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Winter 2001/2

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Issue 42

UFOs and disinformation

In Lobster 40 I wrote about a long-term operation by elements within the US military and intelligence services to disinform those interested in UFOs. More information on this has subsequently come to light.

The MAJESTIC mystery solved?

The real author of this section is Martin Cannon: I have just rewritten his e-mail to me. The background is the long-running controversy about the so-called MAJESTIC papers, documents apparently leaked to the UFO researcher William Moore in the 1980s, purporting to come from a super-secret US government committee of the 1950s which was handling the UFO issue at the time under the codename MAJESTIC.

Cannon noticed a report in the Electronic Telegraph - i.e. the London Daily Telegraph on-line version - on 15 June about the Robert Aldrich book The Hidden Hand (reviewed below). The report focused on the book's revelation of US plans in 1952 to launch a war against the Soviet Union. (At the time there was much talk in the US military about launching a strike against the Soviet regime before it acquired missiles capable of reaching the USA at which point the US would be deterred from doing so.) Cannon put this together with his discovery on a UFO Website of a copy of a 1952 Joint Chiefs of Staff document, found in the National Archives. As the plans sound very similar, came from the same source, the Joint Chiefs, and in the same year, 1952, Cannon concluded that they are the same war plan. But here's the kicker: the 1952 plan to attack the Soviet Union found in the US national archives was code-named MAJESTIC! (1)

Cannon commented:

'The website [on which he noticed the Joint Chiefs plan] is devoted, in general, to Tim Cooper's 'new' MJ12 [MAJESTIC] documents, which I believe are phonies. He's been receiving these things for the past few years. The 'old' MJ12 documents - the ones originally given to Bill Moore - are also phonies, in my opinion, though they seem to be fakes of a different sort. (2) Bob and Ryan Wood - with funding, it is said, from Internet entrepreneur Joe Firmage - have been trying to 'prove' these documents. To that end, they have been prowling around various archives, looking through real documents in order to authenticate the ones I think are fakes. (3) That's how the Woods came across, at the National Archives, the 'Report by the Joint Logistics Plans Committee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Joint Logistics Plan for "MAJESTIC"', from June 1952. Although this document refers to a project called MAJESTIC, it makes no reference to UFOs.'

Here is the description of the Joint Chiefs 1952 Majestic plan for war with the Soviet Union on the UFO site. (4)

Joint Logistic Plan for "MAJESTIC"

'Three interrelated TOP SECRET Security Information memos were found in Record Group 218 -- Joint Chiefs of Staff and titled: "Joint Logistic Plan for MAJESTIC." Declassified in May 1976, before the first Majestic or MJ-12 documents related to UFOs ever surfaced publicly, the memos are dated September and October of 1952. The documents provide for a Joint Logistic Plan for MAJESTIC. The document states: "The following plans in support of MAJESTIC are now under preparation: A psychological warfare plan, an unconventional warfare plan, cover and deception plans, a civil affairs military government plan, a command plan, a logistic plan, transportation guidance, to be included in the logistic plan, a map and chart plan and a communications plan."'

The Woods comment:

'Given the worldwide nature of UFOs and their priceless value if recovered, it is imperative that the J.C.S. would have a logistic plan to recover crashed saucers and pack them back to the U.S......This report by the Joint Logistics Plans Committee, although primarily a war plan, is clearly capable of supporting crash retrieval operations for UFOs.' (Emphasis added.)

Notice in the last sentence the use of the phrase 'is clearly capable of': even the authors can see this is a war plan and not a UFO plan.

From all this Cannon drew the following conclusions.

'Now, the idea of a war of aggression against the USSR should be big news in and of itself. But from a ufological standpoint, this 1952 document from the JCS is quite a breakthrough. When the famous ersatz MJ12 documents arrived in Bill Moore's mail in the 1980s, the cold war was still going on.

Whoever faked those documents used the cryptonym of a real secret project, a project that would have greatly embarrassed the United States if it had become known. Anyone making a Freedom of Information Act request for documents pertinent to MAJESTIC would have run into a "national security" stone wall. It might just be an extraordinary coincidence, but it seems infinitely more likely that whoever concocted the MAJESTIC myth knew of the MAJESTIC reality. In other words, the hoaxer who created the MAJESTIC 12 myth had a security clearance -- which rules out Bill Moore or any other civilian.

