A purported secret committee named in documents that reached the Los Angeles television producer Jaime Shandera as a roll of undeveloped 35mm film, postmarked New Mexico, on 11 December 1984. The central item is a November 1952 briefing prepared for President-elect Eisenhower, listing twelve members and referring to recovered craft. Shandera, William Moore and Stanton Friedman held the material for two and a half years; Timothy Good printed it in Above Top Secret in 1987 ahead of the release they had agreed, and Moore went public on 29 May 1987. The Air Force Office of Special Investigations advised the FBI in November 1988 that the document was fabricated, and the Bureau’s file concluded it was completely bogus. Friedman defended its authenticity for the rest of his life. It is now generally read either as a forgery or as a counterintelligence exercise, and it remains the template for almost every later leaked-committee claim.
The material nonetheless remains in circulation, and reaches new readers through secondary sources, including the anonymous correspondence quoted in Heather Lynn’s The Anunnaki Connection. In 1997 Philip J. Corso reproduced the same twelve names in chapter 4 of The Day After Roswell, dated to 26 September 1947 and named as Majestic-12, without citing a source or mentioning the papers. The presence of Donald Menzel on the list is the point most argued over.
Connections
Timothy Good · FBI · Crash Retrieval Program · Legacy Program · Heather Lynn · Philip J. Corso · The Day After Roswell · Donald Menzel