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The following program presents theories about an historical event that is shrouded in mystery.

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It contains archival footage, reenactments and dramatizations, which invite you, the viewer, to draw your own conclusions.

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For nearly 20 years, UFO researchers and the government have disputed the authenticity of these documents.

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To some, they are proof of a UFO cover-up to others, elaborate forgeries.

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If the press went after this story, we'd have a cosmic watergate.

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Is this conclusive evidence that an alien spacecraft crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, and that the US government covered it up?

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The Roswell case is just one of many instances in which the US military baked it, the press served it and the public ate it.

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These documents, if they exist, are hugely important. If they exist and are authentic, this proves everything.

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These papers suggest that the Roswell cover-up was hatched by the military and perpetuated by an elite government committee.

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This rule, codenamed Majestic 12 or MJ12, answered to no one but the President of the United States.

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The government claims these documents are fakes and that MJ12 never existed.

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The MJ12 documents, they don't really prove anything. Almost everybody who's seen it says, you know, this is garbage.

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The evidence that IEC tells me of the probability of an MJ12 type of organization that very likely does exist.

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In all likelihood, it exists beyond the strict laws of the United States.

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Just how far would our government go to deceive the public about the Roswell incident?

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Did the intelligence services of the United States find things and keep them hidden?

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There was a cover-up, but not gonna die, die then.

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The story begins in the Los Angeles area in December of 1984 with the arrival of a mysterious package.

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Fledgling movie director Jamie Chandra is developing a fictional film about UFOs.

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He comes home one day to find an envelope postmarked Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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It has no written address and contains no message, only a single roll of film.

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Once processed, the film reveals a set of official looking documents.

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One is dated September 24, 1947 and marked Top Secret Eyes Only.

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It appears to have been written and signed by President Harry Truman.

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This letter has come to be known as the Truman Forestall Memo.

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The Truman Forestall Memo is a memo from President Truman to First Secretary of Defense James Forestall,

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telling him to go ahead with Operation Majestic 12 and that it would continue to be accountable only to the President.

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The term Majestic 12 is also referenced in the second document found on the film.

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Taken at face value, it presents an agenda for a briefing for President-elect Dwight Eisenhower.

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The document appears to have been prepared by Admiral Roscoe Hillencoder, former director of the CIA,

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and is dated November 18, 1952, more than five years after the Truman Forestall Memo.

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Essentially the message you get in these documents is that the U.S. retrieved alien technology

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through more than one crash, including Roswell, that the extraterrestrial presence is real and here on Earth,

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and furthermore that the United States government has had communication with an extraterrestrial being.

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This memo, which becomes known as the Eisenhower Briefing Document,

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identifies the Majestic 12 Committee, or MJ-12, as a group of high-level scientists, military leaders, and intelligence officers.

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The memo indicates that these 12 men have been granted the nation's highest security clearance to investigate the 1947 crash of an alien spacecraft.

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For years, rumors have swirled within the UFO research community that such a top-secret panel had hidden the truth about Roswell,

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but no one has ever found what appears to be hard evidence until now.

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Chandra Aynlis, the help of fellow UFO researchers Bill Moore and Stanton Friedman.

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They spend the next three years trying to authenticate the MJ-12 documents.

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They started looking into this, thinking that this could be the Holy Grail, you know, the proof of UFO cover-up.

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Still, Stan Friedman advises that they proceed with caution.

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A physicist who has worked for defense contractors, Friedman is aware that his credibility could be damaged if the documents are found to be fake.

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That's all we need is, you know, some folks are thinking he's going to get one up on us and say, gotcha, kind of thing.

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Slowly, Friedman pieces together a history of the Majestic 12, from the information contained in the Eisenhower Briefing Document and the Truman Forest All Memo.

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It took me years to verify some of the things in the document, dates, obscure things, but it's the trivia that matters,

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because your first thought is, okay, somebody on the outside made up these documents.

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Had it the person who made the documents know not to do this, to do this.

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Friedman will come to believe that the documents are evidence of a conspiracy that originated at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

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According to the documents, the history of Operation Majestic 12 begins with the astonishing eyewitness account of Kenneth Arnold.

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In June 1947, Arnold, a civilian pilot, sees bright objects flash across the sky during a flight in Washington State.

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The press newspaper got this, and Arnold had said that they moved as though like they were saucers skipping on the water.

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And that phrase got turned into flying saucers.

