- Book Topic – MJ-12 Explained – The Effervescent ’80s
- Draft text is included below.
- Book Topic – Setting the Stage – UFOs in the 1970s – The Condon Report Aftermath.
- Research has been completed and draft text is being composed.
- General Reading
- Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA, by MIles Copeland. (1974). To p. 293 of 379.
- “C” – The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, by Anthony Cave Brown. To p. 331 of 830.
- Continuing to review and index the Barry Greenwood MJ-12 file. Viewing the second installment of document images.
The Effervescent 1980’s
The decade of the ’80s in the UFO scene was effervescent. UFO research activity bubbled with events, trends, ideas, revelations and controversies.
By the time that William Moore and Timothy Good released the initial set of MJ-12 documents in May of 1987, the UFO community experienced over a decade of furious research, investigation, rumor and speculation about United States Government contact with extraterrestrials.
It all began in the 1970s.
Persons from the Nixon administration approached Robert Emenegger and his partner Alan Sandler to create a UFO documentary. They promised Emenegger and company a film of a 1960s alien landing at Holloman Air Force Base. Emmeneger and Sandler went on to produce the classic documentary UFOs: Past, Present, and Future in 1974 without the landing footage. Since the film was not available, an artist’s representation of the event was created for the program. An updated version of the documentary was released in 1979 as UFOs: It Has Begun. The Air Force never came through with the film, and it set a pattern for the future.
Once Emenegger’s story circulated within the UFO public, it engendered the first suspicions of United States government contact with extraterrestrials. (1)
Long-time UFO advocate Leonard Stringfield made his case that the U.S. government recovered alien craft at the 1978 MUFON symposium in Dayton, Ohio. His paper “Retrievals of the Third Kind” became one of the first in what would become a series of crash retrieval claims in the UFO sphere. It was a big deal: prior to his presentation he received death threats and had to change his hotel location. Stringfield believed the CIA considered his talk was a test of public reaction. His presentation created a sensation and stimulated a vigorous effort by UFO investigators to discover more knowledge about flying saucer recoveries. (2)
Stanton Friedman contacted retired Major Jesse Marcel in January 1978 and it led to a breakthrough in UFO crash recovery research. Marcel claimed to have seen and handled what he believed were off-world materials near Roswell New Mexico in 1947. Friedman joined forces with William Moore and the two investigated over ninety leads into what has become known as the Roswell Incident. That led to the publication of The Roswell Incident in 1980, and the book inspired many researchers to follow up and track down more witnesses. As we will see, The Roswell Incident led to Moore’s own participation with shadowy government insiders. (3)
In December, 1980 Betty Cash and Vicki Landrum were driving in Texas east of Houston with Vicki’s son Colby when they came across a bright object that traveled at a very low altitude. They stopped the car and Cash got out to watch. It was a diamond shaped craft belching flames within 200 feet of where they were. All three felt heat, and the car became too hot to touch on the outside. The aerial vehicle ascended and several helicopters appeared in the area. Driving on, the passengers continued seeing the craft in the distance with at least 23 helicopters nearby. Betty felt sick afterwards, as did Vicky and Colby. Their symptoms approximated sunburn and radiation sickness. MUFON’s John Schuessler, Allan Hendry from the Fund for UFO Research and Lt. Col. George Sarran of the U.S. Army Inspector General investigated the incident. No government agency would admit employing the alleged helicopters. (4)
When The Roswell Incident was published, William Moore was approached by AFOSI Special Agent Richard Doty who was serving at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Moore agreed to work as a confidential informant with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations there. The arrangement was as follows: Moore would provide information regarding activities in the UFO community and in turn would receive government documents related to Unidentified Flying Objects. Doty acted as an intermediary between Moore and the mysterious “Falcon”, an alleged CIA insider brought out of retirement to run the “operation.” Falcon warned Moore that the material would be partly true and partly false. Moore proceeded to investigate and research the data he was acquiring. Meanwhile, he aggressively developed sources in the military and intelligence agencies who had either direct or indirect dealings with UFO issues in their careers. They became known as “The Aviary”. (5)
As Moore pursued his own investigations, Richard Doty conducted other activities, presumably under orders. For example, television producer Linda Moulton Howe met Mr. Doty on Kirtland in 1983. Doty showed her the “Aquarius Document” (the “Carter Briefing Document”) which described how the United States Government had a long history of encounters with UFOs and their occupants. It mentioned MJ-12. Howe was astounded by the information and began telling her contacts in the UFO crowd about it. (6) (Moore also viewed the document under cloak and dagger circumstances at a different time and location.)