Further, the 1952 document effectively rules out the application of the name MAJESTIC to any UFO related project. The National Security Council would not use the same cryptonym for two different high level projects.'

Daniel Sheehan and Project Disclosure

In May a group of American former government employees, some military, called a press conference in Washington, announced that they had all seen UFOs and called for congressional hearings on the subject. Acting as counsel for the group, the Disclosure Project was Daniel Sheehan, best known for the 1986 'Affidavit of Daniel Sheehan', the most widely publicised aspect of the Christic Institute's failed attempt to get the alleged 'secret team' inside the US intelligence services into court. (5)

The first bald summary of the press conference I read, from ABC News, said that at this meeting Sheehan told reporters that during the Carter administration he 'found out about government-held UFO information that then CIA Director George Bush, father of the current president, would not release.' Sheehan said he was then led into the National Archives where he was shown photographs of captured UFOs, complete with what appeared to be alien symbols on them, but he was only allowed to take notes on a yellow legal pad. He traced the 'alien symbols' onto the cardboard back of his pad. However, in other articles and an interview with Sheehan on the Net, a more complex, interesting - and more accurate - picture emerges: he wasn't shown photographs; he was put in a room with boxes of documents, films and photographs; and he didn't take notes: he was forbidden to take notes.

The first section which follows has been extracted and partially paraphrased from 'Untold history - The Jimmy Carter UFO agenda'. (6)

In January 1977, Daniel Sheehan then General Counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was approached by Marcia S. Smith, Director of the Science and Technology Division of the Congressional Research Service. Sheehan was asked by Smith 'to participate in a highly classified major evaluation of the UFO phenomena, and extra-terrestrial intelligence'. Sheehan recalled the encounter with Smith:

'She [Marcia Smith] informed me that she had been contacted by the Chairman of the Science & Technology Committee of the House of Representatives, (Congressman Olin Earl Teague) who in turn had received a directive from the President of the United States, informing the Committee that he (President Jimmy Carter) in fact had personally seen a UFO while he was in Georgia.'

Carter had indeed seen a UFO and, while Governor of Georgia, had submitted the standard sightings form of one of the big UFO organisations, describing the event. Upon becoming President, Carter had gone to George Bush who was DCIA and said he wanted to know about UFOs. According to Marcia Smith, Bush told Carter that '....this was information that existed on a need to know basis only. Simple curiosity on the part of the President wasn't adequate.'

The President didn't need to know!

Bush told Carter that if he wanted information on the subject he should go to the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Representatives, and have them ask the Congressional Research Service to issue a request to have certain documents declassified so that this process could go on. Rather than having a major confrontation with the DCIA in his first months as President, Carter settled for Bush's suggested procedure and the Library of Congress Research Service undertook two investigations: to determine whether extra terrestrial intelligence existed in our galaxy; and what the relationship of this UFO phenomenon might be to it.

In an interview (7) on 14 July 2001, Sheehan said that he had been introduced to Marcia Smith by a mutual acquaintance. Smith asked him in his role as General Counsel to the United States Jesuit Headquarters, if he could get access to the section of the Vatican library in Rome that would contain information about UFOs. Sheehan asked and the request was denied; and turned down again even when he explained to them that he was asking on behalf of the US Congressional Research staff, and they were responding to a request for information from the President.

Smith then told him that people in the Jack Parsons Laboratory (JPL), in the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) programme wanted him to talk to them about the potential religious implications of contact with extraterrestrial civilisations. Sheehan replied that he would do so but that would like to see some of the data Smith had acquired in the course of her investigation for the Science and Technology Committee in Congress - specifically the classified sections of the USAF study of UFOs, Project Blue Book. And this was duly arranged!

Sheehan went into a room in the National Archives but was told he could look but not take notes.

