"Truth," MJ-12 and Fatal Flaws

When I put up that short article about Truth and MJ-12, it seemed, according to my private correspondence, that the superscript and proportional spacing of the memos about George W. Bush and his Air Guard service had become the main issue. Those flaws were not the only things found. There were others, each, in and of itself not particularly egregious, but in the aggregate, suggest that the documents are faked.*

We see the same thing in the MJ-12 main document, that is, the Eisenhower Briefing document. There are many little flaws from the dating format that is more consistent with the digital age and Bill Moore, to the misspellings of words. None of these are particularly egregious, but in the aggregate suggest the document is a fake.

I have pointed out that there is a fatal flaw in the Eisenhower Briefing Document and that is the paragraph that describes the El Indio UFO crash of December 6, 1950. It is clear that this is the story invented by Robert Willingham, who first dated it to 1948 and later to the mid-1950s. He told the story to Todd Zechel, who told it to Bill Moore. Zechel believed that Willingham had been a high-ranking officer and fighter pilot in the Air Force but research showed that he had not been an Air Force officer or a fighter pilot. No evidence ever surfaced to prove that there had been a UFO crash on December 6, 1950, and if that story was a hoax, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document was a hoax. This would be the fatal flaw, taking down MJ-12.

In the documents released about George Bush there was a similar fatal flaw and it is in the document that refers to an OETR. There is no such document. There is, however, an OET/R. Those inside the Air Guard would have known this and not made such the mistake of calling it an OETR. The source of the mistake, it seems, was an anti-Bush website that had first published some of the documents before CBS got heavily involved. Apparently CBS didn’t know this.

Here’s what happened.

Those of you who have served in the military know that all these things are put into file folders and those folders have fasteners at the top. Documents are punched with two holes so that they can be secured in the folder to keep them in a specific order. The document, known as an Officer Effectiveness/Training Report (OET/R), had the two holes punched in it and one of the holes obscured the slash so that it looked as if it said, “Officer Effectiveness Training Report,” or the OETR.

According to William Campenni, who was a member of the Texas Air Guard at the relevant time, “So I did a little more research on the webpage and found that one Bush record was labeled ‘Notice of Missing or Correction Of Officer Effectiveness / Training Report,’ a multi-use sheet for both OERs and training reports. But Lukasiak [Paul Lukasiak, who originally put the document on the Internet before CBS became involved] did not notice that a hole punch at the top had punched out the ‘/’ (slash). Hence, he mistook it for “Officer Effectiveness Training Report” and created the acronym “OETR.” At the time, I dismissed it as one of many Lukasiak errors and misrepresentations in that blog and put it out of my mind.”

This then is a fatal flaw that was created by a two-hole punch and a misunderstanding about these documents and what they are. To read the whole story, written by Campenni, see:

http://dailysignal.com/2015/10/30/the-truth-about-dan-rathers-deceptive-reporting-on-george-w-bush/

Here’s the point. The use of OETR in lieu of OET/R, while seemingly insignificant, points at the fraudulent nature of that document just as the use of the El Indio UFO crash on December 6, 1950, points to the fraudulent nature of the Eisenhower Briefing Document. Both errors, by themselves, prove that the documents are faked. There is simply no way around this.

Too often we all get lost in the minutia of the situation, talking about fonts, and spacing, and the other ancillary nonsense. We overlook the importance of some of these errors which demonstrate beyond any reasonable doubt that the documents are faked. For the story about Bush, it proves only that the documents are faked but says nothing about his service, which is, of course, a different issue. For MJ-12, it proves that the documents are faked and it ends the discussion about a committee named MJ-12.

While I know this will not end the discussion of the legitimacy of MJ-12, it should. There is no fallback position and there is nothing that has surfaced anywhere to suggest that it ever existed. Too bad that we will continue to waste our time on it.

*One of the other troublesome and basically fatal flaws in the Bush documents is the use of a serial number as opposed to a Social Security number. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the military switched from using a unique serial number to the Social Security number. By the time these Bush documents were allegedly written, the Social Security number had replaced the serial number on all official documents and the use of the serial number argues strongly against the validity of the Bush documents.

Absence of Evidence...

While in Roswell I had a chance, brief though it was, to talk to Stan Friedman. He had come up to me as I ate breakfast and suggested that I was probably correct about Robert Willingham which is surprising. Oh, not about Willingham because it’s pretty clear that he never served as an Air Force officer or a fighter pilot, but because of what it suggests about the MJ-12 documents. If Willingham’s tale is discredited, then MJ-12 is discredited because it mentions the Willingham story and there is no other source of information on Del Rio (or the El Indio – Guerrero UFO crash as it was disguised there).

When I said to Stan that there was no evidence of a Del Rio crash, he trotted out his propaganda argument that “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.”

My immediate reply was, “It is when due diligence has been preformed,” which, of course I had done (and which, of course, sort of attaches a legal term to the argument).

But this whole thing got me to thinking about this “Absence of evidence” line and what it really means. It is the last ditch effort to support a concept, idea, theory, or story that has nothing else to support it. Stan didn’t suggest other sources of evidence for the Del Rio crash, he didn’t offer additional witness testimony, he didn’t produce newspaper articles that talked of some kind of UFO event in the area in the right time frame (which according to Willingham’s various tales was 1948, 1950 or sometime in the mid-1950s). No, he just quoted his line as if that ends the argument.

With that sort of an argument, no rational conclusion can be drawn. It doesn’t matter how much time, effort, or money has been put into an investigation. If you found nothing to support the story, then the fallback position is always, “Absence of evidence...”

Here is where we are with the Del Rio crash. The only witness to ever mention it has invented his military career and if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then he was not in a position to see the UFO crash. If he wasn’t an Air Force officer, then he was never an Air Force fighter pilot and his story fails on that point.

Yes, Willingham has named other witnesses or potential witnesses, but then all of them are dead (which, coincidentally is the same problem with MJ-12... all the men named were dead before the document appeared). There has been no way to verify this story. We must accept it as Willingham tells it.

The only other reference to this case is in the MJ-12 documents. There are no other witnesses, no newspaper stories (and before you get wound up on that, remember even Roswell was mentioned in the newspapers, as was Las Vegas, Kecksburg, Shag Harbour, and several other suspected and alleged UFO crashes), and there nothing in the Project Blue Book files.

Nothing.

You must remember that if there was no Del Rio crash, yet it was mentioned in MJ-12, it would be the final, fatal blow to the Eisenhower Briefing document. There is no reason to include a hoax in the document, a hoax that wasn’t created until 1968, which, of course, means the author of the Eisenhower document was clairvoyant or the document was created after 1968. With Willingham’s latest date change, the crash didn’t happen until after the 1952 date appended to the Eisenhower Briefing Document, and is just one more suggestion the document is fraudulent.

