Saturday, February 28, 2015

MJ-12 and Bill Moore


As I go through files and reports and other documents, I sometimes find a little item that was not very important a decade or two ago but that has taken on added significance. Such is a note about Barry Greenwood and the late Japanese UFO investigator Jun-Ichi Takanashi. Takanashi bought a copy of The Mystery of the Green Fireballs from Bill Moore which in and of itself isn’t all that exciting. Some of the documents that Moore had found were poor quality and difficult to read so that Moore, as apparently was his habit, retyped some of them to improve the legibility.

Takanashi wondered if the unusual dating format that Moore used in many of his letters and documents had been used in the original documents that Moore had retyped. That dating format was seen in some of them. Takanashi sent a query to Greenwood who then searched the Project Blue Book files until he located the original documents concerning the Green Fireballs. According to what Greenwood wrote in the June 1990 issue of Just Cause, “In all four cases where the documents were retyped, Moore had changed dates from the proper standard format to his own style by adding not only an extra comma to the dates but, in the case of the 9 February 1949 memo, a preceding zero before a single digit date where none had existed before!”

This is another bit of evidence that Moore had a hand in creating the MJ-12 documents. His unusual dating format has crept into other documents that he had admitted to retyping because of the poor quality of the originals. The two features, the extra comma and the use of the zero in front of the single digit dates, were not used by the military or the government at the time… For those who still believe that MJ-12 is authentic, this is just more evidence that it isn’t.

I should point out that Barry Greenwood printed this information twenty-five years ago so it has been out there for a long time. Although there are those who suggest they have found examples of government documents that reflect this bizarre dating format, it makes little difference because clearly Moore did use it. Besides, most of those other documents were created under special circumstances or by foreign military and government organizations. Apparently only Moore used it with any regularity and here it is another of his fingerprints on MJ-12. I wonder how many more we need.

7 comments:

Doc Conjure said...

That fact that Doty was involved should have been enough for people to snap out of MJ12's hypnotic hold.

Rusty L. said...

It is unfortunate that some with otherwise interesting and logical points of view still defend these documents. I appreciate that some folks are open-minded and respectful of others, but it is long past the time when these documents should be summarily denounced.

Don Maor said...

Kevin,

The book you mention on green fireballs is from 1983. It is about the same time of the release of the first majestic documents.

One question here is when or why Moore starting using this format style. Considering the information by Greewood, your scenario of hoax is possible, but the problem is that there are two additional possible scenarios:

Scenario 1: When Moore published his book about green fireballs (1983), he had already seen the MJ documents, was naturally impressed by them, and consequently started using the MJ format style in any writing he did, one of those would be the blue book documents transcribed in his book on green fireballs.

Scenario 2: Moore used his peculiar dating style from his high school time or any early stage of his life. Therefore, this would show that he indeed created the MJ-12 documents, but only as a transcription of authentic MJ-12 documents. We know he liked to transcript real documents (as the book on green fireballs shows) so it is not unreasonable to think that the MJ-12 documents are transcriptions made by Moore of authentic documents. Therefore, the MJ documents we now see, although not the original documents; may have good information.

In whatever scenario, the change of dating styles made by Moore in his book on green fireballs is somewhat problematic. It clearly shows some lack of rigor by Bill Moore. However, this lack of rigor might be clarifying to us. In my opinion, Moore is not the scientific and rigorous mind personality; he is more like an activist personality. If he created the MJ documents, transcribing them from authentic documents, he will never admit being guilty of hoax, because he thinks he did the right thing. Moreover, if his personality is more of an activist (think for example about a charming personality as compared to the comparatively colder personality of a scientific mind), this might precisely have granted him access to the authentic MJ-12 documents.

Understanding Moore's possibly special personality might help us to grasp better the MJ affair. Any comments here on Moore’s personality?

KRandle said...

Don -

Your two scenarios would be relevant if these were the only facts. Moore talked of creating a Roswell document and now has one. He wrote, with Bob Pratt a book called Majik in 1980 which outlined the MJ-12 nonsense. Timothy Good's copies of the EBD came from Moore... I have laid all this out and there is plenty moore (yes, the spelling is a pun).

Don Maor said...

Kevin,
The scenarios that I proposed ARE indeed consistent with the facts you cited (book Magic (1980) to be coauthored with Pratt, and with Moore's idea of creating a Roswell smoking gun document).

If Moore succeeded in making a friend insider who confidentially showed him some the authentic Majestic documents or information in, let's say, year 1978, then it seems reasonable to expect that Moore would have tried in the subsequent years to share his knowledge, in any way he possibly could, firstly via a science fiction book called Majic, later via creating a smoking gun document, etc. Remember that I am assuming here that Moore was acting more like an activist than a scientist. Eventually, Moore probably would have succeeded in obtaining permission to transcribe almost literally some MJ documents (we know now he liked transcriptions).

Unknown said...

I am confused because in Greg Bishop's terrific book, Project Beta, he reveals that Doty gave Moore the MJ-12 documents in 85 hoping that Moore would summarily release them and having the weight of the man who "broke" Roswell behind them, Doty hoped that Moore's release of this information would give the documents a credibility all their own. However, in the book, Moore sat on these documents until I believe sometime in '87 when Doty notified Moore that he sent a copy of the documents to Tim Good. Doty used this to entice Moore into releasing the documents before Good was going to. If this story is true, it would seem that Doty and his AFOSI brethren are the progenitors of the MJ-12 mythos. I am likely to believe this just because of the fascinating work Mark Pilkington did in the movie Mirage Men where he determined that Project Serpo and Project Aquarius documents also originated with Doty. What do you think?

Tom Whitmore said...

I recently had an hour long conversation with Joe Nickell in an effort to locate his article analyzing the MJ-12 documents. He referred me to a book in which a chapter contained the article. He also mentioned that there may be extant copies of Moore letters with the EBD date format in the Phil Klass archives. I was excited about that and looked at the inventory on-line but it may be like searching for a needle in a haystack. However, I ran across this blog posting concerning Moore’s Green Fireballs book and succeeded in acquiring a copy. I have since identified five retyped documents that contain the EBD date format. However, there are other retyped documents that do not. The book was published in August of 1983, which pre-dates the alleged receipt of the MJ-12 documents by 16 months (reference Bishop p. 210). I’m intrigued to be in possession of such obscure material, and I can go to the National Archives to see if I can turn up the originals in order to compare them with the re-typed versions. This is part of the confirmation work that I am continuing to do.