Majestic 12: The UFO Documents the FBI Called 'Completely Bogus'

The Story

Every good secret society needs a membership list. Majestic 12 came with one: twelve real, famous names from the dawn of the Cold War, supposedly gathered by President Harry Truman to study a crashed flying saucer and the bodies found inside.

The story arrived the way the best UFO stories do, anonymously. According to the skeptic Philip J. Klass, writing in Skeptical Inquirer in 1990, a roll of 35 mm film showing the documents reportedly arrived by mail from an unknown sender on December 11, 1984. The papers were made public on May 29, 1987.

The Air Force's verdict, as relayed in a 1988 FBI teletype: 'The document is completely bogus.'

There were two key documents, Klass wrote. One was a one-page memo, dated September 24, 1947, said to be from Truman to Defense Secretary James Forrestal, authorizing a top-level 'Majestic-Twelve' group. The other was a long briefing paper dated November 18, 1952, apparently meant to bring President-elect Dwight Eisenhower up to speed on the group's crashed-saucer research.

Believers had one more card to play. In the National Archives sits a real one-page memo, dated July 14, 1954, from Eisenhower aide Robert Cutler to Gen. Nathan Twining, with the subject line 'NCS/MJ-12 Special Studies Project.' It mentions a briefing on July 16. It does not say what MJ-12 was.

The Archives has looked hard at that memo, and says it 'poses problems.' It carries no official letterhead or watermark, unlike the samples of Cutler's NSC paperwork the Eisenhower Library examined. The Archives found no record of an NSC meeting on July 16, 1954. Eisenhower's appointment books show no such briefing. And Cutler, the Archives says, was visiting overseas military installations on the day he supposedly wrote it. Searches of NSC indexes under 'MJ-12,' 'majestic,' 'UFO' and 'flying saucers' all came back empty.

Then there was the signature. Klass reported that the Truman signature on the 1947 memo was 'suspiciously like' the one on a genuine letter Truman wrote to Vannevar Bush on October 1, 1947, which Klass found in the Library of Congress. Since no two real signatures are ever identical, he argued, one had been copied from the other. He said even a small accidental pen skid on the genuine letter showed up on the MJ-12 memo.

The government got involved in 1988, when a copy of the documents reached the FBI's Dallas office. The FBI wanted to know whether classified information had leaked. On December 2, 1988, FBI headquarters sent Dallas its answer, a teletype now posted in the FBI's online Vault. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations, it said, 'advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated.' Then the line that gave the story its title: 'The document is completely bogus.'

Dallas was told to close the case. Majestic 12 lives on anyway, in novels, TV shows and video games. The papers behind it, however, have not survived contact with the archives.