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Arnold's sighting makes front page news. In the days that follow, several hundred sightings of flying objects are recorded across the country.

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In the midst of that, two weeks later, occurred the alleged crash of an object about 75 miles outside Roswell Army Airfield.

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On July 7, 1947, investigators from Roswell Army Air Base are summoned to remote southeastern New Mexico.

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Renter Matt Bresel claims he has stumbled on the wreckage of a downed flying saucer.

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They sort through debris scattered over nearly a mile of scrub land. It's unlike anything they've ever seen.

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Here's all this strange stuff. Metal that was extraordinarily strong and extraordinarily lightweight.

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You could fold it and fold it and fold it, and then it would unfold on its own, memory metal.

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That strange pastel figures on the inside of the I-beam-like pieces. People call them hieroglyphics because what else could you call them if they weren't letters?

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The two Army officers pack up crate loads of debris and return to Roswell Army Air Base the next morning.

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What is it?

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The base commander dictates a press release.

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So statement reads in part, Roswell Army Airfield was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.

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At some point, renter Matt Bresel reportedly enters a coffee shop in Roswell and strikes up a conversation with another patron.

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You go?

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Yeah.

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Bresel shares his story about the flying saucer crash.

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That man happens to manage a local radio station, and he immediately calls sister station KOAT in Albuquerque.

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KOAT radio this morning.

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The station secretary begins to dispatch a teletype message to an ABC station in California.

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But as she will claim years later, her missive is interrupted.

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She was putting it out on the wire, and suddenly a bell rings on the machine, and the FBI says do not continue this transmission.

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Nevertheless, the official statement made at Roswell Army Air Base reaches the Associated Press that afternoon.

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By 2.30, the story had hit the AP news wires, and all hell broke loose.

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The incredible story becomes national news, if only for a few days.

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The Army Air Force has announced that a flying disc has been found and is now in the possession of the Army.

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It will stir controversy for decades to come.

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According to mysterious papers known as the MJ-12 documents, on July 7, 1947, an operation to recover wreckage and bodies from a crashed alien spacecraft is launched outside Roswell, New Mexico.

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The

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By July 8, search teams have descended on a giant debris field and sealed off nearby roadways.

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A major retrieval operation is underway.

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There had been claims, though, that there were these bodies that were found.

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This is one of the statements made in the MJ-12 documents that are so controversial.

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According to the Eisenhower Briefing document, four dead and badly decomposed aliens are also recovered and removed for study.

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The Roswell Army Air Base commander instructs Major Jesse Marcell to transport the debris to Wright Field in Ohio.

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First, however, the plane makes a scheduled stop at Fort Worth Army Airfield in Texas under the command of Brigadier General Roger Raimi.

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UFO researcher Stanton Freedman alleges that two-star General Clements McMullen phones Raimi's assistant from Washington and issues three orders.

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Get the press off our back. I don't care how you do it.

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Send some of that wreckage up here with one of your Colonel Couriers today.

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And the third was, I don't want you ever to talk about it again.

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So Marcell arrived in Fort Worth with this stuff, showed it to Raimi.

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According to Marcell, the two men walked out of the main room.

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When they came back in, there was different material there.

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Torn-up weather balloon, totally identifiable, conventional stuff.

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And it was that material with which Marcell was photographed with in that famous picture where he's holding this wreckage.

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It basically made it look like an idiot.

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Raimi told the press, sorry, it was just a radar reflector, weather balloon combination.

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You know, which is an insult to anybody's intelligence.

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The notion that people at Roswell didn't know about weather balloons is pretty darn silly.

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They were used all the time.

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Raimi also tells reporters that the second leg of this flight, carrying these materials to Wright Field in Ohio, has been canceled.

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UFO researchers believe that is a lie.

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We have an FBI memo, however, that confirms material was taken to Wright Field for study, for analysis.

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According to Stanton Freedman, the presumed cargo on this flight consists of some flying saucer wreckage from the crash site.

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No documentation has been found identifying specifically what was airlifted to Wright Field.

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What is known is that the press reports the Army's weather balloon cover story.

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And by the middle of July of 1947, press coverage of flying saucers in general fell off a shelf.

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Rancher Mack Braswell had supposedly seen the wreckage of a spacecraft.

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According to his son, Braswell is detained for several days by military police.

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His son alleges that Army officials pressure the rancher until he finally swears to secrecy.

