Broomfield, CO July 25, 2007
A determined effort to muddy the waters with claims of “fraud” concerning the extensive Top Secret Majestic, or MJ-12, documents that have leaked from multiple sources in recent years has failed several tests of credibility.
Recently minted Bible professor Michael S. Heiser has issued press notices about his claims in association with a report he is selling on the Internet with promotion for sales of his novel concluding that UFOs are a plot by [censored] to take over the earth in the “the facade” of an Air Force colonel running Area 51.
Heiser recently paid thousands of dollars to a document examiner, Dr. Carol Chaski to look at only 11 pages (about 5,000 words) of the 3,500 pages of MJ-12 documents leaked to researchers since 1984. Despite the examiner’s conclusion that at least one of the 11 pages was in fact written by the author claimed, Heiser has issued sweeping conclusions that all the MJ-12 documents are fraudulent.
Heiser’s allegations have drawn attention to the Internet marketing campaign for his novel, published to little response in 2004 but now advertised again on the Internet next to his claims of MJ-12 fraud.
The novel’s hero is a Bible student (as was Heiser) who claims the Bible describes a “Divine Council” of gods responsible for creation (as Heiser’s own dissertation alleges). A secret-agent Vatican priest pretends to be part of the plot until [censored] crushes him, and in the end, of course, the Bible student gets the beautiful young woman scientist.
“The real facade may be that any responsible scholar would make such sweeping claims on the basis of such limited and conflicting evidence,” said businessman and prominent UFO researcher Ryan Wood. “The least that any intellectually honest person can do is to look at the weight of extensive research that Heiser neglects to mention and keep an open mind.”
Ryan Wood along with distinguished aerospace physicist Dr. Robert Wood and nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman have published in-depth research on the so-called MJ-12, or Majestic, documents, some of which have been found in the archives of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Heiser, who claims to be among the “top 100 UFO experts,” recently hired Dr. Carol Chaski, a forensic linguistic researcher, who ran the pages through a computer program to see if their language is like that of other documents purportedly from the same or similar authors. She concluded that 10 of the 11 pages were questionable.
“A logical flaw is obvious to anyone who has worked in government or the military,” said Wood. “General officers and senior public officials do not write 90 percent of the official documents they sign. Government documents are frequently written by subordinates for commanders, or by committees and secretaries. Expecting linguistic authorship to match across such documents is unlikely from the start.”
“The notion that forensic linguistics, a very new science is the silver bullet that dethrones the validity of the entire majestic document collection, or the Roswell Crash reality is a gross misstatement,” said Ryan S. Wood document researcher.
Questioned Document Authentication
The field of document authentication is very old and focuses on many vectors of authenticity, namely forensics (ink, paper), chronology (out of time/place), chirography (handwriting), typography, provenance, content and anachronisms. The results advertised by Heiser stem from what document examiners consider among the least accurate of their analysis techniques. “The notion that forensic linguistics, a very new science with just one peer-reviewed journal and a handful of experts is the silver bullet that dethrones the validity of the entire majestic document collection is a gross misstatement,” said Ryan Wood, document researcher.
Complicating the matter, Heiser has released only his brief summary of Dr. Chaski’s research. While making scientific claims, he has not revealed the alleged scientific details of what was examined, including the “control documents” she may have used for comparison. So as the saying goes “garbage in garbage out” applies. The bottom line is the tool of forensic linguistics is just one of several state-of-the-art question document examination techniques.
“Far beyond Heiser’s approach, we have originals of some of the MJ-12 documents,” said the Wood’s. “And careful forensic examination of these rare documents has stood the test of authenticity. At a minimum, there is no complete consensus yet from the so-called experts, and it is disingenuous for Heiser, whose previous UFO publishing is confined to his novel, to claim otherwise.”
On the other hand, of the nearly 3,500 pages of other leaked Majestic documents that Heiser ignores — meticulous research for the past decade has cross-verified content with known military activities at a level of detail that is hard to write off as fakery. Corroborating such documents are the direct testimony by astronauts like Gordon Cooper, retired Air Force generals like Arthur Exon and others who have put their direct testimony in the record concerning the reality of non-human craft observed near Earth.
“One problem is that the campaign of ridicule, plus imaginative novels combining UFOs with personal theology, is that it keeps sensible people from exploring the real weight of evidence for themselves. We have gone to considerable effort to put most of the important leaked documents at www.majesticdocuments.com,” said Wood.
“To date,” Wood emphasized, “no credible evidence has tarnished the authenticity of the ‘Special Operations Manual: Extraterrestrial Entities Technology Recovery and Disposal’ of April 1954; the ‘Eisenhower Briefing Document’ of November 1952; the ‘White Hot Report’ of September 1947; or the ‘Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit’ Counter Intelligence Report of July 22, 1947.
In a rare failure of security, the U.S. Army revealed in reply to a Freedom of Information Act request that the Counter Intelligence Corps did indeed have an “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit” during the period of the now-leaked Majestic documents. Without explaining why “interplanetary phenomena” would be of interest to the Army’s security branch, the Army simply said the files had been passed to the Air Force’s own Office of Special Investigations who have likewise never explained their counter-intelligence interest.
The questioned documents are extensively discussed in Stanton Friedman’s landmark book “TOP SECRET/MAJIC” and in Ryan Wood’s recent book “MAJIC EYES ONLY,” which has received endorsements from astronauts, scientists, retired Air Force officers and others.