Latest MJ-12 Documents: A Final Look

For those of you who tuned into Midnight in the Desert to listen to me discuss the latest MJ-12 document release, well, I was bumped early in the evening because Heather Wade had “overbooked the show.” At least I wasn’t dragged off by security for refusing to give up my place at the microphone… which couldn’t have happened since I was at home and she controlled the telephone system anyway.

But I did listen to the beginning of the program because like so many others, I wondered what Stan Friedman would say about the authenticity. Like many of us, he was interested in the source of the documents. They had seemed to excite him in earlier statements, but he now was somewhat more neutral though a careful reading of them should have given away the false nature of them... The mere mention that the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was involved should have been a huge red flag. The IPU has been identified and it has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs or anything of the nature. For more about the IPU see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=IPU

I found one point hilarious and which nearly everyone has failed to mention. The first page says, “READ-AND-DESTROY. I have to wonder how the document survived with that instruction on the first page, which also argues against authenticity. I will note here that a top secret document’s destruction must be documented saying that it has been properly destroyed. Whoever “stole” this one would have had to violate that rule because he would have had to sign the destruction form.

Heather wouldn’t name names, and in one respect I understand that but that also tends to undermine the validity of the documents. She did say that the person who “stole” them originally had died so that he or she can’t be questioned about how he or she gained possession of them.

Heather hadn’t received the originals either. They had come to her in a .pdf file, which, as I have noted in the past, does not allow for much in the way of a forensic analysis of the paper, ink or anything else that might be gained by examination of the originals. We are left with a study of the format, the font, if the documents conformed to others created at the highest-levels of the government and if the documents fit into our current understanding of the situations being discussed in them.

Instead of analysis of these latest documents on the show, we were treated to another waltz down MJ-12 memory lane from the alleged moment the original documents first arrived at Jaime Shandera’s house in 1984 to the point we have reached now. There was nothing new here, other than listening to Stan talk about all his visits to archives, and he enjoys to do so (and hey, that is fun going through all this material, looking for that single and often elusive nugget) and things he had learned about the men who were named to the original MJ-12 committee, all of which was irrelevant to understanding these new documents.

For those who haven’t looked at them yet, though they can now be accessed through a variety of websites including that for Midnight in the Desert. You can still find them here if you are still interested:

http://midnightinthedesert.com/exclusive-ultra-top-secret-assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos/

I have outlined some of the many mistakes in these documents already and find it difficult to believe that something created at this level would be so riddled with errors. I am sorely tempted to enumerate the errors in the Roswell section but will refrain from doing that. Anyone interested can take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century (or almost any of the other Roswell books) and compare the information there with that in this document. The errors will be apparent and we have to think that anyone who was far enough inside of the loop to be writing this document would be cognizant of the facts of the case.

I’m going to move onto the Aztec case which was covered in depth here. Stan had made a big deal out of the research in Scott Ramsey’s book while he was on Midnight in the Desert and how careful and meticulous it has been. But this document is at a wide variance with what Ramsey published. This sets up a conundrum… if the document is accurate, then Ramsey is wrong but if Ramsey is right, then the document is fake and I haven’t even mentioned the possibility that both are wrong and Aztec is a hoax.

According to the document, on March 25, 1948, the craft was watched on three radars “belonging to the recovery network of the White Sands Test Range and located in classified areas of southwest New Mexico.” In 1948, it was the White Sands Proving Ground, and if the radars were in southwest New Mexico, that would have prevented tracking of the object to low altitudes in northern New Mexico because the mountainous terrain would have been in the way. In fact, once you get very far north of White Sands, their radars aren’t much good for an object below 10,000 feet. Radar is line of sight.

Again, according to the document, the crash site was secured by 10:45 p.m. that night, which meant that no civilians would have been gathered at the site on the morning of March 25 to watch the military arrive because the object had yet to crash according to these new documents. And, if the civilians were on hand to see the military to arrive, it would have had to be on the morning of March 26, but then the site was already secured and the civilians would have been prevented from getting near.

We are treated to a reference to the base at Flat Rock, Nevada, which, of course, was the scene of much of the action in The Andromeda Strain. We learn that the Blue Berets (whoever they are… no, they don’t exist) came in disguised as National Guard, but I’m not sure how you pull that off since the uniforms worn by the National Guard are the same wore by those on active duty with the Army. I suppose they removed their Blue Berets and wore regulation headgear.

