his own activities in this way is that he feared that someone else was going to "out" him as working with the government, and he was attempting damage control by his

"voluntary" admission.

Other information on Moore involves the matter of UFO

researcher Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz, a self-employed electronics expert, believed that he had discovered alien technology in action at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, and contacted the military in an attempt to alert them. Bennewitz was apparently fed a series of documents outlining military collaboration with the aliens and other matters that are currently the stock-in-trade of the "Aliens are among us and polluting our vital bodily fluids!" end of the UFO

research spectrum.

According to Moore, "[Bennewitz] was the subject of considerable interest on the part of not one, but several government agencies, and [I discovered] they were actively trying to defuse him by pumping as much disinformation through him as he could possibly absorb..."

Moore admits that he knew that Bennewitz was being disinformed by the government--with evidence suggesting that Special Agent Richard Doty was at least partially responsible--but according to his own admission he took no action to disabuse Bennewitz of the lies that, Moore says, were gradually driving him crazy. Bennewitz got to the point where he believed that aliens were invading his house and poisoning him. He gradually broke down from the disinformational (and perhaps other) attacks, until he was put into a psychiatric hospital.

Sergeant Richard Doty, one of Moore's contacts who was involved in the Bennewitz matter, was a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the course of his employment with AFOSI he invited Linda Moulton Howe--a well-known investigator of cattle mutilations who oddly never seems to bring up the government connection--to visit him at Kirtland. Once Howe had arrived at the Air Force base, Doty showed her alleged secret documents that seemed to reveal information on crashed alien vehicles and their occupants.

According to Howe:

These pages... contained a summary of this government's retrieval of crashed disks and alien bodies, including a live alien from a crash near Roswell in 1949. The paper said that this extraterrestrial had been taken to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it had been kept until it died of unknown causes on June 18, 1952. Then the paper summarized some of the information that had been learned from this distinctly alien life form about our planet and its civilization's involvement with this planet. One of the paragraphs said, "All questions and mysteries about the evolution of Homo Sapiens on this planet have been answered, and this project is closed," ...Further, it stated in the paper that these gray extraterrestrials had been personally involved in the genetic manipulation of already evolving primates on this planet, suggesting that Cro-Magnon was the result of genetic manipulation by the gray extraterrestrials.

Another meeting was arranged between Captain Robert Collins, Howe, and John Lear, the UFO "expert" and former employee of the CIA. Lear is the man who has done more than anyone including Bill Cooper to convince the public that aliens are among us, living in huge underground bases, and collaborating with the government to put us all in the vat-prepared soup. Collins furnished Lear and Howe with more alleged secret documents on the aliens, and mentioned to her that he had worked with William Moore for years.

It also is within the sphere of William Moore's influence that the bogus MJ-12 paper, a faked 1947 presidential "briefing document" on crashed saucers, surfaced.

5

MJ-12

In mid-1987, when UFO buffs first got the MJ-12 document in their hands, many of them thought that they were fondling the Holy Grail of UFO research. This photo reproduction of an eight-page alleged government document is purported to be a preliminary briefing on UFOs for President-elect Eisenhower, released on November 18, 1952 (also officially the first day of the formation of the CIA).

The MJ-12 document was allegedly used to brief Eisenhower by Rear Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, said to be a member of Majestic-12, a top secret research team composed of scientists and military men empowered to investigate UFOs. The MJ-12 document claims that in July, 1947, an alien disk craft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, and that a second craft crashed on the Texas-Mexico border in 1950.

From where did this historic and apparently earth-shaking MJ-12 document originate? In December, 1984, a roll of undeveloped 35mm black and white film was received in the mail in Burbank, California, by Jaime Shandera, a television producer.

Shandera has said that the package was postmarked at Albuquerque, New Mexico. The roll of film was developed by Shandera and William Moore, who found photo images of the pages of the MJ-12

document.

The first publication of a portion of the MJ-12 document appeared in the
London Observer
newspaper, on May 31, 1987. A small portion of the document was printed in an article by Martin Bailey, titled "Close Encounters of an Alien Kind--And Now if You've Read Enough About the Election, Here's News from Another World." The article was reprinted in many American newspapers in the weeks that followed.

According to British UFO researcher Timothy Good, he was the first to publish the complete MJ-12 document, in his book
Above
Top Secret
, in May, 1987. Where did Good get his copy? He stated,

"I received the document from a CIA source in March of 1987."

When queried as to whether the CIA source had anything to do with William Moore, Good responded, "I am sure. Oh, absolutely."

The document was published and re-published in magazines, analyzed, touted as extraterrestrial gospel, decried as a hoax. But it captivated the imaginations of many UFO researchers, and injected life into an ailing UFO research field to a degree that had not been seen since the halcyon days of the 1960s.

For those UFO buffs who are interested in objective evaluation the fact that no original copy of the MJ-12 document is available is only one of the difficulties in proving or disproving its validity.

Because of this fact, no evaluation of the authenticity of signatures, paper, or ink can be made.

The document also is suspiciously similar to a description of the one that was shown to Linda Moulton Howe at Kirtland Air Force Base, if a more refined version.

Other details suggest that the document is a hoax. The dating format is a mixed civilian and military style, as for instance in the date, "18, November, 1952." The military format would be 18

November, 1952," lacking the added comma. Single digit dates also have an added zero inserted before them in the MJ-12 document, a practice that did not come into use in the military until the 1970s. As pointed out by debunker Philip J. Klass, in available examples of Hillenkoetter letters and memoranda, the conventional military date format is used.

Also, according to Klass, a Los Angeles document examiner has determined that the typewriter used to type the MJ-12 document was not available before 1963.