So, let’s look at this “Absence of evidence” idea. In science, sometimes, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

Take The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert T. Bakker and published by Zebra Non-fiction in 1986. On page 116, Bakker wrote, “A careful investigation of the quarry made it clear that something was wrong with the deep–lake theory. As a carcass sleuth looks for clues, he or she must be alert for negative evidence; sometimes what’s missing reveals more than what is present. And negative clues were everywhere in Sheep Creek. No fish bones or crocodile bones and almost no turtle remains (only one fragment of shell) were ever fund in the Sheep Creek limestone.”

In other words, “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

Here’s where we find ourselves today. Robert Willingham is the only source available for the Del Rio crash and he has changed the location, date, number of UFOs, type of aircraft, and a host of other details three times. There is no other source.

Willingham was interviewed by Todd Zechel who was working with William Moore and the Del Rio case appears in The Roswell Incident. (And no, this isn’t a new source, but one that is traceable back to Willingham). It then appears in the MJ–12 papers because everyone thought that Willingham was a retired, high–ranking officer whose word could be trusted. If there was a Del Rio crash in 1948 or 1950 (depending on which version of Willingham’s story you trusted) and it was not included in MJ–12, well that would be evidence of a MJ-12 hoax. No one thought in terms of the Del Rio crash being faked when the MJ–12 papers appeared in the mid–1980s because, it seems, everyone accepted Willingham as authentic.

What evidence is there that something crashed near Del Rio, Texas, at any point in time? There is none. Nothing. The only conclusion to be drawn is that the Del Rio crash is a hoax (a much nicer word than lie) and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing document is a hoax.

Unless, or until, someone can provide any sort of additional and credible evidence of an event near Del Rio, or the El Indio–Guerrero area, there is nothing more to be said. It is a case where “Absence of evidence is evidence of absence.”

MJ-12 and Cognitive Dissonance

In the world of the UFO, we frequently talk about cognitive dissonance, which is defined, simply as “the mental discomfort (psychological stress) experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or value.”

It means believing in two things that seem to mutually exclusive. We run into this, I believe, when we begin to talk about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the second crash of a UFO on the Texas – Mexico border in December 1950.

Simply put here, if the EBD is authentic, then the information contained in it must also be authentic. If a portion of that information can be shown to be fraudulent, then the credibility of the entire document collapses at that point.

Here’s where we are on this. According to the EBD, “On 06 December, 1950 a second object of similar origin, impacted the earth at high

Robert Willingham, the man
responsible for the fatal flaw.

speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican border after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had bee almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.”

The problem here is that this tale was told by Robert Willingham who had claimed to have been a fighter pilot in the Air Force and had retired (or rather left the service) as a colonel. I have, in the past, on this blog, explained why it is clear that Willingham was neither a fighter pilot nor a colonel. Rather than go into all the reasons again, just refer the articles that can be found here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/03/ihave-argued-for-years-that-eisenhower.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/08/absense-of-evidence.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/08/roswell-festival-part-two.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/07/del-rio-ufo-crash-and-mj-12.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/02/willingham-1978-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/eisenhower-briefing-docu-12-and.htmlment-mj

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/end-of-mj-12.html

Well, I think everyone gets the point. I have written about this on many occasions and believed that this should have driven a stake, not only through the heart of the Willingham tale but through the EBD as well. That one paragraph is based on a hoax that those on the inside who were allegedly writing the EBD would have known was a hoax. Please note that other, known hoaxes were not addressed, including the famous Aztec hoax (which I mention solely to create more havoc).

Here’s the point of this short piece. At the Roswell Festival (I don’t remember if it was in 2011 or 2012) Stan Friedman came up and said, “I think you’re probably right about Willingham but not about the Eisenhower Briefing Document.”

Cognitive dissonance. Two mutually exclusive beliefs. One that Willingham had been lying about the El Indio – Guerrero UFO crash but that the EBD was real.

Yes, I know the fall back position. The EBD is disinformation, containing some real information but also some that is faked. But given the context and everything else, that makes no sense and does very little to establish the validity of the EBD. All it does is call into question the whole of MJ-12 without actually damaging the idea of an alien craft at Roswell. The EBD is seen as just a poor attempt by UFO researchers to provide documentation of UFO crashes. It doesn’t prove that Roswell wasn’t alien, only that this document was fraudulent.

But what I don’t understand is how you can see that the Willingham tale is bogus and not question the entirety of the EBD. There are other problems in the EBD, but this seems to me, to be the fatal flaw. The information is based on a lie, yet that isn’t enough to reject the EBD.

If there was any other source on the El Indio – Guerrero crash, that would be one thing, but all references to it, in various books, articles and documents are all traceable back to Willingham as the original source. He provided a number of dates and locations for the crash as the tide in the UFO community changed. Without Willingham and his ever-changing story, there would be no tale of this crash and if it hadn’t happened, then MJ-12 is equally bogus… yet there are those who hold these mutually exclusive ideas that the document is real but Willingham was lying… the very definition of cognitive dissonance, and that is what I don’t understand. How can you argue for the validity of one while confirming the other is untrue? I have yet to receive a good answer for the question that isn’t wrapped in a lot of rhetoric without explaining anything.

The End of MJ-12?

My plan had been to hold off on this until later, but with some suggesting there is still life in MJ-12, I thought I would attempt to drive a nail into this particular coffin. It is clear, based on some early research, that MJ-12 is a hoax created in the early 1980s, probably by Bill Moore and Richard Doty.

Here’s what we all seem to know. The information contained in the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) reflects the state of UFO crash research in the early 1980s. Bill Moore told a number of people, and you can find their names on the Internet, that he was thinking of creating a "Roswell-style document" in an attempt to smoke out additional witnesses. Moore had said that he had taken the investigation as far as he could.

By this time it was clear to many that the Barney Barnett (who died in 1969 long before he was interviewed) connection to Roswell was weak at best. Barnett, who told his tale of seeing a crashed UFO on the Plains of San Agustin, did not have a date associated with it. Barnett was important to the earliest Roswell investigations because he mentioned seeing alien bodies and that was the only mention of bodies. That made it clear the event was extraterrestrial in nature.

The connection was drawn by J. F. "Fleck" Danley who had been Barnett’s boss in 1947, and Danley said that he had heard the tale directly from Barnett. Pushed by Moore, Danley thought the date of this story might have been 1947, and based on sighting in Roswell on July 2, Moore and others assumed the crash to have happened on July 2. This sighting, by Dan Wilmot, has little relevance to the Roswell case other than Wilmot lived in Roswell and it happened on July 2, 1947. There is no reason to connect the sighting to the crash.

When I talked to Danley it was clear that he had no real idea of when Barnett had mentioned the UFO crash. It could have been 1947, but if I pushed, I could have gotten him to come up with another date. Moore knew of the shaky nature of the Danley date.

To make it worse, I learned, in the 1990s, from Alice Knight, that Ruth Barnett had kept a diary for 1947. It is clear from that document that the crash could not have taken place on July 2, if Barnett was there. In fact, there is nothing in the diary to suggest he had seen anything extraordinary or had been involved in anything that would have been upsetting. In other words, the only document about Barney Barnett that we could find suggested that if he had seen a UFO crash, it didn’t happen in 1947.

