RETURN TO UFO PAGE | E-MAIL ME
HOW EASY IS IT TO FAKE A MAJESTIC DOCUMENT?
Since the Roswell "crash"
story was reintroduced in the late 70's, the tendency within the UFO community
has been to embrace the belief that the military has recovered crashed disks
and their occupants, which have been hidden away in various secret facilities
around the country for study and to secretly "reverse engineer" their
technology and integrate it into our own. Some have even gone to extremes and
insist that the government is in league with extraterrestrials in keeping the
public in the dark as to their activities and intentions, breeding an atmosphere
of suspicion and paranoia in which government conspiracy theories can thrive.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates this philosophy than do a number of allegedly
top secret letters known collectively as the Majestic 12 documents. Supposedly
a series of secret correspondence written between the White House and a select
group of senior military officers and scientists during the 1940s and 1950s,
in their entirety they are—if authentic—evidence that the government
not only was aware of extraterrestrials as far back as 1947, but has been using
the powers of the presidency to cover-up of the fact ever since. Even more,
these letters imply that the military has recovered alien hardware in its possession
and is intent on suppressing the information via a "disinformation"
campaign designed to mislead the general public as to the true extent of the
government's involvement—a revelation which would obviously have profound
political and scientific repercussions if true.
Problems with the documents soon emerged, however, and many have been subsequently
exposed as hoaxes (though that remains hotly debated even among ufologists today)
but their impact on the UFO community cannot be denied nor minimized. In fact,
it's fair to say that these papers have done more to create an atmosphere of
paranoia within ufology than any other aspect of the phenomenon. Of course,
that doesn't discount the possibility that some of these documents might be
genuine, but it does force both proponents and opponents of the authenticity
of the Majestic Documents to take a deep look in an effort to determine how
much they are letting often unsubstantiated accounts dictate their beliefs rather
than simply looking at the evidence at hand in a balanced and objective manner.
Personally, I find it difficult to imagine that any government would be incompetent
enough to leave such a paper trail in its wake—especially about something
as shattering as extra-worldly contact—or that it wouldn't have had the
means to destroy such materials if it did long ago, but that's beside the point.
What I was curious about is how difficult it would be to create an authentic
looking top secret government document that might pass muster with the UFO crowd
using only a little imagination and some basic graphics software. What follows
is the result of my labors, performed over the course of a single evening with
nothing more than a basic computer and a propensity towards mischief.
Creating a Majestic Document
The first problem one encounters,
of course, is how to make a document look like something that might have been
generated by some government bureaucrat over sixty years ago. How would it be
worded, what might it look like, what sort of terminology might have been used?
It seems like it would be necessary that I have a background in dealing with
secret documents to make this thing look authentic, but such is not really the
case. All I need to do is study examples of the existing Majestic documents
(accessible at http://www.majesticdocuments.com)
which, in already having been "authenticated" by "experts",
makes them perfect templates from which to create my phony document. That, plus
the fact that I spent eight years in the military and so have some idea of how
military lingo sounds, just might work.
The next thing I need to determine is my timeline. To keep it simple, I choose
mid August of 1947, which is about a month after the Roswell crash and recovery
and the point in time when everyone was still trying to decide what to do with
the debris. Next, I need to select my main characters. The MJ-12 document provides
a cast of potential figures—everyone from President Truman to Vannever
Bush—to choose from, or I could simply make the document addressed to no
one in particular. However, if it's too vague, that also looks suspicious, so
I'll need to pick someone conceivable but not quite as high profile as Truman
or the other figures frequently mentioned in the Roswell story such as Army
Air Corp General Nate Twining. After doing a little research, I've landed upon
Major General Laurence C. Craigie, who was at the time chief of the Research
and Engineering Division at Wright Patterson AFB. Craigie, in being the man
who would eventually authorize the implementation of Operation Sign in December
of 1947, makes him the ideal addressee: he's important enough to be credible
yet obscure enough to not be so high profile as to receive undue scrutiny. His
job at Wright Patterson at the time, along with his later involvement in the
entire UFO controversy, also makes him the perfect candidate as well, and the
fact that he's been dead since 1994 and so can never be asked about any of this
(and thus deny involvement), is a plus as well. Okay, Larry Craigie it is then.
So who will be sending the report and what does he have to say to the General?
I'll have it sent from some obscure civilian research scientist, whom I've named
as one Doctor Eliot Turner. I know I'm taking a chance by naming this guy as
the originator of the letter, but since I don't identify which facility he's
working from and because the name Turner isn't all that uncommon, I thought
it would be difficult to authenticate the existence of the man after all this
time. That should be enough to ensure the document isn't immediately debunked
because of a lack of information about the sender of the letter, as most researchers
would probably give up looking for the guy pretty quickly. (I call this the
"needle in a haystack" approach.)