Researcher Kevin Randle points out another significant discrepancy in the MJ-12 document: "The document is constructed as a briefing paper for President-elect Eisenhower, suggesting that Eisenhower had no knowledge of the Roswell crash. The problem is that Eisenhower, as the Army Chief of Staff in July 1947, would have been completely aware of the Roswell crash."

The MJ-12 report does not resemble in style or substance anything else that I have seen originating from the government, and I have examined hundreds of government documents originating from the same period, many of them dealing with UFOs. The document is also not written in typical "bureaucratese," that elusive jargon so valued in government circles.

The main problem with the MJ-12 document for me, however, is that it solves too much, wrapping up too many of the loose ends of the contemporary UFO controversy, and "proving" exactly what most UFO buffs "already know." Little new information is offered on the alleged saucer crashes themselves, which is rather odd given the fact that this constitutes our first clear look inside the "Cosmic Watergate" so toured by Moore, Stanton Friedman, and others. If this in fact is a briefing provided to Eisenhower, then it is a comic book briefing that would have raised far more questions in the President-elect's mind than it answered. The loose ends that are wrapped up in the document also neatly intersect with the specific stated beliefs and investigative involvement of the men most closely associated with the report: Shandera, Moore, Friedman.

After the publication of the MJ-12 briefing documents, another unsigned document was allegedly discovered in the National Archives, dated July 14, 1954. This is a purported memo to General Nathan Twining, Air Force Chief of Staff, from Robert Cutler, Eisenhower's Special Assistant for National Security. This document states, "The President has decided that the MJ-12 SSP briefing should take place during the already scheduled White House meeting of July 16, rather than following it as previously intended."

The alleged memo was unsigned, with Cutler's name and title typed at the page bottom. Advocates of the authenticity of the original MJ-12 pages claim that the Cutler memo provides proof positive that the document--and the alleged secret MJ-12 consulting group--

was real, while detractors suggest that the memo is just another fake.

The authenticity of the Cutler memo, this supposed confirmation, is doubtful. Advocate Stanton Friedman insists that the memo is real because "it was in a classified box in a classified vault," but this only points up Friedman's willingness to overlook the obvious in his anxiety to verify the MJ-12 document. What would have stopped someone from carrying the Cutler memo in with them when examining the supposedly secure box?

Jo Ann Williamson, Chief of the Military Reference Branch, has indicated that "this particular document poses problems" in a number of ways. Williamson points out that it is not typed on government letterhead and does not have a watermark; it does not have a top secret registration number; it is the single document with a notation about MJ-12 in the folder in which it was found; the marking TOP SECRET RESTRICTED INFORMATION attached to it was not used until many years after the Eisenhower administration; and Robert Cutler was traveling in Europe and North Africa on the day the memo was supposedly issued.

Other significant factors, possibly the most significant in the evaluation of the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents and the Cutler memo are the associations of their recipient and primary disseminators. Jaime Shandera, who reportedly received the film containing images of the MJ-12 document, had in 1980 been involved in pre-production for a fictional movie about UFOs with Stanton Friedman and William Moore. Some rash souls have suggested that the production of the MJ-12 document may have been their next fictional foray. Shandera had also "been working closely with Bill Moore and myself on the Roswell crash,"

according to Friedman.

Shandera and Moore had both been in contact with Richard Doty, who was at the time of the MJ-12 document's release working for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. Doty was trained in disinformation and psychological warfare, and allegedly a self-admitted member of a disinformation group. According to published reports, Moore has stated that Doty reported to a Pentagon official named Hennessey, reportedly chief of security for the Stealth project. It is impossible to gauge Doty's actual connections, since portions of his service records are censored, although while stationed at Linsay Air Force Base in West Germany, according to Klass:

Doty was charged with falsifying official documents and telling falsehoods to his commanding officer. A formal investigation confirmed these charges and Doty was "decertified" as a special agent

[with the] Air Force Office of Special Investigations and returned to Kirtland AFB in late 1986. Doty spent his last two years before retirement in food services management.

Doty was allegedly involved in an earlier UFO hoax regarding a sighting near Kirtland Air Force Base in 1980. An anonymous letter, purporting to be from an airman and indicating that the same information had been submitted to the Office of Special Investigations, was sent to a UFO organization. According to researcher Robert Hastings, "careful analysis of the anonymous letter reveals that it was almost certainly typed on the same typewriter used by Doty..."

According to Dr. Bruce Maccabee of the Fund for UFO

Research, Doty also confessed to William Moore that he been involved in another hoaxed UFO incident, called the Ellsworth case, and that he had forged documents and submitted them to researchers as authentic.

Was Doty or the OSI the source of the MJ-12 documents? Did he forge them? No conclusive proof exists.

But the plot continues to thicken. Researcher Lee Graham has reportedly said that William Moore had contacted him "in an intelligence capacity" and that he worked for the government in releasing sensitive UFO information. According to Graham, Moore had flashed a Defense Investigation Service badge, although Stanton Friedman in his 1996 MJ-12 apologia titled Top
Secret/Majic
puts a different spin on the event. Friedman says, "As a joke, Bill once pulled out a MUFON identification card, flashed it at Lee, and indicated that he was working for the government. Lee bought it."

This sidesteps the issue of this alleged impersonation of a government official, as well as Graham's memory of a government badge, not a MUFON card. Friedman carefully sidesteps these matters in his defense of a person who has otherwise admitted to collaborating with agents of the government!

Another issue that Friedman does not approach in
Top Secret/

Majic
is Moore's association with men claiming to be Air Force intelligence. Although I was not present at the 1989 MUFON