Crashed UFOs?

wwkirk

Divine
You don't have to look very far past Bill Moore for a reasonable explanation of the MJ-12 hoax. There is physical evidence to back up the circumstantial stuff. I can't say he was the source of all that hooey, but old Occam could leave his razor safely stashed away and use a dull pocketknife on that one.
Interesting. Do you really think he had the technical skills to forge the documents?
 
Apparently he did. It wasn't all that difficult even then, and of course it turned out they weren't very good fakes anyway. It's a complicated story, and I don't know of a web site or book that has a concise summary of all that was discovered about it over the years, but the documents were of course gone over very thoroughly, by people who knew what they were doing. I have no desire to rehash any of this, but there are people who can tell you if two different documents were typed on the same manual typewriter. I suppose if you were to google "moore mj12 date format" or something like that, you'd find about a zillion pages dealing with that little detail. The list is long and after a while you just say, "Well yeah. Duh."
 

wwkirk

Divine
Apparently he did. It wasn't all that difficult even then, and of course it turned out they weren't very good fakes anyway. It's a complicated story, and I don't know of a web site or book that has a concise summary of all that was discovered about it over the years, but the documents were of course gone over very thoroughly, by people who knew what they were doing. I have no desire to rehash any of this, but there are people who can tell you if two different documents were typed on the same manual typewriter. I suppose if you were to google "moore mj12 date format" or something like that, you'd find about a zillion pages dealing with that little detail. The list is long and after a while you just say, "Well yeah. Duh."

In support of your conclusion:

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.

 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
I think that the MJ-12 documents are most likely to be an AFOSI creation. Whoever made them had access to original documents and verifiable facts about people mentioned in them, and really knew what they were doing. The documents came to light during a time when Doty and AFOSI were quite active in disinformation, and had free rein to do so. To me, Stanton Friedman's painstaking research confirms to me that they are most likely real USAF documents, even if the story they contain is itself untrue.
 

wwkirk

Divine
Stanton Friedman is almost alone among major researchers in regarding the MJ-12 documents as authentic.
 

Creepy Green Light

Don't mistake lack of talent for genius
Stanton Friedman is almost alone among major researchers in regarding the MJ-12 documents as authentic.
An interesting question that I was able to pose to S.F. is "What cases and/or information did you once think was legit/valid but now think it was a hoax/didn't happen?" After saying he's never been asked that question before - he said "none".
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
Stanton is something of an outlier, in the sense that he is not really a general ufologist. He specializes in the touchstone cases of the 1940's and 50's. I can't think of anyone who has put as much time and effort into the MJ-12 documents as he has. I am a professional archivist with an M.A. in History, and can tell you that his research methods are quite thorough.
 
Stanton is something of an outlier, in the sense that he is not really a general ufologist. He specializes in the touchstone cases of the 1940's and 50's. I can't think of anyone who has put as much time and effort into the MJ-12 documents as he has. I am a professional archivist with an M.A. in History, and can tell you that his research methods are quite thorough.
I first heard of Friedman through his written testimony at the Congressional Hearings, in 1968, and so far as I knew this was his first public statement on UFOs. He is a good thorough researcher, but skilled disinformation experts are ahead of the game, they know all the factors and elements that someone is going to employ in analysing their materials, and they have the resources to do a perfect job where documents are concerned. But some of the MJ-12 papers do contain odd snippets that suggest manipulation rather than revelation. We should be looking at the contents and asking, "If this is disinformation, what is it they are trying to make us think or do?" And, "What is it they don't want us to know"?
And yes, I think the AFOSI is a key player in these games!
 
I think that the MJ-12 documents are most likely to be an AFOSI creation. Whoever made them had access to original documents and verifiable facts about people mentioned in them, and really knew what they were doing. The documents came to light during a time when Doty and AFOSI were quite active in disinformation, and had free rein to do so. To me, Stanton Friedman's painstaking research confirms to me that they are most likely real USAF documents, even if the story they contain is itself untrue.

Stanton Friedman is almost alone among major researchers in regarding the MJ-12 documents as authentic.
I've heard Stanton Friedman and Richard Dolan talk about the MJ-12 documents.

Friedman stands by his claim that a few of the documents are legit, while most of them aren't - I'd have to dig into it to see which ones he thinks are authentic and if they're significant. Anyway, that sounds plausible to me. Nesting fragments of truth within disinformation is a common practice - that way the disinformation effort doesn't only deceive and mislead, but it discredits the fragments of truth that you want to bury as well.

Dolan has said that it would take a team of PhD-level document experts to produce the whole cache of MJ-12 documents, so he thinks that it was a well-funded and well-staffed counterintelligence operation. If he's changed his mind about it since he said that, I'm not aware of it. And I don't know how to resolve that with the involvement of Moore, Doty, Shandera, and Collins. Without the document expertise to properly evaluate the sophistication of the forgeries, I feel obliged to defer to Stanton Friedman's expertise in that area - I don't know of anyone who's studied official government records more intensely than Friedman.

