The Majestic 12 Conspiracy Theory

This program reviews the research of the more credible skeptics of the US Government's report on the incident at Roswell New Mexico in 1947 where many people believe an alien spacecraft was destroyed in a crash. The focus is on the Majestic 12 committee.

Majestic 12 (or MJ-12) is alleged to have been the code name of a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman. The purpose of the committee was stated in the Wilbert Smith memo (see below) to have been to investigate the slew of reports of "flying saucer" sightings that were then being received by U.S. military intelligence and in particular to look into the possible physics and technology of propulsion of the aerial objects that were being reported. The formation of the committee is, because of the timing, widely believed to have been precipitated by the recovery of a UFO north of Roswell, New Mexico during July 1947.





Another government group recently associated with MJ-12 was the CIA's Office of National Estimates or ONE, a forerunner of the current National Intelligence Council (NIC).[citation needed] ONE was created in 1950 by CIA director Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, alleged to have replaced Secretary of Defense James Forrestal on MJ-12 after his death. A history of the NIC states that ONE was a type of super branch of the CIA "whose sole task was to produce coordinated 'National Intelligence Estimates.'" Besides Smith, it apparently consisted of 11 other members. A recent article on the history of the CIA's involvement in UFO investigations states that ONE received a UFO intelligence briefing on January 30, 1953, immediately after the end of the CIA's UFO debunking study known as the Robertson Panel. Members of ONE at that time included FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, William Bundy, President Eisenhower's chief of staff Admiral B. Bieri, and William Langer, a Harvard historian, who was chairman. Referring to ONE as "super think tank" within the CIA, the article states, "ONE is as close as we get to a documented version of the rumoured Majestic-12 group.