Of course, in the early 1980s, Moore wouldn’t have known about the diary, but he did know how he had gotten Danley to give him the 1947 date. He would have known that it wasn’t true and that the Barnett story had nothing to do with the Roswell UFO crash.

This is important because it explains why there was no mention of the Plains crash in the Eisenhower Briefing Document. Moore knew that those on the inside would know that the Barnett story did not fit into the scenario. Moore left it out because it would expose the MJ-12 hoax for what it was to those who knew the truth.

And now we come to the other crash mentioned in the EBD. This is the Del Rio crash that was dated in the EBD as 1950. This is the story being told by Robert B. Willingham, who it was claimed, was a retired Air Force colonel who had seen the crash. Because he was a retired colonel, his story had credibility with those in the UFO community. I believed it for that very reason. A retired Air Force colonel would not be making up something like this.

W. Todd Zechel, a UFO researcher of limited ability, in pawing through the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena files, found a newspaper clipping about Willingham and his alleged UFO crash. Back in the mid-1970s, when Zechel found the clipping, no one was taking much notice of such stories. They were considered, at best, to be mistakes and at worst, to be hoaxes. But Zechel believed the tale, and tracked down Willingham. At Zechel’s insistence, Willingham signed an affidavit about the crash, proving to many that this was a solid case. Even the Center for UFO Studies included the Willingham story on the LP (vinyl) record they produced of interesting UFO sightings.

Moore knew of this story because Zechel had told him. In Moore’s book, The Roswell Incident, he devotes a brief mention to the case which establishes the link between Zechel, Willingham and Moore. More to the point, Moore believed the story for the same reason that the rest of us did. Willingham was a retired colonel.

The thinking is easy to follow. Del Rio is a real crash, but Moore didn’t have all the details. Those belonged to Zechel and what he had learned from Willingham. But Moore believed this to be real and if those on the inside were going to believe MJ-12, he had to mention this crash. Without the details, he simply added a single paragraph to the EBD that suggested the craft had been nearly incinerated upon impact, which, in reality, wasn’t that far from what Willingham originally said.

So, the MJ-12 document, using the information developed by Zechel and supplied by Willingham, said, "On 06 December, 1950, (sic) a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El-Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally (sic) incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study."

The situation, then, in the early 1980s was that Roswell was a real crash, the Plains might be but the date was wrong, Aztec was a hoax, as proven in repeated investigations, and Del Rio was real because there was an Air Force officer who said so. Which, of course, explains why both the Plains and Aztec were left out and Del Rio was included.

I learned, as I was working on Crash – When UFOs Fall from the Sky, that no one had checked on Willingham’s credentials. I became suspicious when the date of the crash shifted from 1950 to 1955. I asked, but no one had ever looked into Willingham’s background. Apparently everyone thought someone else had done it, most believing that Zechel had conducted that research. The whole case hinged on the credibility of Willingham.

But Willingham had not been an officer, had not been in the Air Force, had not been a fighter pilot and had not been in a position to see a UFO crash. In fact, though I didn’t find the newspaper clipping, I did find a one paragraph report in the February/March 1968 issue of Skylook that gave the crash date as 1948, and suggested that there had been three objects. Nearly everything about that original case had changed, some times more than once. It was clear that Willingham had invented his Air Force career, was not a retired colonel, and had served just 13 or 14 months from December 1945 to January 1948 as a low-ranking enlisted soldier.

If Willingham, as the sole witness to the crash had invented the tale, then there was no Del Rio crash and the MJ-12 documents, or rather the EBD, was a fake. But in the early 1980s, Moore didn’t know this, most of the UFO community didn’t know this, and Willingham was still talking about the 1950 date.

Yes, I know what the answer to this will be. What relevance does Willingham have to MJ-12? Two separate issues. Except, they aren’t. There is no other witness, document, indication, suggestion, or mention of the Del Rio case without Willingham. If not for his discussion about the case in 1968, if not for Zechel’s interview of him in the 1970s, there would be no mention of a Del Rio UFO crash anywhere. That it is mentioned in the MJ-12 EBD, and we can draw a line from Willingham to Zechel to Moore, that suggests all we need to know about this. There was no Del Rio UFO crash and if there was none, then it shouldn’t have been mentioned in the Eisenhower Briefing Document.

If we look at the state of UFO research today, we realize that much of what was said in the EBD about Roswell was not quite right and the information about Del Rio completely wrong. The more we learn about the events in Roswell, and the more we learn about the lack of detail for Del Rio, the better the case against MJ-12 becomes.

Couple the other problems to this, the lack of provenance, the typographical errors, the incorrect dating format, and the anachronistic information, then the only conclusion possible is that there is no MJ-12. There never was, except for a 1980 unpublished novel written by the late Bob Pratt with the assistance of Bill Moore and Richard Doty. The only question left is how long are we going to have to listen to the nonsense that is MJ-12.

MJ-12 is DEAD

Back a decade or more, I was collecting video-taped testimony from Roswell witnesses for the Fund for UFO Research’s oral history project. I was in California with Stan Friedman and we, quite naturally, began to discuss MJ-12. I had heard from a couple of people that Bill Moore, one of those who released the MJ-12 documents into the public arena in 1987, had been talking about creating a "Roswell" document to try to shake things loose.

Moore, I had heard, thought he had taken the investigation as far as he could without some sort of revelation or dramatic discovery. The plan was to put out a document that would closely mirror the situation in 1947 and force those involved in the cover up to reveal part of it as they attempted to learn who knew what and how much of it they knew.*

Friedman confirmed that it was true. Bill Moore had told him the same thing. But when the MJ-12 documents surfaced, Frriedman thought nothing of that conversation and the fact that the documents had not gone to Moore but to an unknown film producer whose only tie to the UFO community seemed to be Bill Moore.

Barry Greenwood had heard the same thing and reported in his Just Cause newsletter of September 1989, on page 10, "After Moore released the first wave of MJ-12 documents in 1987, CAUS [Citizens Against UFO Secrecy], and particularly Larry Fawcett, spoke to Moore about cooperation in researching the story in the form of filing FOIA requests, etc. as an effort to flesh out information. Moore rejected the offer, adding that he wanted to ‘put bread on my table.’"

In the late 1980s, as I was beginning my research into the Roswell case, Warren Smith (seen here), a writer living in Clinton, Iowa called me and said that he had just learned of MJ-12. I believe he had a copy of the MUFON Journal that had an article about MJ-12. Smith told me that he knew something more about the Del Rio crash of 1950, which was mentioned as part of the Eisenhower Briefing paper dated November 18, 1952 and was the major piece of MJ-12 documentation available at that time.