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Braswell will refuse to publicly discuss what he saw near Roswell for the rest of his life.

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If the Majestic 12 documents are to be believed, the cover-up was a success.

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But UFO researchers claim the government still needed to contain speculation that something extraordinary happened near Roswell,

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that aliens had pierced some of the nation's most sensitive airspace.

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They believe President Harry Truman authorizes a strategy to quell any remaining suspicions.

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Let's face it, if the United States government recovered crash-flying saucers in New Mexico, you would want to cover it all up.

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The Majestic 12 documents indicate that on September 24, 1947, President Truman signed an executive order initiating the covert operation.

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But there is no record of any MJ-12 meeting, only those documents that surfaced in 1984.

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One, the so-called Truman Forest Hall memo, suggests that Truman authorized the top secret project.

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Allegedly, the 12 members took responsibility for a cover-up, begun by the Army.

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Then there's the so-called Eisenhower Briefing Document, which indicates that the members of MJ-12 were tasked with investigating and exploiting the alien technology,

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recovered from the crash site near Roswell.

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Exactly, UFO researchers say, the approach officials might be expected to take.

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The government, first of all, would want to know are these guys hostile?

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Secondly, they wanted to know how do these things work?

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If you got wreckage, you want to figure out what can I learn from this?

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What do you think one would do if you had access suddenly to something as exotic as alien technology?

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You would establish a super secret group of individuals with the right types of scientific and security clearances,

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and you would say, I assume, figure this out?

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Friedman contends that President Truman and the MJ-12 members were aware of the gravity of the situation.

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The Roswell crash meant that control over some of the most sensitive airspace in the U.S. had been compromised.

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Some of the most classified places in the United States, which are in New Mexico, wait until it's missile range.

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The 509th in Roswell was the most elite military air force in the United States.

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At the dawn of the Cold War era, the stakes for national security had never been higher.

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The motivation for keeping this all secret in 1947, you know, we just won the Second World War.

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The Russians were just getting excited about it.

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The Russians were just getting excited about it.

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The Russians were just getting excited about it.

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In 1947, you know, we just won the Second World War.

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The Russians were just getting excited about espionage.

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Robert Wood, a former aeronautics engineer and his son, Ryan, are UFO researchers who learn of the MJ-12 documents from Stanton Friedman.

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They stress that in 1947, it was paramount that the government keep the Roswell incident under wraps.

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It's something that I don't think people wanted to distract the public about.

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It would highlight the fact that we can't control our airspace at all.

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Both Friedman and the Woods hope to uncover new material to authenticate the MJ-12 documents.

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But they don't even have the originals, only photographs of them.

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So independently, they look for credible secondary sources that will prove the documents are real.

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Friedman begins with the list of supposed members of MJ-12.

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One of the first things we did, of course, was check on the list of 12 dates of birth, dates of death.

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Jerome Hunziker, who was the last survivor, died in September 1984, just a couple months before we got the documents.

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Friedman believes the documents release may have been timed to coincide with Hunziker's death.

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The supposed members of this elite panel were 12 of the most trusted and brilliant men from the military, scientific and intelligence communities.

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Friedman believes that Truman and his close advisors selected them, and the 12 men had the highest security clearance.

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It is an impressive group. The Secretary of Defense, the first three directors of the CIA, an Air Force General who would later become head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of the Army, and five of the nation's leading scientists at the time.

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One characteristic was clear. They all had worked on very high security stuff.

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Friedman is immediately intrigued by one name that appears on the list.

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Here's Donald Howard Menzel, who'd written three anti-UFO books, explained away every sighting, and yet he was supposedly on the inside.

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First of all, the objects are not unidentified. We know what they are.

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Second, in many cases, in most cases, they're not flying, and finally, in many cases, they are not even material objects.

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Dr. Donald Menzel, a Harvard astronomy professor who died in 1976, had earned a reputation as a determined debunker of UFOs.

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And yet, if the documents are correct, he also served on a top-secret committee charged with covering up evidence of extraterrestrial crafts.

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Curious to learn more, Friedman obtains permission to examine the Harvard archives.

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I went up there and was totally shocked at what I found.

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He discovers that Menzel was more than just an academic.

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The astronomer consulted with the National Security Agency, known to be a super-secret intelligence organization.

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As proof, Friedman produces this letter from the Harvard archives that Menzel wrote to Senator John Kennedy in 1960, noting his long relationship with the NSA.

