by Phil Patton
One piece of disinformation shown to Bennewitz was a faked memo ostensibly sent by teletype from Wright-Pat to Kirtland AFB.
William Moore, coauthor of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, which began the revival of interest in the case, also claimed that Doty gave him secret information on UFOs in February 1981. Moore claimed to have received a briefing paper on “Project Aquarius,” an effort to make contact with aliens, which was later mentioned on the television show. The paper mentioned other projects, including the one called Snowbird, which since 1972 had been testing a flying saucer “somewhere in Nevada,” and it also referred to access restricted to “MJ-12.” Thus an infamous code name was first introduced to the world.
In January 1982, Moore met Robert Pratt, a former National Enquirer reporter, and told him about Doty, his “Deep Throat” source. The two wrote a novelized version of the story, called The Aquarius Document, which was never published.
In 1984, TV producer Linda Moulton Howe, known for her documentaries on the cattle mutilations, claimed Doty had provided her with a look at “presidential briefing papers” about flying saucers. One paper described a meeting between earthlings and aliens who had landed at Holloman AFB, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, at six A.M. on April 25, 1964. There was a similar meeting at Edwards—reminiscent of Ike’s trip there. Howe claims that Doty told her there were people who wanted the information to get out: It was time. He promised her that film footage of the meeting and other dramatic evidence of contact would be forthcoming. Actual images of aliens talking with earthlings! But the additional material never arrived; Doty told Howe that there were political problems, a change of heart.
Moore said that Doty provided him with more information from a whole aviary of bird code-named informants, and in return Moore promised to report back to Doty on the activities of UFO researchers. Moore, in turn, was collaborating on research with Stanton Friedman, the UFO researcher who had once worked for Aerojet and had a master’s degree in nuclear physics. Moore also began to deal with Jaime Shandera, a film producer.
On December 11, 1984, shortly before he left his home in Burbank, California, for a lunch with Moore, Shandera was thumbing through Variety when he heard a rustling and then a thump as something dropped through the mail slot in his front door. It was a package wrapped in brown paper and postmarked Albuquerque, where Doty was stationed at Kirtland AFB. Inside was a roll of undeveloped black-and-white 35mm film. Moore and Shandera developed the film, and as the prints were drying they read the words “TOP SECRET/MAJIC/EYES ONLY” in the orange safety light of the darkroom.
It was the beginning of the Majic 12, Majestic 12, or MJ-12 story. The group had supposedly been formed by President Truman in September 1947 to investigate UFOs. Among the photographs was one of a document dated November 18, 1952—a briefing paper for President-elect Eisenhower stating that the remains of four alien bodies had been recovered two miles from the Roswell wreckage site.
The members of the MJ panel were a predictable but convincing group of high-level government and military officials and top scientists. If fictional, the list had been cleverly confected. It included Lloyd Berkner, a member of the CIA’s Robertson panel looking into UFOs; James Forrestal, first secretary of defense in July 1947 and, famously, a suicide at Bethesda Hospital in May 1949; Gordon Gray, assistant secretary of the army, who later became head of the 5412 committee, Ike’s inner circle for national security decisions; CIA director Walter Bedell Smith, who had discussed the psychological warfare implications of UFOs; MIT professor Jerome Hunsaker, the head of NACA, the predecessor of NASA; and Nathan Twining, commanding general of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Patterson Air Field, on record as believing that “the phenomenon is something real.”
The group’s alleged head—called “MJ-1”—was Vannevar Bush himself, who during World War II was head of the National Defense Research Council, in charge of the Manhattan Project, the Radiation Lab at MIT, and other important secret research programs
The MJ-12 documents were the biggest thing to hit the UFO world in years. Moore, Shandera, and Friedman did not make them public until 1985 because, they said later, they wanted first to verify their authenticity. But critics, led by longtime UFO debunker and Aviation Week editor Phil Klass, immediately attacked the documents.