AFOSI was engaged in some kind of counterintelligence effort, possibly in conjunction with the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Richard Doty was also involved in the so-called Bennewitz case, in which Paul Bennewitz, a local scientist and businessman, photographed, filmed and electronically recorded activity on the Kirtland base. Doty requested that Moore provide a copy of the “Aquarius Telex” to Paul. Bennewitz became convinced that UFOs were active on Kirtland, and eventually disseminated a paper named “Project Beta” which became a source of additional rumors and speculation in UFO circles. (7)
Barry Greenwood and Lawrence Fawcett published Clear Intent in 1984. A landmark work, it described a number of UFO related events obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. Attorney Peter Gersten accomplished the FOIA work and organized Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) in order to continue the effort. Clear Intent furthered the notion in the UFO public that the U.S. government engaged in UFO secrecy. (8) Barry Greenwood went on to publish the newsletter Just Cause.
The cattle mutilations issue gained public awareness in the 1970s. By the ’80s it grew into a significant UFO concern. Linda Howe, mentioned above, pursued a number of mysterious animal cases in which the perpetrators removed body parts but left few blood traces. She believed the mutilations were coming from space aliens, and published the results of her animal investigations in A Strange Harvest in 1989. (9)
Howe had a contract with Home Box Office to create a UFO documentary in the early 1980s. Doty and other AFOSI personnel promised Howe some explosive alien material, but it was never delivered. (That echoed the Emenegger incident.) The Kirtland AFOSI office led Howe on to the point she lost the HBO contract.
Moore developed his “inside” contacts tirelessly, and tales about his efforts circulated in the flying saucer groups. The buzz about documents and covert government programs took off. Many of the people mentioned in these paragraphs contributed to the expanding controversies, namely Moore, Friedman, Doty, Howe, Bennewitz, Gersten, and Stringfield to name a few. The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization(APRO) printed articles and sponsored conference presentations on these topics as well.
So, we see that the UFO world in those years was rife with potentials and risks: new research avenues, “leaks” from government insiders, notions of government conspiracies, cover-ups and “disinformation”.
Jealousies and rivalries arose in the crush of incoming data. Some participants felt they were left out of the “inside” information, while others’ felt superior, believing they were “in-the-know”. By the end of the decade it all evolved into a tangled miasma of accusations and counter-claims. (10)
John Lear and William Cooper were a pair of UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy rumor mongers. In 1987, Lear published his “hypothesis” – a slurry of rumors about underground bases, evil aliens and US government covert participation. Cooper claimed to have seen classified documents while in the Navy that named the UFO control group “Majority” instead of “Majestic”. His own version covered a generous dose of World Government and federal gun confiscation conspiracies. Lear and Cooper worked practically as a team for a while. When John Lear discovered that Cooper made up the alien name “Krill” on the fly, their partnership frayed. (11)
UFO Cover-Up? Live! aired on television in the fall of 1988. It was a bombshell. The program included persons already mentioned: Robert Ememegger, William Moore, Jamie Shandera (and by implication) Richard Doty, among others. The most electrifying segments of the show introduced “Falcon” and “Condor”, alleged government insiders who revealed their knowledge in regard to the United States involvement in the UFO problem. Falcon and Condor presented details including the recovery of a saucer, relationships with aliens, and graphics of alien anatomy. The production stunned believers and incited a furor among critics. (12)