Stephen Bassett

But there really doesn’t seem much reason to drag this out. The documents are faked. I spoke with Stephen Bassett yesterday afternoon, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he too thought the documents faked. We discussed some of the bloopers in text, the problems with the classification markings, and all the other errors. Bassett said that he didn’t think these were disinformation, but more likely just someone outside the government who had too much time on his hands. I’ll add someone who didn’t actually know much but who had gotten his hands of William Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec.

What we need to do now is place these documents in the same file folder with the Roswell Slides, the alien autopsy and little grey men who like strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music. Footnotes in the great journal of UFO information, or maybe, even better, have them all deleted from anything to do with UFO research because they have only distracted us. They have added nothing to our knowledge.

Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit - Part Two

There is another alleged MJ-12 document that suffers from many of the same problems as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary and this is the Majestic Twelve Project, Annual Report which is believed to have been created during the summer of 1952. This is another of the documents provided by Timothy Cooper through his source of Thomas Cantwheel, that unidentified man who claimed to have been on the inside of UFO crashes investigations and with the Majestic Twelve or some such.

These are the conclusions from a larger document which rehashes some of the information from other documents and adds to the knowledge that we have been told is highly classified. It is clear from the document that, “…no country on this earth has the means and the security of its resources to produce such [meaning an interplanetary craft].”

It is noted that “The occupants of these planform vehicles are, in most respects, human or human-like. Autopsies, so far indicate, that these beings share the same biological needs as humans.”

One of the things that would become important in understanding the veracity of the document said, “The ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last dated December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of subjects and areas where witnesses were obtained subsequent to the post-1947 incident. The un-published documents consolidate records of interrogation derived from the accumulated reports of interviews of selected witnesses from New Mexico and military personnel involved in removal of evidence.”

It is after Section P labeled as “Government Policy of Control and Denial,” a list of statements about all these events is found. For example, it said, “The Panel’s review of the AEC and AFSWP investigation of Site L-1 and the Air Force Site L-2, has led the Panel to conclude that the objects under study, are the result of a high altitude ejection of a [sic] escape cylinder from a fatal mid-air collision of two unidentified circular planform aircraft of interplanetary nature.”

As had been seen in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, there are the coordinates for L-2 [which is why the two documents can be tied together] and they are written in the same weird format, meaning “Lat. 33-40-31, Long. 106-28-29.… this site yielded the most material for analysis.”

We learn that Site L-2 is associated with Site L-1, again for which no coordinates are provided, which also seems strange. The descriptions of both sites seem to match to some degree and that “impact and the debris pattern… and debris pattern suggests that the craft hit the ground at a sharp angle and continued to remain airborne until coming to rest at Site L-2.”

Then comes a statement that turns part of this upside down. According to the document “The second craft that impacted at Site L-3, provided very little evidence that it too was similar in design, so the impact was vertical in nature and at very high speed. It is believed that the debris discovered on 2 July 1947, by a local rancher was the result of a mid-air collision with an X-plane from HAFB [Holloman Air Force Base]; another unidentified object; or possibly collided with both…”

According to the document, “There were five recovered bodies, two of which were found in a severely damaged escape cylinder, and the remaining three were found some distance away from the cylinder. All five appeared to have suffered from sudden decompression and heat suffication [sic] (recovery and autopsies of the occupants are covered in detail in a separate study GRAY SUIT within Projects 612 and 621…”

Later, it is noted that tissue samples from the contamination of four technicians involved in the recovery were being held at Fort Detrick, MD.

And to make matters worse, there is the note, “Detection of a high altitude explosion was recorded by a Project MOGUL constant level balloon on 4 July 1947.”

At another point it said, “On 6 December 1950, MAJCOM-4 alerts MAJCOM-1 of a breach in DEW Greenland of a UFO on a south-westerly course. HQ IPU alerted and dispatched a scientific team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border. MAJCOM-4 orders a recovery team from Project Stork and MOON DUST to crash site…”

But here’s the problem with those things mentioned above. They are out of place. They shouldn’t be in this document because they didn’t exist at the time it was supposedly written. Or other, better information has superseded it. Newer information has shown where the older data are wrong. For example, the document states that “…ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last dated December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of subjects…” But, according to Brad Sparks, ATIC wasn’t formed until May 1951 and therefore could not issue a series of reports before its existence.