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Donald Menzel lived a double life. No one knew this at the time that the documents came out.

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If the government did have proof that UFOs existed, Friedman says, someone with these credentials would be in on the secret.

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But others scoff at the notion that Menzel's work for the government included covering up the existence of UFOs.

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In an email to the History Channel, his daughter says the contention that her father was involved in the, quote, fictitious program called MJ-12 is patently ludicrous.

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Friedman is used to such criticism. He acknowledges that he has not found any direct evidence linking Menzel to Operation Majestic-12.

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We're dealing with a top secret project. There was nothing in the Menzel papers at Harvard that was still classified.

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And one wouldn't expect a guy who spent more than 30 years of his life working on very highly classified materials to leave anything around about that.

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Despite the lack of direct evidence, UFO researchers believe Menzel's government work is a tantalizing clue. It won't be the last one they uncover.

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All right, take a look at these signatures. He signs in the same place.

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By 1985, as UFO researchers delve more deeply into declassified government records, Stanton Friedman believes they found even more convincing evidence that the Majestic-12 documents are real.

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The only other possibility he claims is that he and other researchers are the victims of an elaborate hoax.

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A few months after Jamie Chandra reportedly receives the package containing the filmed MJ-12 documents, another anonymous message appears.

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In early 1985, Bill Moore, a UFO researcher in California, gets a postcard postmarked New Zealand.

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Its cryptic message suggests he visit the National Archives outside Washington, D.C. and look up Box 189.

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It was clear somebody wanted us to go to Washington. You don't ignore instructions like that.

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For Chandra, Moore and Friedman, it's a promising lead.

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They've already spent years reading declassified material and are skilled at navigating the National Archives.

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So Chandra and Moore go to Washington and examine Box 189.

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They find a document that to them supports the existence of the MJ-12.

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They found the Cutler twining them up. Folded over between two folders, it obviously didn't belong there.

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They called me that night and read it to me and it immediately rang a bell with me.

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The note appears to have been written in July 1954 by Robert Cutler, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, to President Eisenhower.

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The formally classified document announces an upcoming Majestic-12 briefing.

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It is addressed to General Nathan Twining, one of the supposed members of the Majestic-12.

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The Cutler twining memo is particularly important because it's an original document.

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Friedman believes the memo was planted in the archives by an insider, someone who wanted the information leaked.

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I asked the people at the archives what the history of that box was.

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I'm told that that box, 189, was first handled in late September 1984,

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two weeks after the death of Jerome Hunziker, the last survivor. Coincidence, of course.

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Through 1986, Friedman continues to search for hard evidence that will substantiate the MJ-12 documents.

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What he finds is only circumstantial, but combined, it makes what he believes is a convincing case for their authenticity.

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First, the documents say that Defense Secretary James Forrestal and Nuclear Scientist Vannevar Bush were members of this top secret committee.

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The Truman-Forrestal memo, supposedly signed on September 24, 1947,

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comports with official records of a meeting between President Harry Truman, James Forrestal and Vannevar Bush on that day.

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This is the only date in reality that Harry Truman met within a six-month period of time with Vannevar Bush.

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Vannevar Bush met with James Forrestal on September 24, 1947.

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A second detail is found in the Eisenhower Briefing document.

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It's also interesting that the date of the Eisenhower Briefing document, that is November 18, 1952,

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it just so happens that President-elect Dwight Eisenhower on that day did receive a 45-minute long briefing,

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during which General Nathan Twining, another alleged MJ-12 member, was present.

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A third detail, the Briefing document states that on July 7, 1947, a secret operation was launched to recover wreckage near Roswell for scientific study.

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Freedman contends that flight logs he has obtained show on that same date.

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General Nathan Twining boarded a plane from Wright Field in Ohio to Alamogordo Army Airfield, New Mexico, about 115 miles from Roswell.

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He was already there on the 7th, and that's the date where the document says work began.

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Twining's flight logs place him in New Mexico until July 11.

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Whatever the purpose of his visit, Freedman says this letter proves that Twining cancelled other plans in order to make the New Mexico trip.

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He had sent a letter to a buddy at Boeing, they used to like do fishing trips and things like that.

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Sorry, something of great importance had come up that's when he went to New Mexico.

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There is another intriguing coincidence. In March 1949, Defense Secretary James Forrestal, a supposed member of the Majestic 12,

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resigns from President Truman's cabinet.

