8. MAJIC
Is it possible to trace the reaction of the US Government’s military and intelligence community to these momentous events, apart from the officially released documentation? In 1984 some documents of spurious provenance were leaked to Hollywood TV producer Jaime Shandera on a roll of 35mm film. Even though these documents are fabrications, in my opinion they have yielded vitally important clues.
The documents are an alleged preliminary briefing paper prepared for President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower in November 1952 by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the former CIA director, and a September 1947 memo from President Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, supposedly authorizing ‘Operation Majestic Twelve’. Classified ‘TOP SECRET/MAJIC/EYES ONLY’, the briefing paper summarized what the Majestic-12 committee had learned about the UFO problem up to 1952, including details about the Roswell recovery.
In early 1987 I received a copy of the documents from an American source, and these were published for the first time in my book Above Top Secret later that year. Among the reasons for my conviction that the papers are bogus is the fact that the signature on the Truman memo was ‘lifted’ from a document that was known to be authentic. And General Eisenhower, as Army Chief of Staff in 1947, would almost certainly have been given the essential details about Roswell at the time. However, I believe that those who fabricated the papers had inside knowledge, since there is good evidence that a committee by that name (Majestic-12) – or similar – did exist, and the briefing paper’s list of the original committee includes many of those who it is believed were involved, as described in this chapter and earlier. They were:
— Dr Lloyd Berkner – a scientist who was executive secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board in 1946 (under Dr Vannevar Bush) and later a member of the CIA’s ‘Robertson Panel’, a scientific advisory panel on UFOs requested by the White House and sponsored by the CIA in 1953.
— Dr Detlev Bronk – an internationally known physiologist and biophysicist who was chairman of the National Research Council and member of the Medical Advisory Board of the Atomic Energy Commission.
— Dr Vannevar Bush – recognized as one of America’s leading scientists, he organized the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which led to the Manhattan Project. After the war he became head of the Joint Research and Development Board – and head of a small group investigating the ‘flying saucers’.
— James S. Forrestal – Secretary of Defense in July 1947, he set up the initial Air Force Project Saucer, which became Project Sign in September. A mental breakdown led to his resignation in March 1949, and he committed suicide at Bethesda Naval Hospital in May 1949. The ‘MJ-12 briefing paper’ names General Walter Bedell Smith, then CIA director, as his successor.
— Gordon Gray – Secretary of the Army in 1949, he was appointed special assistant to President Truman on National Security Affairs and in 1951 directed the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board. He became adviser on national security matters to President Eisenhower, and was chairman of the highly secret ‘54/12 Group’ or ‘Special Group’ (referred to in Chapter 5 in connection with Lieutenant Colonel Philip Corso).
— Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter – the first director of the CIA (1947–50), Hillenkoetter was involved in investigations into the ‘ghost rockets’ (Chapter 3) and was the first intelligence chief to make public his conviction that UFOs are real, and that ‘through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense’.
— Dr Jerome C. Hunsaker – headed the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. As noted earlier, Hunsaker pressed the Congress for huge budget increases during the flying disc/aircraft accident crisis.
— Dr Donald Menzel – Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard College (1939–71) and involved in several military projects relating to the tracking of guided missiles, Menzel is chiefly remembered for his dismissive statements and books on UFOs, all of which, he insisted, could be explained in mundane terms. Stanton Friedman, a retired nuclear physicist and leading authority on the UFO phenomenon, discovered that Menzel had been a top-class expert in code-breaking (holding a Top Secret Ultra security clearance), had a lengthy association with the National Security Agency, and had been a consultant to several presidents on national security affairs. Moreover, he was well connected with several other members of the MJ-12 group – especially Dr Bush.1
— Brigadier General Robert Montague – as an expert on anti-aircraft missiles, he was among those who investigated the first intrusions at White Sands (described earlier). He became base commander at the Atomic Energy Commission installation at Sandia Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico (July 1947 – February 1951).
— Rear Admiral Sydney Souers – first Director of Central Intelligence (January–June 1946), he became executive secretary of the National Security Council in September 1947.
— Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining – as noted earlier, Twining was commanding general of Air Materiel Command, which in 1947 confirmed the reality of the flying discs.
— General Hoyt Vandenberg – second Director of Central Intelligence (June 1946–May 1947), he had been involved in the ‘ghost rocket’ investigations and attended meetings with President Truman and others to assess the Roswell situation.
In UFO research, confusion surrounds the code names MAJESTIC, MAGIC and MAJIC. In the Second World War, ‘Operation Majestic’ had been an alternate plan for the invasion of the southernmost Japanese home island of Kyushu (averted by the atomic bomb). It was rejected in favour of ‘Olympic’, though elements of Majestic were incorporated into deception plans such as ‘Pastel’.2 In an August 1946 top-secret message – contained, coincidentally, in the War Department ‘ghost rockets’ file – the Olympic code word is referenced as having been cancelled and substituted with Majestic in August 1945. The questioner asks if restrictions still applied to Majestic.3 Both code words had been declassified by the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in October 1945, came the response.4
According to another top-secret report, however, the Majestic code name was reinstated in October 1952 as a ‘Joint Outline Emergency War Logistic Plan MAJESTIC’, drawn up by the JCS in the event of war with the Soviets.5 Currently, there is ‘Blue MAJIC’, the Air Force Space Command’s Blue Force Microsatellite Areawide Joint Information and Communication Systems.
Although code names may be cancelled and later reused, it seems improbable that Majestic – per se – would have been used in connection with a briefing paper for Eisenhower on the alien contingency, especially within two months of Plan Majestic.
The code word MAGIC was used early in the Second World War. As relations between the United States and Japan continued to deteriorate, by August 1940 American cryptographers had solved the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s top-secret codes. Magic entailed ‘the interception, decryption, and translation on a current basis of secret Japanese worldwide diplomatic messages’.6 Subsequently, Magic was replaced by the code names ‘Red’, and then ‘Purple’.
Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt cite General Exon’s reference to a group he dubbed ‘The Unholy Thirteen’ – not knowing the actual name of the group – which was established following the Roswell incident. ‘One thing that Exon made clear,’ state Randle and Schmitt, ‘was that no elected officials, outside the President, were ever included as a member of the top echelon.’7
In late 1950 the Canadian Government established its first secret committee to investigate aerial phenomena, code-named Project Magnet and headed by Wilbert Smith as engineer-in-charge. In a three-page top-secret 1950 Canadian Government memorandum, senior radio engineer Wilbert B. Smith stated as follows:
a. The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb.
b. Flying saucers exist.
c. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Doctor Vannevar Bush.
d. The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance …8
Dr Bush’s background in coordinating top-secret research projects and his concern (shared with General Groves) with the compartmentalization of classified information, would have made him the ideal choice to head a special committee following (or perhaps preceding) the Roswell incident.
Wilbert Smith had obtained his information from Dr Robert I. Sarbacher, an American scientist and consultant to the Research and Development Board. In a letter to researcher William Steinman, Sarbacher lists names of several of those involved, following the recoveries of alien craft and bodies (see p. 134). In his meeting with Sarbacher in September 1950, Wilbert Smith learned more (see following chapter) and, according to his son, eventually gained access to inspect the bodies of the deceased. I asked James Smith if he could provide me with some details. ‘Nothing further available,’ he replied. ‘He was under the Official Secrets Act and gave me no further details.’9
In a recorded conversation with nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman, Sarbacher confirmed that British-born scientist Dr Eric A. Walker had attended all the meetings dealing with the recovery of craft and bodies.10 Dr Walker was a Harvard graduate whose posts included executive secretary of the Research and Development Board, chairman of the National Science Foundation’s Committee for Engineering, chairman of the Institute for Defense Analyses and President of Pennsylvania State University. In a recorded telephone conversation in 1987 with William Steinman, Dr Walker also confirmed that he had attended meetings at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (around 1949–50) concerning the military recovery of flying saucers and bodies of occupants.
‘Did you ever hear of the MJ-12 group?’ asked Steinman.