Smith’s story was that he had been installing and upgrading linotype machines somewhere and one of the men he worked with had a wife who was visiting a "dude" ranch in southern Texas. The man was getting daily letters from his wife. They took a weird slant when she mentioned that the cowboys had seen something strange crash and that the military had come in to recover it.

If this story was true, then it would be a nice piece of corroboration for the Eisenhower Briefing document. Smith said that he could get the letters, but never did. Later I learned that Smith had a habit of inventing things like this (He once tried to interest a friend in creating the Ted Bundy diaries). I couldn’t trust anything he had said and it meant that this corroboration did not exist.

There were other, major problems with all the MJ-12 documents as well. Stan Friedman sent copies to a questioned document expert, Peter Tytell. Tytell analyzed them and concluded they were faked. He pointed to the signature on the Truman Memo which was part of the Eisenhower Briefing and said that it was uncharacteristically low on the page. Truman habitually signed with the top of the "T" on Truman reaching into and touching the text of the letter. That it did not on the memo in and of itself didn’t prove it was faked but it sure suggested it.

The proof was on the "T" on Truman. According to Tytell, there was evidence that the top stroke on the "T" had been altered. That was definitive proof that the memo was a fake.

And, if that wasn’t enough, the signature on the memo matched, exactly, another signature on an authentic document. To Tytell, as well as other experts, this exact match proved the document to be faked.

Tytell also said that the typeface on the documents was from a typewriter that didn’t exist at the time the document was supposedly written. To him it was another proof that these documents were faked.

Yes, I know that Friedman has said that other experts said the typewriter did exist, but he has offered no proof of this and has not identified these experts. Yes, I know that Robert and Ryan Wood have found pictures of Truman using an automatic writer so they suggest the exact match isn’t a disqualification on the Truman Memo, but frankly, they’d need to find a third document to show that Truman used it to sign the memo, and they have not. And yes, I know Friedman (seen here) has little to say about Tytell and demands we produce a signed assessment by Tytell knowing full well that Tytell refuses to do so until someone pays his fee. If I had a couple of grand laying around, I’d do it myself.

To make it worse, if that is possible, we now know that Bill Moore was discussing the dates and data that appear in the first of the MJ-12 documents with Bob Pratt and talking about MJ-12 two years before he, or rather Shandera received the 35 mm film with the Eisenhower briefing on it. Moore, according to the notes now available as an example, said to Pratt:

Well, that was '53... fully 11 months after the Robertson Panel, and there were all sorts of doings and goings on between the CIA and the NSC where the CIA was attempting to - it's not clear which way it was going, whether the NSC was attempting to get the CIA to take over things or whether it was vice versa. I've never been quite clear, on who was trying to influence whom, but if you read that message it is very confusing. And especially when a lot of those documents make reference to attachments which aren't there. So I have just sort of conjectured that the NSC got control of it at the point in time where Truman was ending his administration and Eisenhower was beginning his. If you stop and think about the point in time of the Robertson Panel, it happened just on that transition phase. See, Truman had not run for reelection in '52, in November. Eisenhower wins and takes office in January, January 20, and you've got the Robertson Panel deliberating in there, and it could .well be that somebody was trying to determine how to go on with the change in administrations, which would have presented a problem for that sort of a thing, especially if it had gotten highly developed and the decision had already been made that this has got to be kept locked tighter than a drum. How then to deal with it with an incoming president whose reaction is not certain. And that's a point that nobody's ever brought up that I've heard in discussion. Nobody's ever noticed that that date is a very interesting.

And one of the biggest problems for these documents is that there is no provenance for them. The trail leads to Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera and ends there. No authentic documents mentioning MJ-12 has ever been found. None of the men mentioned left personal papers that contained a reference to MJ-12 and that suggests there are none because lots of people have spent lots of time looking for just that sort of a reference.

The final and probably fatal blow to all this is the paper Brad Sparks delivered at the most recent MUFON conference. In it Brad traces the history of MJ-12, in its first incarnation as a novel to be written by Bill Moore, a Air Force OSI agent named Richard Doty, and former National Enquirer UFO reporter Bob Pratt. Quite a bit of the MJ-12 stuff surfaces in that novel. And yes, I know the excuse will be that they thought a novel was the best way to publish the information about MJ-12. A nonfiction book would have required sources and footnotes and evidence, something they didn’t want to have to produce. And, more importantly, after all these years, have failed to produce.

Using the information from Pratt’s personal notes ( a sample of which was quoted earlier), interviews with various researchers, Sparks, along with Barry Greenwood, conclude that MJ-12 is a hoax. Sparks believes it was a sanctioned disinformation campaign by the AFOSI with Moore and Shandera as the willing participants, or maybe the unwilling dupes. The evidence leads clearly to hoax regardless of the spin put on it or the reason for its creation.

Sparks points out that this report is the most heavily footnoted article to ever appear in The MUFON Symposium Proceedings. It contains facsimiles of many of the documents and it outlines the evidence clearly and concisely. It should drive the final stake through the heart of MJ-12, but nothing in UFO research ever sinks completely. There are always those who will attempt to resurrect it by claiming that was a disinformation campaign that contains some "real" information. All we have to do is figure what is real and what is fake.

But disinformation implies that it was an official operation of some kind and in this case the overseeing agency is AFOSI, at least to Spark’s way of thinking. I’m not sure it was a sanctioned mission and it might have been more of Doty seeing a gravy train and leaping aboard with his buddy Bill Moore than it was any kind of planned AFOSI operation. At this point, it really doesn’t matter because in either case, the conclusion of hoax is the important one. Government disinformation or opportunism by Doty and Moore makes no difference in the end. They both lead to hoax.

You can read the Spark’s paper or download both the paper and the supporting documents here:

http://www.mufon.com/symposia.htm

FFor those interested, an updated version of my book on MJ-12 is available at Amazon. It contains new information about MJ-12 and identifies the original Majestic document with a known provenance. You can order it at: https://www.amazon.com/Case-MJ-12-Kevin-D-Randle-ebook/dp/B07DKJP2YH/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538671334&sr=1-8&keywords=Kevin+Randle

*I believe the attempt failed because those running the cover up were smart enough to realize that the document had nothing to do with reality and that it contained information that was just flat out wrong. It didn’t conform to the standards of the time and date used by the military, contained misspellings and it contained nothing extraordinary. It did, however, interest the media for a while, but they quickly gave up when they could find no corroboration for the document and that many of the mistakes were noticed. In the end, MJ-12 has damaged th hunt for the truth.

Why I'm Beginning to Dislike the UFO Field - Part Three

Almost from the moment that Kenneth Arnold’s “flying saucer” (yes, I know he was describing the motion and not the shape) hit the newspapers, this field has been plagued with fakers, liars, charlatans and hoaxers. They have made up their experiences, their expertise, their military service and they have been believed by millions, even when exposed for the frauds they are. Which is, of course, one of the reasons that I have begun to dislike this whole field.