All of a sudden the UFO world sounded as if it had turned into a covey of graphologists. The critique of the documents leveled the following charges: that the rubber stamp of the TOP SECRET banner was not made for the purpose but had changeable type (like old-style library due-date stamps) that bore a strong resemblance to one Bill Moore had used for his own return address; the presidential directive order number establishing the group was not consistent with the numbering system (secret directives, Friedman countered, would naturally not be numbered with the standard system); the documents bore no top-secret register number, and the classification “Top Secret Restricted Information” was not used until years later; the supposedly top-secret documents did not have the “Page __ of __ pages” indication that is standard; the document uses the form “Roswell Army Base,” which was not used after 1943; the text includes the term “media,” and uses “impacted” as a verb, years before such locutions became common; and, finally, the Truman signature on the September 24, 1947, memo seems to be identical to one on an October 1, 1947, letter to Vannevar Bush, right down to the distinctive skid mark on the H in “Harry.”
A dizzying series of debunkings and counterdebunkings began, turning on watermarks and date formats, bureaucratic procedure and national security directive numerical formats. But the debates that burned up the newsgroups and UFO seminars seemed to lodge mostly on the dating matter: Phil Klass had charged that the MJ-12 documents’ use of a zero before a single digit day of the month (as 01 August or 06 December) reflected a style that had come along only after the advent of computers. It was, he wryly added, also a format Moore had used since the fall of 1983 in his personal papers, as well as in “retyped” official documents he’d distributed. In response, Friedman pointed out several cases where the zero had been used, especially in military documents. The charge and countercharge, assertion and rebuttal, seemed to zoom in on that zero, circling the null, like a bug in a draining sink. It was more closely scrutinized than any circle or disc in the sky had ever been.
Moore revealed that in March 1985 he had received several anonymous postcards. They had been sent to his post office box in Dewey, Arizona, a previous address, then forwarded to his new home in Los Angeles. One card showed a photo, credited to the Ethiopian Tourist Commission, which pictured the African bush. The return address read, “Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” but the card had been postmarked in New Zealand. On the back, a single-spaced, typed message read in part: “To win the war … Add zest to your trip to Washington / Try Reese’s pieces; / For a stylish look / Try Suit Land.”
For Moore and Shandera, “Reese’s pieces” was a reference to the candy eaten by the alien in the film E.T. But they reminded Friedman of something else.
To validate the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents, Friedman had planned to visit the National Archives, where some promising military intelligence records had been declassified. The trio was particularly interested in Record Group 341. Friedman was scheduled for a lecture tour and asked Moore to go to Washington in his stead to check out the documents. Moore was not excited by the idea and told Friedman about the baffling postcards he’d just received. Then Friedman happened to mention that the records were not at the Archives themselves but in a branch in suburban Suitland, Maryland, and in the charge of a man named Edward Reese.
Moore and Friedman would discover a letter in the declassified records signed by Robert Cutler, Eisenhower’s national security adviser, referring to a change in the time of an “MJ-12 meeting.” Later, they realized that the box in which the memo had been found, number 189, was the same number as the post office box on the return address on the postcard.
Who had sent the cards? And if the
letter had been planted in the archives, who had done so? Was it some kind of Deep Throat seeking to let the secret out, or a disinformer working from inside?
Robert Cutler’s letter, found loose between two manila files, was dated July 15, 1954, and referred to “NSC/MJ-12 Special Studies Project.” It was a carbon copy on onionskin paper bearing the red slash officially declassifying it. The letter notified Nathan Twining that “the President has decided that the MJ-12 SSP briefing should take place during the already scheduled White House meeting of July 16, rather than following it as previously intended.” Friedman and Moore believed this innocuous, procedural note was the smoking gun that verified the existence of the MJ-12 group and the authenticity of the earlier MJ-12 documents, but critics attacked what quickly became known as “the Cutler-Twining memo.” They noted that it did not bear the standard government eagle watermark, that Ike had no such meeting on July 16, 1954, and that Cutler was not even in the country on the day he was supposed to have signed the letter. (His aide James Lay signed a genuine memo on the same date.) Yet Richard Bissell, who had looked at top-secret documents throughout his career, concluded that he could find nothing obviously false about the letter.