Although there is the discussion about some sort of mid-air collision, the best evidence today is that there was a single craft that scattered its debris over three sites, all of them between Corona, New Mexico and Roswell. There is no evidence of a crash near the Trinity Site, other than in the MJ-12 documents. While an argument can be made that the information we have today does not completely eliminate the collision scenario, it can also be argued that it is out of date information that was the current thinking by some in the mid-1990s. That dates the creation of the document to that time.

Then, unlike the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, this document adds a third site. This might be an attempt to account for the later information coming from UFO researchers in the 1990s. Realizing that something else had come down between the Brazel ranch debris field and Roswell, the forger added this new detail to conform to the new and better information. As an aside, this information should have appeared in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, since it would have been available in July 1947. This all, of course, is indicative of a hoax rather than the truth.

Worse still, is the suggestion that Mack Brazel had found the debris field on July 2. It has been claimed by some that the crash took place either late on July 2 or early on July 3. Brazel found the debris on July 3 or 4, according to some of the scenarios, but none of them include finding debris as early as July 2.

The idea of a collision between an experimental aircraft out of Holloman is not borne out by research. Air Force investigation showed that no military aircraft, either in the regular inventory or in the experimental stages disappeared in early July 1947. Those on the inside of these organizations, with the clearances necessary, would know this. They might speculate about a collision with an unknown object but they would know that it was not an aircraft of any type.

We move into trivia again. Holloman Air Force Base was, in fact, the Alamogordo Army Air Field in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that someone writing about this in 1952 would use the current name of the air field rather than the older name.

Almost the same could be said about the tissue samples were sent to Fort Detrick. The problem here is that Fort Detrick was Camp Detrick in 1952. The new designation would not be made until some four years after the document was allegedly written. Yes, you could say that it is a minor mistake that might have been made by someone who was not fully aware of how the Army designated their installations. Even someone inside the Army might not understand this. The question to be asked is how many of these sorts of errors are allowed before it becomes clear that the document was not written by an insider?

Part of that answer is found in the next statement about a MOGUL balloon detecting the collision or explosion on a July 4. First, there was no July 4 MOGUL flight and there is no indication that any sort of explosion detected by MOGUL. This is not to mention that it contradicts the other information suggesting that Brazel found the debris on July 2. If the alleged detonation was detected by the July 4 flight, then how is it linked to an event that happened two days before it was launched?

But it is the next paragraph that proves the document a hoax. It begins with a date of December 6, 1950, and claims that the UFO breeched the DEW in Greenland. The problem is that the DEW line didn’t exist in 1950 and according to Brad Sparks the name wasn’t even “coined until the MIT Project Lincoln Summer Study Group report of September 1952. The DEW line was not started until 1954.”

Even worse, according to the document, “HQ IPU alerted and dispatched a scientific team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border.” This is based on the testimony of Robert Willingham, who claimed that as a high-ranking Air Force officer and fighter pilot, he had seen the crash. The trouble is that Willingham was neither an officer nor a fighter pilot and his story has been discredited. It would seem that a tale, invented in the 1960s by Willingham and that has undergone several revisions since then, would not appear in an authentic document created more than a decade before Willingham made his first claim.

Finally, we know that Project Stork was the analysis done by Battelle and had nothing to do with crash retrievals. Although it began early enough to be mentioned in this document, it is clear that the author didn’t know what Project Stork was.

Attached to this is the mention of the MOON DUST team but this is a real problem. According to documents that I located in the Project Blue Book files and a letter dated December 12, 1957, MOON DUST began in the fall of 1957. In other words, it would not exist for five years and there is no way for it to deploy a team in 1950.

To summarize (which is to say, let’s beat this dead horse), this document is filled with internal contradictions, it is filled with inaccurate information, and it contains information that would be correct if the programs, units and projects actually existed in 1952. While it might be argued that this is a draft (which would have been destroyed when the final draft was completed) so that you might expect the typos, misnamed military organizations, and some inaccurate information, all of which would be corrected in the final draft, there is no way to explain the predictions for the future.  There is no way for the author to know the DEW line would be created two years in the future, would know that it would be called the DEW line before the name was coined, and no way to know that MOON DUST would be created some five years later. These, to me, are the fatal flaws.