‘Yes, I know of MJ-12. I have known of them for forty years,’ replied Walker. ‘You are delving into an area that you can do absolutely nothing about … Why don’t you just leave it alone and drop it?’11
As reported in Above Top Secret, I corresponded at some length with Admiral Stansfield Turner, Director of the CIA (DCI) from 1977 to 1981, and asked him several times if he was aware of a Majestic-12 group. This was the only question he refrained from responding to.12 However, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, Deputy Director of the CIA (DDCI) from 1981 to 1982, who had been director of Naval Intelligence as well as of the National Security Agency, indirectly acknowledged the existence of ‘MJ-12’ during a brief meeting with investigator Bob Oechsler in Maryland in May 1988, at a ground-breaking ceremony for the National Security Agency’s new supercomputer facility for the Institute for Defense Analyses, of which Inman was a former director.13
Andy Kissner believes that the acronyms MAJIC and MJ-12 could have been formed from Manhattan [Engineering District] Joint [Chiefs of Staff ] Integrated Command, [Project Y, Division Z, Group] 12.14 I asked Rebecca Ullrich, Sandia Laboratories’ historian, if any of these acronyms had surfaced in the archives. ‘We have no records pertaining to any entities called MJ-12, MAJIC-12, or MAJESTIC 12,’ she replied.15 Another possibility (suggested by Dr Robert M. Wood) is that MAJIC was formed from Military Assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Whatever its precise code name, it remains abundantly clear, despite the lack of official recognition, that a highly secret committee (perhaps one of several) was established in 1947 to deal with the greatest secret on Earth – a secret which remains classified to this day.
REFERENCES
1. Friedman, Stanton T., Top Secret/Majic, Marlowe, New York, 1996, pp. 28–33.
2. McCombs, Don and Worth, Fred. L., World War II Superfacts, Warner Books, 1983, p. 434.
3. War Department message (Top Secret) from the office of the Commander-in- Chief, Air Force, Pacific, 7 August 1946.
4. War Department message (Restricted), 8 August 1946.
5. ‘Report by the Joint Logistics Plans Committee to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Joint Logistic Plan for “Majestic” ’ (Top Secret Security Information), from the Chief of Naval Operations to various US Navy commanders-in-chief and commanders, 2 October 1952.
6. Loureiro, Pedro, ‘The Imperial Japanese Navy and Espionage: The Itaru Tachibana Case’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1989, p. 106.
7. Randle, Kevin D., and Schmitt, Donald R., UFO Crash at Roswell, Avon, New York, 1991, pp. 231–4.
8. Memorandum to the Controller of Telecommunications (Top Secret), from W.B. Smith, Senior Radio Engineer, Department of Transport, Ottawa, 21 November 1950.
9. Letter, September 2005.
10. The Wilbert Smith Archives (CD), edited by Grant Cameron. www.presidentialufo.com/smith.htm
11. Transcript of William Steinman’s telephone interview with Dr Eric Walker, 30 August 1987, published in UFOs, MJ-12 and the Government: A Report on Government Involvement in UFO Crash Retrievals, by Grant Cameron and T. Scott Crain Jr, Mutual UFO Network, PO Box 369, Morrison, CO 80465–0369, 1991, pp. 8–10.
12. Good, Timothy, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1987, p. 359.
13. Good, Timothy, Alien Liaison: The Ultimate Secret, Century, London, 1991, p. 187.
14. Kissner, J. Andrew, Peculiar Phenomenon: Early United States Efforts to Collect and Analyze Flying Discs.
15. Email, 16 September 2005.
An extract from a previously Top Secret memorandum to the Controller of Telecommunications from Wilbert Smith, Senior Radio Engineer with the Canadian Government’s Department of Transport, 21 November 1950. This information was revealed to Smith by Dr Robert I. Sarbacher, an American consultant to the Joint Research and Development Board. (Department of Transport, Canada)
A Top Secret memorandum relating to the information acquired by Wilbert Smith from Dr Sarbacher. (Department of Transport, Canada)
The first page of a letter to researcher William Steinman from Dr Robert Sarbacher confirming the recovery of alien craft and bodies. (William Steinman)