This Day in Tech – 1947: If the secret committee known as the Majestic 12 ever really existed, this is the day that the group was allegedly created by a memorandum from President Harry Truman.
If real, this shadowy coven of scientists, military brass and government officials came together in response to the Army’s recovery of an alien spacecraft that crashed on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947.
Their purpose: to investigate the circumstances surrounding the Roswell incident and to maintain vigilance against further alien incursions.
Among the names who appear as original members of MJ-12:
- Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, first director of the CIA
- James Forrestal, secretary of defense
- Dr. Vannevar Bush, who headed the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development
Confirming the existence of MJ-12 is central to the argument by UFO conspiracy theorists that the U.S. government has deliberately hidden UFO information from the public ever since Roswell.
The government, whether irritated by the crazies who won’t leave it alone or genuinely interested in keeping the presence of aliens under wraps, has consistently denied MJ-12’s existence and dismissed UFO reports as mistaken identity or hoaxes (PDF – 607.04 KB).
The military continues to maintain that the wreckage retrieved at the Roswell ranch came from a top-secret research balloon.
That explanation has never flown with UFO watchers, who have produced a mountain of evidence purporting to prove that not only does MJ-12 exist, but there’s a really big cover-up going on. (Forrestal’s untimely death in 1949, officially ruled a suicide, has helped fuel the fire.)
Sixty years on, and the argument still rages.
It’s time to cue up X-Files theme music… “we are not alone” … or are we?
Let me know your thoughts with your constructive comments below.
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I’ve simply gotten tired of the conspiracy theories floating around. Until there’s more concrete evidence surfacing that either proves or disproves the existence of , I remain neutral and focus my attention on something else.
This is a difficult topic, but I just saw Transformers yesterday so it’s somehow relevant.
I think that if a special agency was really trying to prevent alien contact or gather intelligence, they would round up all of the people who claim to have been abducted or claim to have seen a ufo. They would interview them one by one, run physical tests, the works. But with that, you get in to the mix of separating truth from imagination and exaggeration. Like I said, it’s a difficult topic, but if there is an invasion I imagine it to be like “Independence Day” or “Transformers”.
Autobots, roll out. =]
I always found it odd that the US government publicly denies the existence of ET’s and UFO’s yet there exists a law which states that it is ILLEGAL for a US citizen to come into contact with an ET or their vehicles. How odd is that? Stanton T. Friedman is an interesting fellow who sums it up nicely. “many UFOs behave in a manner that we, with our current technology, could not hope to have produced, nor are they explainable as hoax or natural phenominon. If a UFO could not have originated from anything on this planet, then the only logical conclusion is that it originated elsewhere. The only thing that is certain is that SOME UFOs may indeed be alien space craft.” He backs it up with interesting evidence.
As for the existence of MJ-12… I’m not sure it really matters in the scheme of things. The US government doesn’t think we need to know, they won’t tell us even if it where true.
Majestic 12 was infiltrated by the Illuminati (not to be confused with secret society of pornographers the Illuminaughty), but eventually split off from them, co-opting their power and after a time became the leaders in aerospace and nanotechnology. Not publicly acknowledged leaders in those fields, of course, but leaders none the less.
No, seriously. I saw it in a video game, so it’s got to be true…