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In April, he is admitted into Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment for mental illness.

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On May 22nd, 1949, seven weeks after checking in, Forrestal plunges to his death from a window on the hospital's 16th floor.

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The official cause of death is suicide, but Forrestal's fall has long been the subject of speculation.

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I don't think we'll ever know the true story of what happened.

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The theories are many. He was pushed out, he was tossed out, they decided he was going to talk about things he shouldn't be talking about.

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By the spring of 1987, Friedman and his colleagues feel compelled to make their findings public.

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The result is national media coverage, including on the ABC News program Nightline,

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where Friedman debates the existence of MJ-12 with skeptic Phil Klass,

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a journalist and founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or PSYCOP.

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Klass issues a challenge to the national media to investigate the MJ-12 documents.

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And within a month, come back and report, either these documents are authentic, we have captured a flying saucer,

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the government has maintained a cover-up for 40 years, or come back and report its nonsense,

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and there has never been so great a con job done against the news media and the public.

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I think that the people who want to keep secrets have done a very good job of taking advantage of the egos of the Washington Press Corps,

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who think that no secrets can be kept from them.

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Nearly 20 years later, skepticism remains.

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Paul Kurtz now heads PSYCOP, founded at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

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On the MJ-12, there were 12 people on this special committee, and they're all dead now.

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If after the fact you're going to create a commission or committee out of fiction,

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then it's convenient to put dead people on it, so you cannot question them.

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The MJ-12 documents are third-rate amateurish productions, in my opinion,

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and I say this as someone who's looked at some very good forgeries for over decades.

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Joe Nicoll, a PSYCOP investigator, takes issue with the fact that only photocopies of the Eisenhower Briefing Document

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and the Truman Forest Hall Memo are available for analysis, not the originals.

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Where are these original alleged documents?

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The rule of best evidence says that you don't use a copy of something when the original could be available.

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Despite these limitations, Nicoll agreed to study copies of the supposed Majestic-12 documents.

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They're hugely problematical, riddled with factual errors and even document errors, riddled with them.

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Nicoll begins by dissecting the Truman Forest Hall Memo.

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If Friedman and his supporters are to be believed, this memo marked the launch of Operation Majestic-12.

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It mentions an executive order number. We can go to the Truman files and look up its executive order numbers,

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and this isn't one of them. When we get to the signature, it gets even worse. This is a cut-and-paste job.

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This was Xerox's copy that had been interposed on something that had been typewritten.

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The signature is genuine, but the evidence suggests it was a fabrication.

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Stylistic errors, like incorrect date formats, also expose the Eisenhower Briefing Paper as a fraud Nicoll argues.

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The Eisenhower Briefing Document is a problem on several levels, but one that caught my attention was the date format, which is really incorrect.

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The civilian date would be November 18, 1952. The military format would be November 18, 1952, no comma.

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But the Briefing Document has a hybrid. I think this is one of many touches of incompetence in these documents.

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If the first two alleged Majestic-12 documents are fakes, then what about the Cutler-Twining Memo that was discovered at the National Archives?

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Nicoll learns that the alleged author, Robert Cutler, was not even in the U.S. when the memo was supposedly written. He had left for Europe 11 days earlier.

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Equally suspicious, Nicoll argues, is the fact that the Cutler-Twining Memo, like the other documents, was discovered by UFO researchers.

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The archives didn't have any record of it, didn't know they had it. Nice try, fellas, but this is not a very credible document.

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Nicoll does not rule out the possibility that one of the memo's proponents, Stanton Freedman, Moore, or Chanderay, planted the document there to make it look authentic.

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They're not expecting you to bring a George Washington letter into the archives. No, they're worried about you putting one in your briefcase or something and walking out with it.

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But Freedman defends his work on MJ-12. He says his research has unearthed many official documents, with date formatting and consistencies.

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And Freedman has a response to Nicoll and others, who would suggest that the Cutler-Twining Memo was planted.

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The guys who had the best opportunity to plant it were the lawyers and other people who spent their time in the Army Reserve working on declassification.

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They have to have high-level clearances, otherwise they don't get access to this stuff.

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While the debate persists about whether the government instigated a massive cover-up about Roswell, UFO stories gain widespread popularity due in part to Stanton Freedman's charges.

