More Revelations
A popular 1997 book, Philip Corso and William J. Birnes’s The Day After Roswell, explicitly ties MJ-12 to government-sanctioned study of other planets and extraterrestrials. Among proponents of the ET/MJ-12 relationship, Corso (who died in 1998) had particular credibility, as he was a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who had worked in counterintelligence during World War II and the Korean War. Corso, who made special efforts throughout his career to look after the interests of American POWs and displaced Jews, claimed to have had a key role in the disposition of physical evidence left by the Roswell crash.
He also claimed to have had telepathic contact with an extraterrestrial outside the White Sands missile base.
On July 7, just three days after ranch foreman Mac Brazel returned for a closer look at what was later determined to be “Roswell debris,” and just one day before the crash was reported by the Roswell Daily Record, military officials (according to the MJ-12 papers) began to gather crash wreckage—and four small, decomposed bodies. MJ-12 documents reveal that group member Detlev Bronk examined the four corpses. His conclusion was that they were not Homo sapiens, but the result of some other evolutionary path. Bronk called them “extraterrestrial biological entities”—EBEs.
Two other members of MJ-12, General Twining and Dr. Bush, examined the wreckage. Although the impact of the crash apparently pulverized the craft’s propulsion system, both men were satisfied that the system was not in keeping with present-day Earth technology. In 1947, practical flying saucers from human sources were possible only theoretically; issues of lift and airborne propulsion blocked anything beyond small-sized prototypes. (For more on earthly experiments with flying saucers, see chapter three.) The MJ-12 documents reveal that after Twining and Bush’s report, some (unnamed) members of the group expressed the opinion that the Roswell ship originated on Mars. (Some witnesses claimed that peculiar-looking inscribed characters ringed the perimeter of the Roswell saucer. The Air Forces’ official counter was that their weather balloon had been covered with decorative Scotch tape.) But Twining and Bush surmised that the captured saucer was a short-range reconnaissance craft, an opinion that must surely have invited this question: Where is the mother ship, or other base?
Regardless of his thoughts about the craft’s range, Twining felt that the saucer had originated from outside our solar system.
Because Twining and Bush examined wreckage, neither saw the saucer in flight. Regardless, the MJ-12 documents from the National Archives report that the men felt encouraged to speculate on the craft’s engineering and aeronautical aspects. In keeping with what Kenneth Arnold had seen the month before the Roswell saucer, the latter lacked wings, a piston-or jet engine, tail, and any other standard element of powered flight (other than the presumed streamlining effect achieved by the leading edge of the short, rounded fuselage). Enough large pieces remained for Twining and Bush to determine that the saucer had been designed to accept internal components completely foreign to human aeronautics. They found, for example, no evidence of wiring harnesses; this implied wireless controls and, perhaps, mind control.
People skeptical of the National Archives MJ-12 documents are not without a case. Certain dates don’t jibe with dates commonly given for William Brazel’s interactions with the debris—but then, the Brazel dates are a confusion even without the documents. Twining and Bush appear to have made a great many assumptions about the saucer on badly damaged evidence. It is likely that nothing at all suggested that the craft came from Mars, or from outside our solar system, either, so those assumptions have the character of wishful thinking.
And then there is the issue of the documents’ very existence, which is the basic source of bother to skeptics. How convenient that these papers should reveal themselves when UFOlogists came calling.
Contrarily, an assumption that the skeptics are justified in their suspicions invites more questions: Who inserted the documents into the files? What was the motive? One possible answer is that the government wished (and wishes) to obscure the truth about Roswell. By allowing relative crumbs of information about the craft and its occupants, larger and more dangerous issues are skirted.
Perhaps to encourage thoughts of a postwar conspiracy designed to silence the Majestic 12 participants, or the government’s bid to undermine the Roswell story, some proponents of the documents emphasize that in addition to the premature and ostensibly mysterious death of James Forrestal, General Vandenberg and General Montague were both dead by 1958, before either had reached the age of sixty. The death dates are accurate (1954 and 1958, respectively), but nothing sinister was afoot. Vandenberg died of prostate cancer, and Montague by cerebral hemorrhage precipitated by a severe intestinal ailment picked up during his travels in South America. No credible source, inside or outside the military establishment, has raised the specter of foul play with regard to either death, or to Forrestal’s, either. With the exception of Lloyd Berkner (d. 1967), MJ-12 members other than Forrestal, Vandenberg, and Montague lived until the 1970s and ’80s.