MJ-12 Revisited

I have, for a long time, thought there is no real government conspiracy to hide UFO information from us. I thought that we are so inept, that we accept so much as true with little or no proof, and that there are so many frauds, charlatans, fakers and liars out there that the government doesn’t need any program to discredit UFO reports. We do it to ourselves all the time.

But then I got to thinking about this MJ-12 stuff. I believed that it was created by certain members of the UFO community to propel themselves into the spotlight. It was a hoax from inside the community that wasn’t necessarily designed to mislead, but had another agenda behind it. This might have been a creation designed to shake information loose with the added benefit of media attention.

But then I began to reevaluate these thoughts.

And I began to look at those who were the initial reporters of MJ-12.

And I remembered something that Stan Friedman had told me a long time ago.

And I began to wonder if it wasn’t possible that MJ-12 was more of a government project that I had suspected.

Let me backtrack a little bit and mention William J. Moore who might be considered the father of MJ-12, who has been around the UFO field for a long time, and who admitted to ties to the intelligence community long ago. Moore had also once been on the Board of Directors of the Coral and Jim Lorenzen’s Aerial Phenomena Research Organization. Moore confessed that he was spying on UFO researchers for the government at that time.

I thought he was just making that up for some reason. He did accuse me of the same thing and since I knew that I wasn’t spying on anyone for any reason, I suppose that led me to my conclusion. Of course, he might have accused me as a justification for his own spying.

Friedman also told me that Moore had told him that he, Moore, was thinking about creating a Roswell type document because it might shake things loose. But what if the idea for this wasn’t Moore’s? What if it came from somewhere else?

Moore was also associated with Richard Doty, a former member of AFOSI who had lost his status as a member of AFOSI and finished his Air Force career in food service. This means, simply, that he was in charge of a Dining Facility or what we used to call a Mess Hall in the Army (now they’re DFACs which stands for Dining FACility).

Moore also said that he was responsible for some of the disinformation that was leaked to Paul Bennewitz. Moore said that he played along with this, even to the point of rearranging Bennewitz’s furniture to frighten him. Moore said he did it in the misguided belief that it would take him into the inner ring of the anti-UFO government programs so that he might be able to learn more about them and then expose them.

I thought at the time it was a load of crap, but probably because I was still being accused of being a government agent (this time by Don Schmitt who was supposedly my friend) and I knew this wasn’t true. But what if the government wanted to discredit UFO research. What if the plan was to throw out so many different ideas, so many tangents, that anyone who stumbled onto the right one might be dragged onto another. Or, if that didn’t work, just discredit all of UFO research by discrediting one small aspect of it.

For about twenty years we have been arguing the reality of MJ-12. Great amounts of effort, research and money have been dumped into the chase of MJ-12 and that is effort, research and money that was not available for other, possibly more productive lines of inquiry. And in that time, we haven’t uncovered anything that advances our knowledge of UFOs in any helpful way. We have not found the smoking gun documents but have found dozens, if not hundreds that are faked. In fact, some of the evidence suggests there were all faked. It even tells us who did it and why, but still the debate continues.

So, where does that leave us today? Well, Bill Moore did claim to be a government agent, he did admit to the harassment of Bennewitz for the government and he did admit to spying on researchers for the Air Force. Moore was the first to tell us of MJ-12 and it was Moore who worked to prove that MJ-12 was real. Maybe there is a connection here between the government and Moore that has accomplished the mission. Twenty years later and we’re still arguing about MJ-12 and when we divert our attention to MJ-12 we can’t focus it in other directions, and maybe that is the whole point.