The MJ-12 tales grew and acquired a backward history: Their origins were better known than their subsequent existence. In the accounts of people like conspiracist William Cooper, MJ-12 became linked to the Bilderberger clique and the Trilateral Commission (whose triangular symbol was said to have been derived from the markings found on a crashed flying saucer). In these accounts, MJ-12 killed JFK and forced Nixon from power because he wouldn’t cooperate.
After the Lazar stories surfaced, an investigator named Robert Collins published an elaborate organizational chart for the MJ-12 organization, ostensibly dating from 1984–85, which included a prominent branch for operations at Area 51 and S-4. His source, he said, was William Moore. John Lear told in his lectures of a country club where the MJ-12 members held their meetings, playing golf and tennis in between considering the fate of the planet. According to these accounts, Henry Kissinger and Harold Brown had become members, along with Lew Allen of the Strategic Defense Initiative and Bobby Ray Inman, former deputy chief of the CIA and NSA boss.
To UFO and secret aircraft historian Curtis Peebles, the whole thing was very much in the classic American line of suspicious secret groups and “cabals.” Twelve was a neat number; Peebles noted that one member, Harvard observatory director Donald Menzel, was a widely read UFO debunker and could figure as a Judas. He also referred to the twelve Jewish elders to whom the notoriously fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion had been attributed. (Five of the original MJ-12 panel had “Jewish-sounding names.”) George Van Tassel had been advised at Giant Rock by a “Council of Twelve” key followers.
The idea of a secret, conspiratorial organization charged with recovering and repairing saucers while hiding the existence of the UFOs had deep roots. Ufologist James Moseley wrote in Saucer News in 1956 of reverse-engineered saucers. “This type of saucer is not built by the American Government as we ordinarily understand the word ‘Government.’ As fantastic as this might sound … these saucers are actually built, operated and maintained by an organization which is entirely separate from the military and political branches of the Government that we know about. I shall call this secret project ‘The Organization.’ ” Donald Keyhoe moved from suspicion of the Air Force in his first book to charges of outright conspiracy and cover-up in his next, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy.
But the MJ-12 project also sounded a lot like actual commissions formed to deal with vital questions of national security, such as the Killian Committee, which had recommended building the U-2, and the Gaither Commission, formed around the time of Sputnik. And Majic suggested the “Magic” code name of U.S. intercepts of Japanese codes. In fact, Larry Bland, editor of the George C. Marshall Papers, asserted that one of the Majestic-12 documents reproduced language from a 1944 letter Marshall had sent to presidential candidate Thomas Dewey regarding the “Magic” intercepts, with the dates and names altered and “Magic” changed to “Majic.”
If they were fake, the MJ papers were well done. Were they too good to be true? Or was someone “inside” working to get the word out? Wasn’t there too much in these documents? Reading them, one sometimes gets the sense that they’re like a subplot in a badly written film trying to fill in background for the audience. It was also hard to imagine the social dynamic in the room when Eisenhower was told of all this, the Pentagon updating the president-elect on a day when he was scheduled for less than an hour of briefings—just forty-three minutes, one researcher concluded from a study of Ike’s date book, for the entire world situation. Was he informed somewhere in those forty-three minutes that, by the way, we have found flying saucers from another system and have four alien bodies and a clandestine committee shrouded in secrecy deeper than that of the Manhattan Project?
Early in 1985, Richard Doty was transferred from Kirtland to West Germany. It was later charged that he had faked contact reports there and flunked a lie-detector test, both of which Doty denied. Then, in May 1988, he denied that he had shown Linda Howe any presidential briefing paper on Aquarius or anything else, or that he had even heard of MJ-12.
In 1989, speaking at the national MUFON convention, Moore confessed that he had been a double agent, spreading disinformation on behalf of AFOSI and spying on UFO believers in order to get closer to the truth and get behind the cover-up. Desperate not to be left out of the biggest story in history, he had collaborated.