Before the ink was dry on the Arnold report, there were those who had met the alien creatures piloting those interstellar craft, who had ridden in them, or had seen them crash. Some of those tales were so outrageous that they were nearly impossible to believe, but believe them, some did.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, in July 1947, a saucer crashed into the street. It caused such a stir that both the Army and the FBI were involved in the investigation. J. Edgar Hoover even wrote, on a memo later that month about the “La case” in which the Army grabbed the debris and wouldn’t let the FBI look at it. Some later attempted to suggest this little note proved that the Roswell crash was real. But the object found in Shreveport was only about 18 inches in diameter, and was an admitted hoax. And, it was clear that Hoover’s note referred to the Shreveport case and not the Roswell crash. We still have to deal with it long after the truth was learned, even with the documentation available to prove the crash was a hoax.

Worse still is the Aztec UFO crash, which happed in March, 1948. Although there is no documentation to support the case, and it was started by a couple of con men who were peddling something they called a doodlebug that could find mineral deposits, there are those who today defend this as a real UFO crash. The problem is there are no first-hand, credible witnesses to the crash, much of the information about it has been proved to be inaccurate, and the case, which resulted in the bestselling Behind the Flying Saucers has been discredited. While the case was completely rejected by serious researchers first in the early 1950s and later in the mid-1960s, we are still arguing about the authenticity of it today. I have to ask, “Why?”

With the interest in flying saucers growing, there were those who claimed to have made contact with the space brethren. These contactees as they became known, were men, though a few women claimed contact as well, who were provided with messages of hope and peace from the people of Venus, or Mars, or maybe the big interplanetary council on Saturn, though some suggested the travelers were from beyond the Solar System. They offered out of focus photographs and other evidence that had no properties that would prove they were of extraterrestrial origin as proof of their adventures. They made predictions that were often ridiculous, often completely the opposite of what later happened, and then rewrote those predictions to make them more accurate and to seem they, the contactees, were prophets. Even with the lack of evidence, and even with our modern science proving that the surface temperature on Venus is hot enough to melt lead and our exploration of Mars that has failed to find any evidence of advanced life there, people still believe these silly claims. I don’t know why.

In fact, it has gotten worse today with several men claiming to have been involved in an interstellar war fought on Mars and fought with alien allies against other spacefaring races. I was even supposed to have been involved according to one of those tales. I hadn’t been in Iraq as I had thought but had been fighting on Mars. When I returned to Earth, as were all my fellow soldiers and Marines, we were brainwashed into believing we hadn’t been on Mars. Why they were even clever enough to provide us with various souvenirs and photographs proving this… and there are people actually believe this nonsense.

But it is in the last twenty to thirty years that we have been nearly overwhelmed with blatant hoaxes that have divided the field. It might be said this all began with the announcement of a number of government documents that alleged the creation of a super-secret program to exploit the find of alien technology at Roswell. Majestic-Twelve, or as it is commonly known, MJ-12, has been examined carefully, been the subject of extensive research, and held up as proof that the government is hiding the secret of alien visitation and UFO crashes. In all those years of research, in all those archives that have been visited, in all those declassified government files from dozens of formerly high-ranking military officers and government officials that have been searched, there has never been a single document found to support MJ-12. In fact, the original documents have no provenance and that is one of the largest red flags there is, though the supporters of MJ-12’s reality brush off questions about it.

Since that time in 1984 when the documents were mailed, anomalously to UFO researchers, there have been a number of fatal flaws found in them. The first was the improper date format, which told us all that the Eisenhower Briefing Document or EBD as it now called, was not prepared by government officials or military officers, but by someone outside those realms with a knowledge of the Roswell case but no military or government service.

Stan Friedman, one of the leading promoters of the
MJ-12 Documents. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

While the inaccurate dating format probably isn’t sufficient for everyone to reject the documents as faked, there is additional, larger problems. In the EBD there is a discussion, short though it is, about a UFO crash in the El Indio – Guerrero area of northern Mexico, very close to the Texas border. This case is a hoax started by Robert Willingham in 1968 and co-opted by Todd Zechel in the 1970s. Willingham had originally said that he saw the crash in 1948 while flying Air Force fighters, but Zechel, in his interviews with Willingham, said the date was actually December 6, 1950, a date that appears in the EBD.

On December 6, 1950, there was an alert about something, or some things, heading toward the United States.  Within an hour, the alert was canceled when the objects were identified. Willingham, who had gone along with this date for years, told Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte that the crash couldn’t have happened in December 1950 because he, Willingham, had been in Korea at that time (tangentially, this too is a lie based on his military records as retrieved from NARA in St. Louis). Willingham himself later told me the crash took place in 1954 or 1955, contradicting his own, original statement (published in March 1968, Skylook, the precursor to the MUFON UFO Journal), Zechel’s claim of the date, and the Eisenhower Briefing Document. And if, there was no crash in that area of Mexico, regardless of the date, that would destroy the credibility of the whole document… yet there are those who believe that is not the case. I don’t know why this doesn’t convince people about the truth.

Accompanying the EBD in the data dump, was a note or memo on White House stationery authorizing the creation of what would become MJ-12 and that memo was allegedly signed by President Truman. But the signature was proven to have been lifted from another, authentic document, which has been identified. It was attached to the memo and then copied again to remove the cutlines. It was placed uncharacteristically low on the memo, suggesting that Truman had not actually signed it. More importantly, there are some slight indentations on the cross bar of the “T” in Truman, which suggest that the parts of the letters that had been touching it on the original signature had been removed artificially. In other words, the signature had been cut from the authentic document, placed on the memo, and then photocopied. Neither the original Eisenhower Briefing Document nor the Truman memo have been found, another big indication these two documents are faked, but we still hear arguments about their authenticity.

In the mid-1990s, these faked documents were used as part of a package to prove that the alien autopsy was real. This was a short film that allegedly showed the autopsy of an alien creature found in the Roswell crash. Overlooking the fact that the documents are faked and those using them might not have known that, the

Creating the alien for the Alien Autopsy. Photo
courtesy of Philip Mantle.

autopsy itself suffered from the same problems as those Eisenhower documents. There was no provenance for them. Ray Santilli had claimed he bought the film from a US Army cameraman who was never identified. The actual film of the alien was never actually seen by anyone. All that we had was a videotape made from it. As they say, many notorious forgeries have some mechanism to explain the lack of an original document that would yield a great deal of evidence that could prove authenticity or reveal the hoax.

But all this is now unnecessary because those who made the film have said they faked it. Photographs of them creating the creatures in their workshop have been published. Drawings made as they designed the creatures have been furnished. Without any evidence, the autopsy is real and a pile of evidence that it is faked, there are still those who claim that it is authentic. They demand that I, and everyone else who knows the autopsy is faked, just need to look at ALL the evidence to show us reality of the film. But it is those supporting that reality who refuse to look at all the evidence.

