Dr. Vannevar Bush: identified by Walter Smith as leading US enquiries into the flying disk phenomenon and Joint Research and Development Board Chairman.

James Forrestal: Secretary of Defense who met with Byrd on his return from Operation Highjump, and who was later to commit suicide.

Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter: Third Director of the CIA which was established the same month as Majestic-12 (MJ-12).

General Nathan Twinning: Twinning had already put in writing in 1947 that in his opinion "the phenomenon reported is something real."

Interestingly, on 8^th July 1947, the day of the first press release announcing the recovery of a crashed disk at Roswell, Twinning cancelled a planned trip to the west coast citing a "very important and sudden matter." Researcher William Moore established that Twinning spent the next few days in New Mexico (1).

General Hoyt Vandenberg: The second director of the CIA who had ordered a report by the Air Technical Intelligence Centre that concluded UFOs were interplanetary in origin be destroyed.

Dr Jerome Hunsaker:

An aircraft designer He headed the Departments of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was also Chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Dr Donald Menzel:

Director of the Harvard College Observatory who had a long association with the National Security Agency and who was a Naval Intelligence cryptography expert. Menzel had been a consultant to several US Presidents on national security affairs (2).

                  General Robert Montague:

Base commander at the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Sandia Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico between July 1947 to February 1951. Montague had also been General Twinning’s classmate at West Point, and Commandant of Fort Bliss with Operational Control over the  command at White Sands. There he was head of the Special Weapons Project. (It is interesting to note that on 27^th July 1948 at 8:35am a UFO was seen by a scientist whilst driving through the streets of Albuquerque. He reported seeing for ten minutes a flat, circular object that seemed to be a metallic disk motionless in the sky. The witness, in addition to his scientific training, also had more than two thousand hours of flight as a navy pilot under his belt and was familiar with standard aircraft (3).

Rear Admiral Sidney Souers:

The first Director of Central Intelligence (January-June 1946) who in September 1947 became Executive Secretary of the National Security Council. Souers resigned from the group in 1959 however was retained as a special consultant to the Executive on security matters.

Gordon Gray:

Assistant Secretary of the Army at the time MJ-12 was allegedly established and chairman of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board. Later specialising in security matters, he became chairman of a highly secret ‘54/12 Group’ or ‘Special Group’ formed during the early days of the Eisenhower administration (4).

Dr Lloyd Berkner:

A geophysicist who was the Executive Secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board in 1946 under Vannevar Bush. He was later to become a member of the Robertson Panel and headed a special committee to direct a study that led to the establishment of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group.

Dr Detlev Bronk:

A physiologist and biophysicist, Bronk was head of the National Academy of Science and Chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Together with Edward Condon, Bronk became a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Understandably the MJ-12 documents were subjected to intense scrutiny both by those who believed them to be authentic, and by others who were more sceptical. And as this scrutiny gathered pace, doubts about the documents’ veracity began to emerge.

The first and most significant clue that they could be forgeries lay in the signature of President Truman. No two signatures are ever exactly the same, and yet the signature on the MJ-12 Document (top right) is almost identical to the one on an authenticated memo dated 1^st October 1947 (bottom right).

Joe Nickell, a document analyst and writer for Skeptical Enquirer magazine is convinced the documents are faked, not only citing the signature, but also the date formats, the typefaces, the style of language used – all of which he claims differ from authenticated documents. Others disagree. Stanton Friedman who has spent over ten years researching the documents dismisses those who cry ‘fake’, "I have yet to hear a convincing argument against MJ-12," he retorts.

Friedman’s views are supported by others. Dr. Roger Wescott, a linguistics expert from Drew University in New Jersey, reviewed more than twenty genuine documents written by Hillenkoetter from the Truman library. He compared them with the MJ-12 paper purportedly written by Hillenkoetter and after this analysis stated: "In my opinion, there is no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or not to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter. This statement holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum of 18 November 1952, as well as for the letters both personal and official." (5)

In all likelihood the documents are clever forgeries of original documents, but that the group existed (regardless of its name) appears to be beyond doubt. It also seems probable, for if there really was a crashed flying disk with alien occupants, it would be reasonable to assume that a top secret and senior group of officials would be convened to address the ensuing issues.

Many years later it appears that this position changed. In the ‘Introductory Space Science’ course of the United States Air Force Academy, Volume II, Chapter 33 (page 462) it states that among the possible reasons why the aliens have not attempted to contact us officially is that "3) … such contact may already have taken place." On pages 461-2, four groups of alien are mentioned. The last one "a rare group reported to us as about four feet tall, weight of around 35 pounds, and covered with thick hair or fur (clothing?). Members of this group are described as being extremely strong." (7)

There are other sources confirming such incidents have taken place. Wilbert Smith (left), a former senior radio engineer who worked on secret defence projects for the Canadian Government’s Department of Transport. He held a master’s degree in electrical engineering and several patents.

On 21^st November 1950 Smith wrote a memo to the Controller of Communications in the Canadian Government (Appendix 1) and recommended that a research project be set up to study the subject of UFOs.

In the memo he claimed "I have made discreet enquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in Washington who were able to obtain for me the following information.

The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.

Flying saucers exist.

Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.

The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance."

Smith’s recommendation was accepted and on 2^nd December 1950 Project Magnet was established under Commander C.P. Edwards, then Deputy Minister of Transport for Air Services (8).

The information supplied to Smith is now known to have come from Dr. Robert Sarbacher, at that time a consultant to the Research and Development Board and President and Chairman of the Board of the Washington Institute of Technology.

Smith, who later suffered from stomach cancer, made sure that his files were hidden from the US government after his death, however when they were uncovered a hand-written note that detailed a conversation between Smith and Sarbacher was found dated 15^th September 1950:

Smith: … I have read Scully’s book on the saucers and would like to know how much of it is true. [Scully authored a book entitled ‘Behind the Flying Saucers’ (right) which was published in 1950 and first drew attention to stories of recovered crashed UFOs and aliens.