Moore decided to “come clean” in a presentation at the MUFON symposium in Las Vegas in July 1989. He gave a lengthy talk to set the record straight on his cooperation with AFOSI, his relationships with Richard Doty and the Paul Bennewitz affair. It was part disclosure, part sermon, with a lot of opinion and mea culpa. That his address caused a ruckus is an understatement. Some people in the audience shouted insults at Moore, others walked out. Bill Moore himself left the stage through a back door without answering questions or interacting with the conference goers. (13)
As if all this wasn’t enough, Las Vegas TV investigative journalist George Knapp introduced Bob Lazar (“Dennis”) in shadow in 1989. Lazar claimed he briefly worked in a UFO back engineering program at “Area 51”. Dennis/Lazar described his work location at what he termed “S-4” at Papoose Lake, how the facility was inside a mountain with bay doors that were expertly camouflaged on the outside. Lazar claimed he read documents that summarized the U.S. government’s involvement with alien craft, and that he viewed several saucers stored there. (14)
All these events don’t even include a recounting of the receipt of the MJ-12 documents by Jaime Shandera and William Moore in December 1984, or the “discovery” of the Cutler Twining Memo in 1985 and the release of those items in the spring of 1987. We will address those issues in another section.
Endnotes
(1) Clark, J. (2018). The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon From the Beginning. “Dark Side”. p. 357 (3rd ed., Vol. 1: A -M). Omnigraphics. Detroit, MI.
(2) Stringfield, L. (1980). “Case A-6”. The UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome – Status Report II: New Sources, New Data. Mutual UFO Network, Cincinnati, OH.; Stringfield, L. (1978). “Retrievals of the Third Kind”. 1978 MUFON UFO Symposium Proceedings – Dayton, Ohio – July 29 & 30, 1978. Mutual UFO Network, Cincinnati, OH.
(3) Friedman, S. and Berliner, D. Crash At Corona. (1992).”Chapter 2 – The Search for Evidence Begins”. Paragon House. New York, NY.; Berlitz, C. and Moore, W. (1980). The Roswell Incident. Grosset & Dunlap. New York, NY.
(4) Clark, Vol. 1, pp. 226-228. See also Schuessler, J. (1998). The Cash–Landrum UFO Incident. Geo Graphics Printing Co. La Porte, TX.
(5) Moore, W. (1990) The MJ-12 Documents, An Analytical Report. Burbank, CA. The Fair Witness Project.
(6) A signed, notarized letter to researcher Barry Greenwood from Linda Howe dated April 26, 1988 attesting that Doty showed her a document titled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America” exists in imaged form, courtesy Barry Greenwoods’s “MJ-12 File”. The imaged file is curated at The National UFO Historical Records Center (NUFOHRC) in Albuquerque, NM. https://nufohrc.org
(7) For a general outline of the Bennewitz affair, see Bishop,G. (2005). Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. Paraview Pocket Books. New York, NY. Tom Whitmore has reason to believe there is much more to the Bennewitz story, much of it classified in OSI (and possibly) DIA files.
(8) Greenwood, B. and Fawcett, L. (1984), Clear Intent – The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience. Prentice-Hall Inc. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
(9) Howe, L. (1989). An Alien Harvest. Linda Moulton Howe Productions. Littleton, CO. Howe became convinced that many animal mutilations were the work of aliens in UFOs. The book includes UFO related stories, testimonies and claims as well.
(10) Complete text of William L. Moore’s MUFON Symposium Speech, Delivered at the Aladdin Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. July 1989. FOCUS. “UFOs and the U.S. Government: Part I” (1989). William L. Moore. WLM & FWP, Inc.
(11) Jacobson, M. (2018). Pale Horse Rider – William Cooper, The Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America. Chapter 7. Blue Rider Press. New York, NY. See also Lear’s “The UFO Cover-Up” at http://whale.to/b/lear2.html
(12) The program can be viewed in full on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CzZyrGolAg
(13) See Moore above (endnote 10).
(14) Bob Lazar as “Dennis”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP916VVnXug
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