Before long, Moore vanished from the UFO scene. Had he been telling the truth? Was this an AFOSI job? Was Moore really spreading disinformation? Or were his claims to have traded duplicity against his fellow youfers for access to hidden information themselves bogus? Was he a double agent or a triple one? Did he simply disinform Bennewitz, or did he, by himself or in collusion with Doty, fake the MJ-12 documents? Finally—given that his story seemed to reflect those of Moore and Doty—was Lazar’s story a continuation of the same scheme, by way of Lear (who had “gotten interested” in UFOs in 1986 and cited the same April 25, 1964, date for the “meeting with aliens” at Holloman)?
To some of the youfers it hardly mattered whether the MJ-12 documents were real or phony. A number of apologists for the papers worked them into the trickle-out theory—they might not be genuine but they were preparation, a means of breaking the news gradually. Without being rank disinformation, they could still be part of the Big Plan from those On the Inside, preparing us with a softer version of the truth.
Linda Howe continued to stick to her story of seeing the briefing papers, but the record was not in her favor.
Was Doty the center of the disinformation scheme that involved Moore, perhaps John Lear, and eventually Lazar? Was he a loose cannon or a nut? Were the doubts about Doty’s veracity a further muddying of the waters by the AFOSI or a recognition that he had gotten out of hand? Doty left the service and was hired as an investigator in the New Mexico Department of Public Safety. “I don’t do interviews,” he told me. “I can’t talk about it. I’m still sworn to secrecy.”
He didn’t sound like a nut; he didn’t sound like a hard-ass military type, either. He had a cowboy sort of twang and sounded quite likable. “I wouldn’t ask you to violate your oath,” I said.
I suggested that he might not have been treated fairly by the record of the whole matter.
“I don’t worry about it. People can think what they want to think. The truth is known by those that matter.”
“Did you distribute any false documents?” I asked.
He repeated that he could not talk about it.
“You feel you acted according to your duty?”
“Absolutely.”
He suggested he might be able to call me back. I was amazed when he did. “We did not fabricate any of the papers,” he declared. “I have been investigated and cleared.”
Howe had brought the alleged briefing paper with her, Doty said
. I didn’t have to take his word for it. The meeting with Howe, he revealed, had been videotaped; the footage backed him up.
He denied having created any briefing paper, or having delivered it. He did not create the MJ-12 papers, he said, nor did he know who did. AFOSI thought that the culprit was most likely some private citizen. The implication was Moore and/or Shandera. Moore, he told me, was “a low-level source” for AFOSI. The FBI and AFOSI tried to determine the authenticity of the MJ papers but could not; they ran up against classification barriers. “A lot of time and money was spent trying to determine whether they were genuine,” Doty said. “The FBI came up with fifty-fifty.” He also denied being Falcon or Condor. Falcon was another man, he said, in his eighties if still alive.
I ventured some ideas: In the past, black programs had always been covered with stories. The U-2 cover was the weather-plane story. The Stealth fighter was covered in part by the phony A-7s with bogus electronic pods. Had AFOSI ever run deception programs using UFOs as a cover or diversionary story?
“Yes,” he said, “you’re right on the money. I’ve never worked on any, but there have been some. It’s called ‘legitimate lying.’ ”
Then I learned that Doty had been born in Roswell; his father had worked on the U-2 program.
16. The Real Men in Black?
Could Doty be believed? My instincts said so, but I could hear the doubtful saying, Well, what else would you expect from a disinformation agent?
Yet who was to say that the whole MJ project had not been some larger version of the sort of cover stories used to hide black programs like that of the F-117? What Doty had said gave me a new model: Dreamland not just as a reflecting funhouse mirror but as a malignly refracting crystal. To use the language of the low-observables engineers, this was not just passive stealth, bouncing inquiries off at oblique angles, but active stealth, generating false signals, “spoofing.” For most of the Interceptors, the assumption has been that the military does not need to generate disinformation, that, as John Andrews once put it, the “natural mutations” of information would do the trick: The noise itself would be taken for signal.