I'd like to see if anyone can make a viable case against the specific documents that Friedman still thinks are legit. Because being included within a cache of demonstrably fake documents isn't sufficient to discredit every document in the collection, and it's an important detail. Because if a few of the documents are authentic, then by identifying them, we could learn something valuable about the specific information that the disinformation campaign was created in part to discredit. And then there might be some exceedingly thin silver lining to the horrific fallout from the MJ-12 fiasco, which in my mind proved to be instrumental in almost completely destroying the credibility of ufology in general within the public eye.
 

Creepy Green Light

Don't mistake lack of talent for genius
If somebody was new to the entire MJ-12 debacle - how would you summarize (if possible) what was found and what is controversial within what has been found? I know in very general terms what the docs are but I am far from any authority on the subject. Or maybe it's too elaborate to try and explain in a post on a message board? Thanks :)
 
The docs were very exciting when they first came to light. It didn't take long for discrepancies to show up, where they did not match facts. Over the years their credibility has eroded steadily as new information came to light. I recommend A Different Perspective, Kevin Randle's blog, as a place to search for bona fide facts. Randle is a careful researcher, he has been at it for decades, he knows all the players personally with few exceptions, and he has a lot of sense.

I disagree with Dolan's idea of how sophisticated they were. At the time, there were plenty of researchers and UFO buffs who could have done something similar, though most of course would not. (Some did pull of some less elaborate hoaxes though.) Yes it took a lot of work, and the perps would need access to lots of real docs to make it even superficially believable, but there were a few dozen people in the field who had the capability. They didn't fool many serious researchers for any significant length of time, which says a lot about how brilliantly they were made.
 

Rick Hunter

Celestial
In the end, all we have are opinions. No one has (to my knowledge) seen the actual paper documents nor has anyone stepped forward to take credit for them, either as a hoax or genuine. Friedman's efforts to verify the information within the documents, as well as the formatting (type face, date format, salutations, etc.) may be the best that anyone will ever be able to do.
 

humanoidlord

ce3 researcher
You don't have to look very far past Bill Moore for a reasonable explanation of the MJ-12 hoax. There is physical evidence to back up the circumstantial stuff. I can't say he was the source of all that hooey, but old Occam could leave his razor safely stashed away and use a dull pocketknife on that one.
but everthing about the documents scream rich doty
 

humanoidlord

ce3 researcher
I think that the MJ-12 documents are most likely to be an AFOSI creation. Whoever made them had access to original documents and verifiable facts about people mentioned in them, and really knew what they were doing. The documents came to light during a time when Doty and AFOSI were quite active in disinformation, and had free rein to do so. To me, Stanton Friedman's painstaking research confirms to me that they are most likely real USAF documents, even if the story they contain is itself untrue.
yes they have a official look about them, they were definitely made by someone that wanted to deceive the ufologists and that someone is doty
 
Someone highly placed is certainly directing this disinformation, and the question of who exactly prepared which document is less important than the overall aim of the campaign. Is it (a) just to misdirect people who may see tests of secret devices, or (b) is there some more sinister long term programme (e.g. von Braun's alleged claim that there was a plan to weaponize space based on a contrived extraterrestrial threat?) Or something that we are totally unaware of?
 
Don't leave out the reports from some of Bill Moore's friends that a year or so previous he said he was thinking of working up some fake documents just like these, because he thought (for some reason I'm apparently too thick to grasp) it would "flush out the real ones". Or something like that. All of that stuff was well within Moore's abilities and some of it appeared, to people who study such things, to have been typed on the same machine as some of Moore's personal letters to others in the field. And of course his idiosyncratic date format. Among other things. We can use Occam's nephew's dull razor for this one. But do carry on with elaborate conspiracies if you want. I admit they are lots of fun.

I have no doubt he was helped and encouraged by the usual suspects, but I don't think Doty, for one, is bright or creative enough to cook them up. Whatever else can be said for Bill Moore, he does have talent. I don't think Moore is a bad guy, just misguided and not possessed of the best judgment. I'm sure he underestimated both the scrutiny the docs would come under, and the assplosion of bleevership that would ensue. Kind of like Lazar, who apparently didn't waste any time thinking his scam through.
 

humanoidlord

ce3 researcher
Someone highly placed is certainly directing this disinformation, and the question of who exactly prepared which document is less important than the overall aim of the campaign. Is it (a) just to misdirect people who may see tests of secret devices, or (b) is there some more sinister long term programme (e.g. von Braun's alleged claim that there was a plan to weaponize space based on a contrived extraterrestrial threat?) Or something that we are totally unaware of?
its just to misdirect ufologists
ufologists were getting very close to the truth in the 70's and then out of nowhere, pops roswell, MJ-12, dulce base, bob lazar and other ridiculous stuff
i don't believe in coincidences
 
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