It seemed that the 1990s were consumed with these various fakes. Research resources that might have been better used, were wasted as we all chased our tails. The US government, or rather the U.S. Air Force, got into the act in their attempt to prove that the Roswell UFO crash was a case of mistaken identity. After a long investigation, they semi-retracted their original statement from 1947 that what was found was a weather balloon, replacing it with another answer. It was a… weather balloon. Oh, this was a somewhat different one that was part of a top-secret plan to spy on the Soviets, so naturally, they had to cover it all up. But now, in the 1990s, they could tell us all the truth about that.

The truth here, however, is that while the ultimate purpose of that balloon project was classified, the activities and experiments being conducted in New Mexico were not. Even the claim that the name, Project Mogul, was classified and unknown to those in New Mexico turned out to be untrue. Documentation, ironically provided by the Air Force, proved that Mogul was not the culprit, but still, today, we have those who refuse to accept this (let the bullying begin again and we can start another round of why the documentation that refutes Mogul as the culprit cannot be trusted).

Not all that long ago we all were surprised to learn that pictures of the alien creature found at Roswell had surfaced in a private slide collection. The slides were the smoking gun and the skeptics would be howling in pain when all was revealed. For more than a year we waited to see the actual slides while being told that the evidence was here, that due diligence in the search for the truth had been made, and experts agreed with the conclusion of alien visitation. Within 48 hours of the big reveal in Mexico City in May, 2016, we learned that the slides showed the remains of an unfortunate child who had died centuries earlier. I outlined all of this at length on this blog in 2016. Just type in Roswell Slides and take a look at the evolution and the destruction of this tale… and there are still those who insist that the slides show an alien creature and somehow all the documentation is in error.

So, why now, go through all this again? Why bring it up? Because we find ourselves making the same mistakes over and over. We attempt to put an end to all these distractions but find ourselves having to repeat the arguments, prove the same points again, and still argue with those who refuse to look at the evidence that goes against them. They don’t want to hear the truth. They just want their belief structures validated. They accuse us (or rather me) of failing to look at the evidence when that is exactly what they do.

Even the most innocuous of remarks is taken as an insult. Not all that long ago I suggested that I didn’t believe the Billy Meier tales of alien contact. I didn’t say it was a hoax at that time, just that I didn’t believe it, offering nothing more about it. I was then the subject of an email attack, I was labeled a coward, told that I refused to look at the evidence, and I couldn’t prove the case was a hoax anyway. Of course, it really doesn’t work that way. Those claiming that Meier is traveling among the stars with his Pleiadean pals were required to prove the case was real, but that didn’t stop them. And yes, I believe this will open up another assault on my character. We live in an age where you just can’t express an opinion without someone taking offense and demanding an apology or attacking you for holding that opinion. In this case that’s not going to happen because it is my opinion and I’ve seen nothing to alter it. Let the second wave of bullying begin.

The real problem here, as demonstrated by the Meier group, as well as several others, is that a small number will cling to one or more of these nonsensical stories, hide the truth and expect us not to ask critical questions. News media find these people in their attempts to be fair, giving them a platform that they do not deserve and by doing this, make all of us look as if we have no ability to discriminate between fantasy and reality. We all get lumped into the tinfoil hat brigade, even as we attempt to provide real evidence that can be independently evaluated and we accept those conclusions that have been found scientifically even if they are not the conclusions we wish to see.

And once we take a stand, based on our evaluation of the evidence, we are attacked as debunkers, members of the CIA, and propagandists who are unable to think for ourselves. These true believers don’t understand that I, and many of my colleagues, do reevaluate the evidence periodically in case something new has been found or the case has been changed in some way. And when we demand evidence, why, it’s just that we can’t see the truth, though the evidence is never offered.

Finally, if the evidence breaks against them, such as that now suggesting that the Atacama Desert mummy is totally human, the immediate reaction is that those doing the research is just junk science. That has become the default setting. Or we are told that the CIA has buried the information and discredited the case to hide the truth. The only truth they will accept is their truth. Belief structure trumps evidence every time.

And we read that a new study completed after five years of work, a new peer review of those DNA results, is going to be launched. Steven Greer is going to select those to make this new study, seemingly unaware that a preselected peer review committee by him isn’t going to prove much of anything. To be effective, the peer review must be made up of those who are disinterested in the subject. It means they have no bias about the outcome, other than to determine if the study is accurate or flawed in some fashion and that the conclusions follow logically from the evidence.

This has been the trouble from the very beginning of the UFO era. If you don’t find the proper conclusion, then you are labeled as a bad person. Skeptics seem unable to say that a specific case is extremely unusual, which is not to say that it proves alien visitation. Believers are unable to say that a specific case they favor has a solid terrestrial explanation. The study of UFOs has become so polarized that neither side wants to give an inch or even just say, “You have an interesting point.” Doesn’t mean you agree, only that you understand the concept.

Although there are some who have quietly taken up this position, too many see it as a debate rather than an investigation that has yet to be finished. There are cases that seem to defy terrestrial explanation but there don’t seem to be any cases that prove alien visitation. I’m not sure why this is something that is so hard to understand. I’m not sure why each side believes it to be the Keeper of the Flame of Truth. There are times when the best you can say is, “I just don’t know…” but no one seems to be able to do that.

The Ufological Mess

Given what I have read here recently, and given the Peter Jennings Special, it seems to me that ufology, as we call it, is in a mess. We agree on almost nothing, we get caught up in personal fights that don’t advance the cause, and we spend half our time defending ourselves from assaults by our friends and foes. Worse still, we never seem to learn our lessons. We make the same mistakes over and over and then blame the government for being too clever forus.

Take the recent debate between Michael Salla and Paul Kimball that has appeared on UFO Updates (See UFO Updates, Latest 100 Messages). While I find it refreshing because it hasn’t descended into name calling, it does demonstrate part of the problem. Here, I fall on the side of Kimball (See www.redstarfilms). His opinions and information more closely follows my line of thinking about Lazar and other matters than does that of Salla.

Let’s look at this. At one point Salla uses the SOM 1-01 as proof that Bob Lazar might be an authentic witness (Yes, I know proof is too strong a word here, but it makes a point.) Kimball suggests that using MJ-12 documents to bolster a point makes the argument weak since there is controversy around the authenticity of MJ-12 generally and the SOM 1-01 specifically.

Salla points out that Robert Woods believes the document to be authentic… but doesn’t mention that the man who received it, Don Berliner, believes it to be a hoax. In fact, a careful review of the SOM 1-01 by several prominent UFO researchers including Mark Rodeghier, and a review by former military men who worked with classified documents, also believe it to be a hoax. The anachronisms also suggest hoax. Reasonable people, I believe, can differ on their opinions about this. The one question that has not been satisfactorily answered is provenance. Just where did this document originate?

Yes, I know that Stan Friedman has suggested it came from Wisconsin based on the postal code used, and that there is a suggestion that they know the name of the man who sent it, based on the use of a postal meter, but that doesn't answer the question of provenance. It suggests there might be some valuable clues in that direction.