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In late 1993, at the urging of constituents, New Mexico Congressman Steve Schiff demands a federal inquiry into the records of the Roswell incident.

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The investigation that follows will help blow the lid off a U.S. Air Force secret that's been tightly guarded for 46 years.

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Something happened near Roswell in 1947. Question is, what exactly happened?

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March 1994. In Washington, D.C., a congressional inquiry explores government records of a crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

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Some UFO researchers hope that the inquiry will unearth evidence of a cover-up of a crash of an alien spacecraft.

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A cover-up which they believe is spearheaded by a secret government council called the MJ-12.

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The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, handles the fact-finding mission.

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It audits the FBI, CIA, Air Force and other agencies for records of the so-called Roswell incident.

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The pro-Roswell people, if you will, have for years said it was the Air Force that had, quote, covered this whole incident up.

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Colonel Richard Weaver oversees the Air Force's role in the investigation.

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Military records, according to Weaver, contain nothing to suggest that an alien spacecraft crashed near Roswell.

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There just wasn't a recognition that this was anything extra-terrestrial.

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The Air Force's focus was really on, are these really Russian type of flying objects?

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If that was the case, they were flying with impunity over our skies.

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However, Weaver does discover that the official explanation for the Roswell crash site debris, that it was a weather balloon, is not true.

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But UFO researchers claim that this story is just another part of a disinformation campaign that was underway in July 1947.

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Deep in the Air Force records is the mention of a covert operation called Project Mogul.

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Launched in 1946 at the onset of the Cold War, Mogul experimented with spy balloons that could monitor Soviet nuclear testing.

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We were trying to spy on the Russians.

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It was the only way that we had at that time in 1947 because there were no satellites.

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There were no possibilities of overflights in that area.

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There were no human resources on the ground that we could get that information from.

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So it was an attempt to gather information through kind of a novel method.

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In fact, Weaver learns that a Project Mogul spy balloon went missing near Roswell in early July.

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Just days before rancher Matt Braswell stumbled upon the alleged alien crash site.

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Yes, there was a cover-up.

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It was not of a spacecraft from outer space and it was not of little green people.

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It was of the technology that we had developed in the Cold War to detect nuclear energy.

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Weaver compiles a report that includes his findings on Project Mogul.

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The Air Force releases it to the public in September 1994, adding that no Air Force documents reveal a cover-up or any evidence of alien bodies or extraterrestrial materials.

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However, the GAO, or General Accounting Office Probe, is still in progress and has not yet published any of its own findings.

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The result? Critics charge that Weaver and the Air Force are still perpetuating a cover-up that began back in 1947.

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This was a preemptive strike against the GAO report.

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Someone in the Air Force decided that the best way to cut them off at the pass was to do their own report.

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Mark Rodiger is scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies, a group of scientists, academics and investigators interested in promoting serious scientific interest in UFOs.

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He argues that Project Mogul is one more ploy to misinform the public about Braswell.

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There is no way that the amount of material in a mogul balloon would fill up the area as described by the witnesses on the Braswell debris field.

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That's enough for me.

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Even though Rodiger doubts that the MJ-12 documents are authentic, he believes it is possible that aliens did crash near Braswell.

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And he disputes Weaver's assumption that anyone would mistake a crash balloon for an alien spacecraft.

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People found mogul balloons out there all the time. In fact, mogul balloons often had written on them who to return it to.

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In July 1995, nearly a year after the release of Weaver's report, the General Accounting Office completes its inquiry into government records regarding Braswell.

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The GAO concludes in part that the year-long investigation has found two records from 1947 that acknowledge a crash.

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Both claim the object was a balloon. The report finds no other records of a crash near Braswell.

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UFO researchers may be disappointed, but not surprised.

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They didn't try to determine whether the Braswell event was real. They simply looked for existing records and they basically could find almost nothing.

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Rodiger argues that the General Accounting Office lacks the muscle to make the FBI, CIA or any other agency turn over top secret files.

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What is indisputable is that the GAO inquiry does reveal one suspicious fact. Many records at the Braswell Army Airfield from 1947, permanent records that were supposed to be preserved, had been destroyed years before.

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Is this evidence of a government cover-up?

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What the General Accounting Office discovered? This is an amazing thing.

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It was that all outgoing messages from the middle of the night, from early 1946 to the end of 1949 were inexplicably missing. They were just gone.

