Allegedly created by President Truman after the 1947 Roswell incident, Majestic 12 was a secret committee of 12 officials tasked with covering up UFOs and managing alien contact.
In 1984, a plain brown envelope with no return address appeared in the mailbox of television producer Jaime Shandera. Inside was a roll of undeveloped 35mm film. When processed, the images revealed an extraordinary document.
"TOP SECRET / MAJIC EYES ONLY" -- a classification level above Top Secret. According to the document, on September 24, 1947, President Harry Truman issued a secret executive order establishing a committee of twelve scientists, military leaders, and intelligence officials. Its name: Majestic 12, or MJ-12.
Its mission: to investigate and conceal the "extraterrestrial biological entities and wreckage" recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, in July of that year.
The names listed in the document were all real and all powerful. Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA. Vannevar Bush, the architect of the Manhattan Project. Astronomer Donald Menzel. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. It read like a who's who of America's postwar establishment.
One of the alleged members, Secretary Forrestal, died in 1949 after falling from a window at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The official ruling was suicide. Conspiracy theorists claim he was eliminated for threatening to reveal the secret.
Note: MJ-12 documents have been officially determined to be forgeries. The following presents the topic as a cultural phenomenon.
When the documents surfaced publicly, they ignited fierce debate within the UFO research community. The FBI conducted its own investigation and concluded the documents were "bogus."
Critics identified numerous red flags. The formatting did not match authentic government documents of the era. The date notation style was inconsistent. Truman's signature appeared to have been copied from a separate, genuine document. Most damning of all, no independent corroborating evidence has ever been found.
The consensus among mainstream historians and UFO skeptics is clear: the MJ-12 documents are forgeries. Yet within segments of the UFO research community, a persistent argument holds that even if the documents are fake, it does not prove that an organization like MJ-12 never existed.
Since 2017, the U.S. Department of Defense has acknowledged the existence of official programs investigating UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena). This disclosure has brought the belief that the government has concealed information about UFOs closer to the mainstream than ever before. The specific narrative of MJ-12 may be debunked, but the question behind it remains very much alive: what does the government know about extraterrestrial life?
The unmarked envelope that arrived in 1984 did not change history. But the myth it spawned lives on, four decades later, as potent as ever.