We can ask the same, important question of the original MJ-12 documents. We know that Bill Moore “retyped” the AquariusTelex because, according to him, the original was such a poor copy that he needed to do that for clarity. The problem is that we don’t have an original to compare with the retyped version so we have a document that is without provenance and that even Moore now suggests is a hoax. Few researchers accept the Aquarius Telex as authentic.

When we move to the Eisenhower Briefing document and theTruman memo that accompanies it we are left with the sameproblem. There is no provenance. Worse still is that Stan Friedman submitted those documents to a questioned document expert, Peter Tytell, who, after review, said that they were not authentic. He bases this in part on Truman’s signature, which he believes proves that document a fraud. It is placed improperly, it is an exact match for another signature and it shows signs of having been altered. (Robert and Ryan Wood's claims not withstanding. They have not answered these questions).

There are other reasons to argue the point such as the misspellings and the lack of any mention of the Plains of San Agustin as reasons to believe the document a fraud (if you accept the Plains crash as authentic. Isn't it interesting that there are some who accept both the Plains crash and the Eisenhower Briefing?)

But most important here is a tale told to me by Stan… Bill Moore had told him in the early 1980’s that he, Moore, had run upagainst a brick wall and was thinking about creating a document to see what would shake free. At the same time Moore was working on a novel about a secret government investigation (along withtwo others, Pratt and Dody) which is the first incarnation of MJ-12. Later, the first of the documents arrived at the home of one of Moore’s friends. This alone should raise all sorts of questions…

Here, again, I can see where reasonable people might disagree with a point. The arguments suggesting fraud, to me, outweigh those arguing authenticity. But I believe those suggesting the documents are real are sincere in their beliefs. I just think they are wrong, just as they believe I’m wrong.

This is the same sort of argument we find in the so-called whistle-blowers’ testimony being offered by Salla among others. Many of us suggest that these people have not been carefully vetted so that we end up with people telling wild tales to all who will listen. In response, we hear that there isn’t time or resources to investigate all the claims properly. Their testimony is offered because it is believed and they seem to be sincere.

But is that really enough? And, if one of the whistle-blowers is found to be a fake, doesn’t that really diminish, if not destroy, the testimony of others? If I can point to several of these people and suggest they are making it up, and present evidence that their claims are not true, doesn’t that really hurt the whole cause? Isn’t defense of those frauds damaging to all?

Salla mentioned Robert Dean and Cliff Stone as well as Bob Lazar. Here I side with Stan on Lazar. Too many questions about his background and too many holes in it. And I do not understand how claiming to be a physicist translates into proof of a Master’sDegree as Salla suggested in one of his Update posts.

As another aside, I interviewed a man for an article in the newspaper recently. He told me that he was an engineer. Later, he asked if this article would appear in his hometown and I said it would. At that point he changed from an engineer to an engineering technician. I had no reason to doubt his original claim and have no reason to doubt his amended claim. The point is that such a claim, printed in the newspaper doesn’t make it true. How many times have we seen people lose their jobs over claims, such as these, that could not be substantiated, yet here, with Lazar, we make up excuses for him.

For those who believe that Cliff Stone has any credibility, please read the article he wrote for UFO magazine (American version, Vol. 13, No. 6 1998) in which he made so many ridiculous claims about his Vietnam service that it’s difficult to believe anything he says now. Even with that out there, and with his service records available suggesting he has been less than truthful, we still hear of him as one of the whistle-blowers.

Which sort of leads to “dueling” witnesses. Stan and I disagreed over the importance of the tales told by Gerald Anderson and Frank Kaufmann about their Roswell experiences. I believed Anderson, at first, but then found so many holes in what he said and the evidence he offered that it was clear to me that Anderson was lying. He faked a telephone bill to make me look bad, his diary was in disagreement with that of Ruth Barnett (for which we did have provenance), and he made claims about his background that were found to be untrue. He changed his story, moved the crash site around the Plains, and could offer nothing in the way of corroboration that was independent. Stan, I think, still believes some of Anderson’s nonsense.

On the other hand, Stan did not believe Frank Kaufmann, while I did. We finally learned that Kaufmann was no more reliable than Anderson and while Kaufmann didn’t admit to lying, in so many words, it is obvious that he was.

So, the united front we could have maintained was divided by individuals who knew nothing other than how to spin a good tale. We should have been more careful in our review of the testimonies, but we all got caught up in what Karl Pflock labeled as a will to believe. We ignored red flags and argued for the authenticity of ourwitness and against that of the other. In the end, we both were wrong and neither witness was of value… (as an aside, since people have now started debating the definition of witness, shouldn’t both of these names be removed from a list of “witnesses”?)

The point here is that we should be searching for common ground. Instead we argue over the reliability of witnesses we know have lied to us. Worst still, we have found a number of researchers who lied about themselves and their colleagues but we still invite them to speak and listen to what they have to say. How many lies do these people get before we realize that they have not been honest with us and that continued support of them hurts our overall credibility.

So maybe we can search for some common ground here. Maybe we should stop attempting the defend the indefensible and concede that sometimes we make mistakes.

KRandle

The Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Del Rio UFO Crash

I have argued for years that the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) is not authentic. I have argued that it was created in the early to mid-1980s because the information contained in it reflected the UFOlogical thought of that time. The one paragraph that seemed to prove that more than any other was the one referring to the December 6, 1950 crash near El Indio – Guerrero area of northern Mexico. I had suggested that this is the sighting made by Robert Willingham and that we know that he has changed so much of the information about it that it is clear that it never happened.

“Why bring this up now?” you may ask.

Because I have additional information thanks to Isaac Koi, Greg Long, and James Carrion. Let’s take this all one step at a time.

Apparently on October 19, 1994, Greg Long received a telephone from W. Todd Zechel, who then launched into what was pretty much a monologue according to a document created by Long (which makes sense since I too received one of these Zechel telephone calls in which he talked and talked and talked until his father yelled for him to get off the telephone). Long made notes, and the important part of that document, at least to us here, said:

Zechel talked about his research into the Del Rio case. He described how John Acuff [one time director of NICAP] had put NICAP’s cases in storage. Maccabee stole documents from the NICAP files. There was a particular file that Zechel read regarding a crashed object in Del Rio. Zechel tracked down a name, Colonel Willingham, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, flew to Pennsylvania, and interviewed him. Willingham admitted that he saw the crashed object. To assess Willingham, Zechel got the colonel’s military records and proved he was authentic.

Later in this same document, in a section labeled “Hoax,” Zechel again alludes to the Del Rio case. He wrote, “[Brad] Sparks responded that he felt only two of the cases showed some promise: the Roswell incident of 1947, which Moore had written about, and one that reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950 near the Texas/Mexico border.

And later still, Del Rio is connected to the El Indio – Guerrero case, when talking about the EBD received by Shandera, Zechel wrote:

Billed as a briefing paper prepared for ‘President-elect Eisenhower,’ the document ‘ contains a rather lengthy description of the Roswell incident – which just happens to verify Moore’s contentions and misrepresentations of the facts – but only a spare paragraph describing a second incident in December 1950. According to the new, improved model:

On 06 December 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexico boder (sic) after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico for study.