'There were a bunch of documents there. There was actually a film machine. It was like a little reel-to-reel-kind of a film machine there. I don't know if it was 35mm, or whatever those things were. So there was actually some little films there. I looked at some of the films and they were like the classic films that you have seen, sort of far distant shots of strange moving vehicles. So I decided I wasn't making much headway on this, so I began to look into these little boxes, that had these canisters there...... I had gone through several, or at least a few of these boxes, when I hit upon this one canister that had film and pictures. I started going through, turning the little crank and there it was...... There were these photographs of unmistakable - of a UFO sitting on the ground. It had crashed, apparently. It had hit into this field and had dug up, kind of plowed this kind of trough through this field. It was wedged into the side of this bank. There was snow all around the picture. The vehicle was wedged into the side of this mud-like embankment kind of up at an angle. There were Air Force personnel. As I cranked the little handle, and looked at additional photos, these Air Force people were taking pictures. In the photograph they were taking photographs of this vehicle. One of the photos actually had the Air Force personnel with this big long tape measure measuring this thing. You could see that they had these parkas on, with little fur around their hoods. You could see that they had the little name tags on their jacket. They were clearly U.S. Air Force personnel. I was kind of in this strange state saying, "Here it is!" So I turned the crank for more pictures, and I could see on the side of this craft these like little insignias - little symbols. So I turned ahead a couple of pictures to see if there was a closer picture. Sure enough there was. One of the photos had kind of a close-up picture of these symbols. So what I did is, I was getting nervous. I looked around, and the guys [security personnel] weren't watching or anything. They were outside of the room, so I took the yellow legal pad, and I flipped it open to the little grey cardboard backing and I flipped it under the screen. I shrank the size of the picture to the exact same size as the back of the yellow pad, and traced the actual symbols out in detail, verbatim of what was there...... Once I had actually seen these pictures, and actually chosen to copy down and trace these symbols from this craft, I just decided that I should get out of there. So I got up, closed the little pad, and I put the film back in the canister. I put all the boxes back where they were, and put the yellow pad under my arm, and just walked out. As I came through the door, I went over to get my briefcase up, and the man at the little desk that was sitting there pointed to the yellow pad under my arm, and he said, "What's that that you've got there?" I said, "That's the yellow pad that I had with me." He said, "Let me see that." He reached out and I handed it to him. He flipped through the yellow pages, and never looked at the back, never looked at the inside cardboard backing, and handed it back to me. So, I just put it under my arm, got my briefcase and walked out of there.'

Huh?

As presented by Sheehan, this episode is utterly baffling. A request from the Congressional Research Service gives Sheehan access to this most closely guarded secret? Does the Congressional Research Service have that kind of clout? If it does, I have seen nothing else suggesting so and have never heard of it being used to obtain access to other classified material. Who decided to declassify the material? Sheehan is allowed to wander in, unsupervised? And isn't searched on his way in or out? None of this makes any sense as it stands. Was the material that Sheehan saw genuine? (How would he - or we - be able to tell?) At this stage it seems much more likely to me that Sheehan was given access to disinformation; the 'look but don't take notes' instruction is standard psy-ops, the same technique used much later with the film-maker Linda Howe, discussed in Lobster 40; and the lax security suggests to me that he was being invited to take some of the material. If this is the case, it suggests either that the disinformation operation which apparently began with Paul Bennewitz in 1980, discussed in Lobster 40, and moved on to to Bill Moore and the MAJESTIC documents, has its origins further back than we had previously known; or that a similar operation had been devised earlier. (The former is much more likely.)

And for reasons best known to himself, Sheehan has yet to show the world his drawings of the 'alien' symbols.

Notes

1 The Joint Chiefs plan document is at http://www.majesticdocuments.com/documents/archives/nationalarchives.html Such plans continued to be drawn up throughout the 1950s. Operation:World War III, edited by Anthony Cave Brown (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1978) is about another such plan, Operation Dropshot, from 1957.

2 And much better fakes in my opinion - ed.

3 You can get an overview of their efforts at www.majesticdocuments.com

4 http://www.majesticdocuments.comdocuments/archivesnational archives.html Scroll down to the bottom of the file.

5 Sheehan's thesis was discussed in Lobster 15.

6 At http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Skyopen/message/6618

7 At http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/updates/2001/jul/m16-015.shtml

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