For those interested, there are more examples of this in the document. I just didn’t bother to enumerate all of them. And yes, I know that the comment will be made that the way to discredit a leak of classified information is to pump false information into it so no one knows what is accurate, what is false, and the whole thing is rejected. But that isn’t the point here. These documents just appeared in Timothy Cooper’s mail box and the trail basically ends there.

Without a provenance, without an eyewitness, without anything to allow us to validate the documents, there is but one sane course. Ignore them. Reject them. Move our research efforts into another arena. Unfortunately, the facts about this document are not enough to remove it from the case. Instead it is considered highly reliable by some in the UFO community.

There is one other thing to be said. During all my investigations into the MJ-12 documents, regardless of source, Stan Friedman, Dr. Robert Wood and Ryan Wood, have answered most of my email questions. All are aware of my personal belief in MJ-12 but they do respond and I appreciate that. It would be simple for them to ignore my questions but they don’t. I thank them for putting up with my questions.

Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary - July 22, 1947

The other night as I was cursing the cable I blundered into another of those UFO programs filled with hysterical narration and a belief that nearly every outrageous claim is based in reality. In this case they were talking about the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit as if the documentation existed to prove that the Army had, at one time, investigated UFOs under that unit title. They flashed some documentation but in today’s world with nearly everyone and her brother creating UFO documents for fun and profit you would think that a little caution would be called for. But there was really nothing in the documentary to suggest that this wasn’t true other than a mention of the “controversial MJ-12” documents.

I had thought that it had been fairly well established that this IPU information had been discredited and was a little surprised to see it being used as evidence that MJ-12 was real, as was the Roswell UFO crash along with a similar event over on the Plains of San Agustin (or more accurately, a point to the southeast of Socorro, but more on that later). So I wondered just what do we know about the IPU and where did that information originate.

It seems that in 1977 Larry Bryant had filed a somewhat generic FOIA request with the Army asking about their gathering of UFO reports. Eventually, in response, the Army said that their records had been sent to the Air Force in 1962 so they no longer had anything related to UFOs. If you look at the timing here, you’d see that the Air Force was also attempting to get rid of the UFO investigation or relegate it to the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information (SAFOI), so the Army, having the perfect place to dump their UFO material, did so. All this means that at the time no one wanted to get stuck with the UFO problem.

Bryant filed another request and in 1978 the Army came back with what they termed an “institutional memory,” which was their way of saying they’d asked an older member of the team what he could remember. He said that in 1958 the UFO reports were processed by the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit. This was set up in 1958 after the launch of the Soviet satellites in late 1957. According to the institutional memory, all the material gathered was sent to the Air Force in 1962. The IPU was abolished at that point.

Brad Sparks believed that the actual name was probably something like the Intelligence Processing Unit and the function was that of gathering all sorts of intelligence reports about all sorts of things to be distributed to the various commands and activities where that information could be exploited. According to Sparks, based on his review of various organizational charts and other documentation, he found the name of the IPU was actually Input Processing Unit, and if Sparks was right about its function, then this name makes more sense than the more exciting Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit.

And while you could argue that Sparks has gotten this wrong, though the evidence supports him, there seems to be one fact that is not in dispute. The IPU did not begin to function until 1958. There is no evidence that it existed prior to that.

But then documents from the IPU began to surface. They seemed to come from a man named Timothy Cooper who received them from a fellow named Thomas “Cy” Cantwheel which is a pseudonym so that he can’t be traced and his claims about his background can’t be independently verified. One of the documents that relates to the IPU is labeled Top Secret and it mentions only those with “Majic access may have access.” This strikes me as a rather wishy-washy way to say that “Access to the document is restricted to those with Majic clearance,” but then, that’s just my personal opinion.

The document is the “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary,” and it is classified as “Top Secret – Ultra.” There is a problem with this as well. A classified project known as “Ultra” existed during World War II. Ultra was an attempt to gather and decrypt Nazi communications at the highest level. By the end of the war this was an Allied effort that was of significant importance and certainly contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. But the point is, the classification for the project was Top Secret Ultra and that was for that specific project which has nothing to do with UFOs.