Zechel then explains how this information about the crash had come into the hands of Moore and one of his cohorts, Richard Doty. He suggested that a manuscript that he had written was “either given or sold… to Bill Moore…”

To follow through on this linkage, and to prove that the information about the El Indio – Guerrero crash is that from Del Rio and Robert Willingham, Zechel wrote:

The point is that Moore… obtained two separate manuscripts I had written about the crashed saucer case which reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950, near the Texas – Mexico border. The first manuscript… gave the location of the incident as near Laredo, Texas. The second manuscript… gave the date of the incident as happening between Dec. 5 and Dec. 8, 1950, and the location as near Del Rio, Texas… No witnesses that I know of support the El Indio location given in the ‘briefing paper,’ but, on the contrary several eye-witness accounts have verified the Del Rio site. Moore, however, would not have known that, since I myself did not know these facts until a couple of years after I left Hollywood.

More telling than this is what Zechel believed about how this particular case came to be part of the EBD. Zechel wrote:

What I’m saying is that he [Moore] clearly knew, based on my manuscripts and Brad Sparks’ input, that he had to acknowledge the 1950 case in the ‘briefing paper,’ but with all the bitterness, acrimony, jealousy and hate he feels toward me … he just had to burn that sucker up!

And, in case that hasn’t made the connection between the Willingham tale and that from the EBD, in a letter to Walt Andrus at MUFON, dated December 8, 1978, Zechel wrote:

What I did say is that I had an affidavit from the retired Lt. Colonel (emphasis in the original) – the former pilot who flew down to the crash site – about his knowledge of the incident, which is limited to seeing the object in the air and covered by a canopy on the ground.

This retired Lt. Colonel is Robert Willingham who did sign an affidavit about the crash. So, we know that Willingham is the source of the Del Rio case, who also suggested that the crash was near Laredo. We know that Zechel was sharing information with Bill Moore, though it isn’t clear that the sharing was voluntary or if Moore acquired the information through some devious means. We know that in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, many in the UFO field believed the Willingham story because he was a retired military officer who signed an affidavit and Zechel claimed that he had verified his records (which by the way is untrue because it is clear that Willingham’s records reveal he was a low-ranking enlisted man with 13 months of active duty). We also know that Zechel was claiming other witnesses, but none have surfaced to this point.

But now the Willlingham story is in tatters. As mentioned here before, he was neither a retired Air Force officer nor a fighter pilot and if that is true, then he was not in a position to see any crash of anything. We know, based on the available documentation that Willingham originally claimed that the crash had taken place in 1948, and while Zechel attempted to vilify Len Stringfield for saying this in his 1978 presentation about crashed UFOs, we know, from the available documentation that Willingham himself is responsible for this “error.” Zechel moved the date to conform to information about a security alert in December 1950, but there is nothing to suggest the alert had anything to do with a flying saucer crash.

What all this does is prove that one segment of the EBD is based on a hoax and that does not bode well for the remainder of the document. If this paragraph is faked, then what else in it is faked and isn’t a reasonable conclusion that it is all faked? I think that we now have all the information we need to connect all the dots and with that, we can draw the conclusion that the EBD is a fake based on faulty information and complete invention. We can now move onto other, more important things.

MJ-12 and Major Contradictions

 Here’s something that I have never understood. How can you hold two beliefs that are contradictory? If one is true, then the other cannot be true. They cancel out one another.

Here’s what I mean. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) received by Jaime Shandera is authentic (which means only for this point). It tells of two crashes, one on the Brazel ranch and the other in December 1950 in the El Indio – Guerrero area near the Texas – Mexico border. It tells us that four “human-like beings” had been found some two miles from the main debris field and all four had been killed in the crash. Other details, such as the name of the base at Roswell, the creation of the Air Force Project Sign, and Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947, suggest that the creator of the document had knowledge of the history of the UFO phenomenon.

There are those who believe this document but who also believe there was a crash on the Plains of San Agustin which might have been part of the Roswell crash, and another event near Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. The question that arises from this is if the EBD was created for President-elect Eisenhower, why are these other two crashes left out? There is no reason to hide that information from Eisenhower, unless those creating the EBD knew that those events hadn’t happened? In other words, they didn’t include them because they knew they were faked.

Taking this a step further, and because we’ve just discussed the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, we see in those two documents the information about a UFO crash near the Trinity site on the White Sands Missile Ranch. While it could be said that this is part of the events on the Brazel ranch, it was not mentioned in the EDB. The documents talk of five creatures rather than four and, importantly, mention that Eisenhower, then the top officer in the Army, would be briefed in August 1947, eliminating the need for a briefing in November 1952.

If we look at the First Annual Report, it mentions three sites. Two are on the Brazel ranch and one at the Trinity site. Again, this is in conflict not only with the EBD but also the IPU summary. So which of these documents is accurate and which are fakes? And isn’t it possible that all three are fake?

As mentioned in the past, the El Indio – Guerrero crash of December 6, 1950, has but a single witness and the credibility of the crash rests on his shoulders. In the mid-1980s when the EDB was released, nearly everyone in the UFO field accepted this case because the witness was a retired Air Force colonel who had been fighter pilot. The trouble is that he is neither and he changed the date of the crash three or more times. Given those facts, it seems logical to reject his claims of a UFO crash, and if that is true, what does that mean for both the EBD and the First Annual Report, which contain that information?

I had planned to talk of other MJ-12 documents that seem to contradict one another, but this all makes the point. There are fatal flaws in each of the documents. Any document created at the supposed level at which these were created would be accurate. There wouldn’t be the sort of elemental errors seen here. If there were three crashes, then three crashes would have been mentioned.

I will point out one other obvious thing because there are some who don’t seem to get it. In various MJ-12 documents there are anachronisms… that is, there are things mentioned that did not exist when the documents were allegedly created. I’ve pointed out that the First Annual Report written in 1952 mentions Project Moon Dust which wasn’t created until late 1957 as an example. The MJ-12 manual SOM1-01 sent to Don Berliner some time ago, suggested as one of the cover stories to suggest to the press that the debris was from a “downed satellite.” The manual was allegedly created in 1954 when there were no satellites to crash and scatter debris. Such a suggestion prior to October 1957 would raise more questions than it answered.

What all that means is that the documents have some real problems that are not easily explained. They contain information that just wasn’t available when they were allegedly created and they seem to be predictive of the future. Or, more precisely, this seems to suggest the documents are forged.

However, the real question that I have is how one person can hold two sets of beliefs that are mutually exclusive. If the EBD is authentic, then the tales of other crashes, on the Plains of San Agustin and at Aztec must be false… and if those are real events, then why are they not mentioned in the EBD? One set of facts or documents must be wrong and given everything else we know, it seems obvious that all of the documents are fraudulent… but as they say, “That’s just my opinion