NATIONAL ARCHIVES Washington, DC 20408
Date: July 22, 1987
Reply to attn of: Military Reference Branch
Subject: Reference Report on MJ-12
To:
The Record The National Archives has received many requests for
documentation and information about "Project MJ-12". Many of
the inquiries concern a memorandum from Robert Cutler to General
Nathan Twining, dated July 14, 1954. This particular document
poses problems for the following reasons:
1. The document was
located in Record Group 341, entry 267. The series is filed by a
Top Secret register number. This document does not bear
such a number.
2. The document is in the folder T4-1846. There are no other
documents in the folder regarding "NSC/MJ-12".
3. The Military Reference Branch (Edward Reese) has conducted a
search in the records of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Headquarters US Air Force, and in other related
files. No further information has been found on this subject.
4. Inquiries to the US Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and
the National Security Council failed to produce further
information.
5. The Acting Director of the Freedom of Information
Office of the National Security Council informed us that "Top
Secret Restricted Information" is a marking which did not
come into use at the National Security Council until the
Nixon Administration. The Eisenhower Presidential
Library also confirms that this particular marking was not used
during the Eisenhower Administration.
6. The document in question does not bear an official government
letterhead or watermark. The NARA conservation specialist
(Mary Ritzenthaler) examined the paper and determined it
was a ribbon copy prepared on "dictation onionskin". The
Eisenhower Library has examined its collection of the Cutler
papers. All documents created by Mr. Cutler while he
served on the NSC staff have an eagle watermark in the
onionskin carbon paper. Most documents sent out by the NSC were
prepared on White House letterhead paper. For the brief period
when Mr. Cutler left the NSC, his carbon copies were prepared on
"prestige onionskin".
7. The Judicial, Fiscal, and Social Branch searched the Official
Meeting Minute Files of the National Security Council and
found no record of a NSC meeting on July 16, 1954. A search of
all NSC Meeting Minutes for July 1954 found no mention of
MJ-12 nor Majestic.
8. The Judicial, Fiscal and Social Branch (Mary Ronan)
searched the indices [sic] of the NSC records and found no
listing for: MJ-12, Majestic, unidentified flying objects, UFO,
flying saucers, or flying discs.
9. The Judicial, Fiscal, and Social Branch (Mary Ronan)
found a memo in a folder titled "Special Meeting July 16, 1954"
which indicated that NSC members would be called to a civil
defence exercise on July 16, 1954.
10. The Eisenhower Library states, in a letter to NNMR,
dated July 16, 1987:
"President
Eisenhower's Appointment Books contain no entry for a
special meeting on July 16, 1954 which might have included a
briefing on MJ-12. Even when the President had `off
the record' meetings, the Appointment Books contain entries
indicating the time of the meeting and the participants....
The Declassification Office of the National Security Council
has informed us that it has no record of any
declassification action having been taken on this memorandum
or any other documents on this alleged project.... Robert
Cutler, at the direction of President Eisenhower,
was visiting overseas military installations on the day he
supposedly issued this memorandum -- July 14, 1954. The
Administration Series in Eisenhower's Papers as President
contains Cutler's memorandum and report to the President
upon his return from the trip. The memorandum is dated July
20, 1954 and refers to Cutler's visits to installations in
Europe and North Africa between July 3 and 15. Also, within
the NSC Staff Papers is a memorandum dated July 3,
1954, from Cutler to his two subordinates, James
S. Lay and J. Patrick Coyne, explaining how they
should handle NSC administrative matters during his absence;
one would assume that if the memorandum, to Twining were
genuine, Lay or Coyne would have signed
it."
JO ANNE WILLIAMSON
Chief, Military
Reference Branch Military Archives Division
EDITOR's THOUGHTS
So, you may judge for yourself but I feel that Jo Anne Williamson
is presenting a strong case. I myself is far from certain one way or
the other, but let's assume someone did fake this memo. This would
bring forth some interesting questions. When the documents were
first found, Stanton Friedman is said to have claimed that it
was impossible for the documents to have been forged since they were
found "in a classified box in a classified vault". This is of course
true, should the forger not have a high enough security clearance to
have access to this vault. This means that if the memo is a
forgery, the forger is almost certainly working for the
government in one way or the other. Why would the U.S. government
put any effort in making a forgery of something so useless, one has
to ask. To find the answer, one must determine the use one could
have of this document.
The reason the finding
of this memo was blown up into such a "big deal" is that it in some
way verified what was found in the original
Majestic 12 Briefing Documents.
So, the one reason to make this forgery would be to verify what was
said in the Majestic 12 documents, probably meaning that
these documents are fake as well... One question remains unanswered
however, and actually points in favour of the memo being real
(or so I feel). If the government is behind a forgery, why is it so
crappy? Why did they use security labels that weren't used at that
time? Why not put a signature on the document and selecting a date
for its creation during which Cutler was in the U.S.? One can
say many things about the American government but one thing they
aren't is sloppy. So who, if anyone, faked the Cutler - Twining
memo? Was it perhaps someone within the government working on
his own in an attempt to strengthen the UFO Researcher's case (and
not, as would be the case should hard evidence of a hoax turn up,
undermine and discredit it), or was it the government trying to
discredit the same? Maybe it isn't a fake?
Maybe the Cutler -
Twining memo was a mistake on behalf of the government. It is
said that
Majestic 12 is a totally secluded
fragment of U.S. Intelligence, they themselves being responsible for
safekeeping of their own documents, and censoring documents
concerning them that originates from Intelligence Agencies other
than themselves. Maybe this memo was lost in the machinery (either
by accident or because of someone interested in bringing forth the
truth (remember, Moore got an anonymous tip to search the
N.L.) and was never supposed to surface in such a place as the
National Library in the first place, thus explaining the lack
of Top-Secret Registry Number and the lack of other documents
concerning MJ-12 in the same folder. The fact that the search
for more documents concerning MJ-12 failed to produce any results is
hardly surprising if Majestic itself is responsible for handling of
these papers.
The security labelling
can be explained with the matters nuclear nature (the AEC
started using the security level in question the same year the memo
was written). The perhaps strongest indication that we are dealing
with a hoax however, is the fact that President Eisenhower's
Appointment Books contain no entry for such a meeting, but maybe
this matter was considered so secret that it didn't even make its
way in there. Who knows?
Daniel Kling
15 May 1999, Västerås,
Sweden
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