Overlooking this, the document lays out the “facts” about the Roswell UFO crash. The problem here is that investigations as outlined in these documents have been superseded by new and better information. It places a part of the crash at Site LZ - 2 (which I suppose is Landing Zone 2) some twenty miles southeast (that’s right, southeast) of Socorro, which moves it from the Plains of San Agustin to “Lat. 33 – 40 – 31, Long. 106 – 28 – 29, with Oscura Peak being the geographic reference point.” Overlooking the fact that the coordinates would have been listed as 33.40.31N and 106.28.29W (33° 40' 31" N, 106° 28' 29" W), those coordinates are not on the Plains of San Agustin, but southeast of Socorro. While the Barnett story is questioned and certainly does not relate to the Roswell crash, it was clear that he was talking about the high country meaning the Plains and not someplace to the southeast.

For those keeping score at home and who don’t have Google Earth on their computers, those coordinates, along with Oscura Peak, are on the White Sands Missile Range near the Trinity site. It’s difficult enough to get onto the debris field found by Mack Brazel since it is private property surrounded by BLM land. No one is going to drive out onto the missile range to dig on that site, let alone get near the Trinity site without permission. As far as I know, no one has been there to see what might have been left behind.

In fact, that leads to another question. Why is it that they have the coordinates for LZ – 2, but not for the Brazel ranch site? I suspect the reason is that when this document was created, the coordinates of the Brazel site were known to very few people and if the document had the wrong coordinates, that would call its legitimacy into question. The hoaxer just didn’t know those coordinates.

These few things should be enough for those paying attention to reject this document as fraudulent. It should be enough to prove that this document is a forgery and a not very clever one at that. It does nothing to support the idea of the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because the document is an invention created in the 1990s, after the publication of the various books about the Roswell crash, but the forger didn’t seem to have looked at a map, which proves the forgery. (Or maybe I should say he did look at a map and picked the location because of its highly restricted access. He didn’t have to worry about someone going there to see what they might find.)

In fact, I can date it even better than that because it does mention Mogul and no one was talking about Mogul until the early 1990s. It is unlikely that a report created in 1947 would refer to the balloon project by that name. It probably would have referred to it as the New York University balloon project or the constant level balloons rather than Mogul, if mentioned it at all. More likely it would have just mentioned weather balloons if it was felt necessary to make that connection. All that does is allow us to date the time of creation for the document and point to another flaw in it.

But, remember, the IPU, by whatever name, didn’t exist in 1947 and wouldn’t exist for another decade according to the best information available. This document does nothing to prove that the name of the organization was the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because the document is a fake.

In fact there is no real documentation confirming the existence of such an organization at all. It was the “institutional memory” who created the name based on what he remembered. That “institutional memory” was Craig Hunter who, some two decades after the fact, mentioned all that he remembered about the IPU. There is no official document with the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit name on it…

Oh, I know what you’ll say. There are letters to researchers that prove the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit existed, or exists, because it is referred to as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit in these official communications. In one of those, written by Lieutenant Colonel Lance R. Corine, it says, “As you note in your letter, the so-called Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was disestablished…”

In other words, Corine is not actually confirming the existence of the IPU as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because that is the name of the unit used by William Steinman in his letter to the Army. Steinman gave them the name. Yes, the IPU existed but it was not the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit. It was the Input Processing Unit, which certainly isn’t the same thing.

And, yes, this is splitting a fine hair, but the point is, other than the “institutional memory” of the name, the letters cited as proof seem to be responding to information included in the FOIA requests. I’d like to see a document from a government source (other than MJ-12, of course) that uses the name Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit on it. Brad Sparks said that he’s seen organizational charts with IPU on them, but not that particular name.

The evidence for the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit is one man’s memory that seems to be contradicted by the documentation from official sources, which you all are now free to reject because it is from official sources and is all part of the bigger conspiracy. Everything, including to those letters to researchers, points to the creation of the IPU in 1958 which means that a document that was allegedly created in 1947 using the name Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit is a fake. And if it is a fake then those using it in a documentary to support another aspect of the UFO phenomenon have failed to prove their point. A fake document proves absolutely nothing and shouldn’t be used as evidence for the existence of something else.

Oh, I do get it. Those producing documentaries don’t have the comprehensive knowledge needed to understand what is going on. They must rely on the “experts” to understand what they are being told… and too often there are competing points of view. Sometimes the information is easily available and the evidence of fraud is almost overwhelming but they still use it to bolster their case. They want to believe just as badly as some of those in the field want to believe so the negative evidence is reduced to a single sentence or phrase that is almost mumbled. The “controversial” comment is misunderstood by many, suggesting that there is still an open question. In this case, with this organization, the IPU, and this particular document, there is no real controversy. The results are in and the document is a fake.