So what does Doctor Turner have to say to the General? I must be careful here. It has to be credible, somewhat routine in nature, and believable, yet be extraordinary at the same time—a real "smoking gun" letter that, if true, would blow apart the whole Roswell cover-up. It also needs to be short on specifics and lacking in the sort of useful details the more hardware minded investigator might be interested in. Fortunately, since it also has to be brief, that should be no problem. Let's see....I think I'll make it have something to do with the instrumentation console on one of the crashed disks and how, due to the difficulty of determining how the technology works, it needs to be sent to another facility for further evaluation. Ten minutes later, this is what I come up with:
18 August, 1947
SUBJECT: Analysis of recovered disk control console
TO: Major General Laurence Craigie,
Chief of Research and Engineering Division
U.S. Air ForceSir:
In response to your communication of the 14th, I regret to inform you that the precise inner workings of the control console from the recovered craft at site LZ2 remains beyond our capabilities to determine at this time using the personnel and facilities currently available to us. Since CDE possesses the superior capability to allow for a more complete inspection, I respectfully request permission to have the entire console transferred as early as is feasible for more extensive analysis. I and my team have deemed it imperative that this transfer be done as quickly as possible to maintain security and to keep to the President's timetable.
Respectfully
Doctor Eliot Turner
Section 3 Analysis Coordinator
Notice that I refer to site LZ2 in my letter. This is something I picked up
from a Majestic Document called the Interpanetary Phenomenon Report—a seven
page report supposedly written by some group called the Interplanetary Phenomenon
Unit that discusses the recovery of fallen airborne objects in the New Mexico
in July of 1947. In it, they identify two potential crash sites which they refer
to as "LZ1" (the traditional Roswell crash site near Corona) and "LZ2",
a site 20 miles southwest of Socorro that, according to their report, "contained
the majority of structural detail of the craft's airframe, propulsion, and navigation
technology." Thus, by integrating details from a previously "authenticated"
Majestic Document and adding a few new details of my own, I've added an additional
(and much needed) layer of authenticity which should pass initial muster with
those already predisposed towards believing every Majestic Document to be legitimate.
Further, to provide an air of intrigue, I'm having the Doctor request permission
to send the console to someplace designated as "CDE" for further analysis—the
insinuation being that CDE is a coded designation for some unknown facility
(maybe Wright Patterson?) that possesses a more sophisticated analysis capability.
Using three-letter designations is a common method the military sometimes uses
to maintain a small degree of security when discussing travel plans or specific
military installations; obviously, unless one knows where CDE was, they wouldn't
know where the console was being sent.
Okay, so I've got a decent start. I've checked my facts and made sure the story
holds together historically, at least on a superficial level. Now I have to
set it up so that it looks like I typed it on a clunky old manual typewriter
back in 1947. Of course, I could just go out and try to purchase a typewriter
from that era (which is what I would do if I were really serious about perpetrating
a hoax) but for the sake of time and since this is only a demonstration and
not a genuine effort to fool people, I'll make do by using the courier font
on my computer. Laying the entire thing out in Illustrator CS2, fifteen minutes
late my "document" looks like this:
Not bad, but the problem is that my version is too clean looking, especially when compared to the barely legible documents in the Majestic collection (many of which are almost unreadable). As such, I need to mess it up a bit to make it appear as though it's a copy of a copy of a copy that's gone through the proverbial wringer a few times, which I do by converting the text into vectored objects and rasterizing it (turning it from vectored text to pixels). To get a more blurry effect, I convert the entire image into a bitmap, giving it the following appearance:
Better, but still too neat. I need to make it look more authentic, so I've added a black censor's block on the bottom designed to make it look as though someone is concealing information (wouldn't you love to know what's under there?) However, I need to take this further if I want to really make the page look old and weather-beaten, which I achieve by adding some handwritten notes, crude underlining, spill coffee on it—whatever.... Then, as a final step, I scan the document, further degrading it and acheiving the desired effect. This is what emerges from my frenzied efforts:
Viola! Notice how much it looks like a Majestic document. It's not perfect, but not bad for an hours work, either. But does this prove that the Majestic documents are illegitimate? Not at all, but it does demonstrate just how easy it is to come up with a reasonable facsimile of a purported top secret document using only one's imagination and some common software. Imagine what mischief I might be capable of were I to put some real time and effort into creating a fraudulent document and inflicting it upon an unsuspecting public (as I suspect a few folks have done before)? Scary to think about, isn't it?
CAVEAT EMPTOR