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These documents are the only hard evidence that an elite government committee called the Majestic 12 ever existed. Skeptics say they are fraudulent.

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But UFO researchers believe other records could have confirmed the existence of the MJ-12. They say those documents may have been destroyed as part of a government cover-up.

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Jamie Chandra and William Moore, the original recipients of the documents, no longer comment publicly on the Majestic 12.

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But in an email to the History Channel Moore said that if the documents are a hoax, he suspects it was perpetrated to discredit Roswell investigators. Fellow researchers agree.

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One of the key questions you have to ask yourself about these documents is did somebody manufacture them? Are they all fake?

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And you have to say, well, why fake them? What's the motivation for faking them? Is it to fool the UFO community? Ah, nobody cares about the UFO community.

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Is it to make fame and fortune? Nobody's made any fame and fortune out of it.

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The answer could be it's government disinformation of the most insidious kind to take us off the path of what could be the truth.

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In fact, UFO researchers' quest for the truth about Roswell and Operation Majestic 12 may be hopelessly compromised by the intense secrecy of the Cold War era.

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If you take yourself back to 1947, the Cold War was just beginning with the Soviets. It was a time when we had lots of secrets we were keeping and more secrets were going to be kept as years went by.

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In December 1947, five months after the Roswell incident, the Air Force did establish a secret committee staffed by elite scientists and military officers.

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That operation eventually became known as Project Blue Book.

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Headquartered at Patterson Field in Ohio, its mission was to investigate all reported UFO sightings and determine if they pose a threat to national security.

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UFO reports could clog reporting channels for military communications and so forth, and the Soviets could use it for deception operations.

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The government decided that UFO sightings had to be explained at all costs and that UFO reports had to be debunked.

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But to some, Blue Book's very existence validated claims that alien spacecraft may have been credible.

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In 1969, after a 22-year tenure, Blue Book was terminated. Air Force officials deny that extraterrestrial aircraft were ever found.

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Some UFO researchers are not surprised, since they claim Project Blue Book was never meant to expose the truth about UFOs.

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It wasn't some kind of deep black deception. It was instead a very open deception, if we can put it that way.

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A public relations effort to convince the public there was nothing to UFOs.

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In the years since a mysterious role of film brought the Majestic 12 controversy to light, Roswell, New Mexico has become an iconic place in American culture.

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Whether or not an alien spaceship really crashed there almost seems beside the point.

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But the debate over the authenticity of the Mj-12 documents rages on.

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Do these papers open a Pandora's box of nefarious government secrets?

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Are they fakes that merely showcase the handiwork of a determined con artist?

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Or is there a third option? That the documents are part of an elaborate government-sponsored disinformation campaign designed to keep Americans in the dark about UFOs?

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Some people say, oh, that's a crude hoax. Well, if it's a hoax, it sure ain't crude. Those documents are quite sophisticated.

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I mean, there's a lot of information in those documents that when they came out in 1984 in the form of a canister film,

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we're not known or widely understood at the time.

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I've now been to 20 different document archives across the country.

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I get real kicked out of the people saying, this document must be phony.

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They say it from their armchair instead of going to the archives and finding other documents with the same idiosyncrasies.

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But despite the efforts of some UFO researchers to have the Mj-12 documents taken seriously,

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Richard Dolan insists that the existence of Mj-12 doesn't necessarily hinge on their validity.

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You look at the Mj-12 documents and to accept them blindly as real, I think, is premature.

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On the other hand, I think that there is reason to consider them valid. I do.

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I would argue that however one perceives the authenticity of those documents,

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that it is entirely logical and likely that an Mj-12 type of group did indeed exist.

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Skeptics say that UFO researchers have engendered a debate based on spurious logic and flimsy evidence,

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and in doing so, they've behaved at best, irresponsibly.

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I think the public should be outraged over Mj-12.

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It was not just a fun and games, but it's caused a lot of people to distrust the American government.

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It's caused people to have suspicions about historical figures that are unjustified.

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In June 2004, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson said that the official investigations

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have never adequately explained the crash near Roswell.

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He called for a full disclosure of what the government knows.

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Will another inquiry reveal the Mj-12 documents to be proof of one of the greatest government cover-ups of all time?

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Or will it perpetuate the public's willingness to believe?

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The preceding program presented theories about an historical event that is shrouded in mystery.

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It contained archival footage, reenactments and dramatizations,

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which invite you, the viewer, to draw your own conclusions.