Majestic 12

Majestic 12 (also known by a variety of other names and abbreviations, including Majic 12, MJ 12, M12, Mars-Jupiter 12, Majority 12, Majestic Trust) refers to an alleged cabal of government and military officials and scientists as well as the set of forged documents purporting the existence of said cabal. UFO proponents claim that the Majestic 12 was a committee commissioned by President Harry Truman in 1947 to investigate UFO sightings which subsequently covered them up.

Original Majestic 12 documents (1984)
In 1984, UFO hobbyist and film producer Jamie Shandera claimed to have received an anonymously mailed set of documents on film detailing the creation of a committee of twelve government officials and scientists by Harry Truman as well as a briefing received by Dwight Eisenhower. These documents discuss the discovery and cover-up of UFO discoveries in Roswell, New Mexico and a secondary site near the Texas-Mexico border. In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan notes the documents make reference to appendices that supposedly contain information about alien biology and the technology of their spacecraft, but no such appendices were included on the film.

Cutler-Twining memo (1985)
In 1985, Shandera and his associate William Moore received a tip to go to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Maryland, where they discovered what was called the "Cutler-Twining memo." This memo, dated 1954, references a "NCS/MJ-12 Special Studies Project" but makes no further mention of MJ-12 or UFOs. The memo was later investigated as part of Project Blue Book by NARA, which found no further mention of MJ-12 (or variations on that name) in the archives. The document is widely believed to be a plant due to the fact that it doesn't bear a Top Secret register number as do other documents in the series it was found in, and that its typeface cannot be matched precisely to any brand of typewriters in use in 1954.

Release and early investigations
The set of documents were released in 1987 by Shandera, Moore, and Stanton Friedman. Soon after, UFO skeptic Phil Klass performed a number of analyses on them, finding a number of problems with the documents. Among a number of other inconsistencies, the typewriter used to type them matched a model that wasn't released until 1963 and Truman's signature had been cut-and-pasted onto the memos relating to him. The FBI conducted a joint investigation with the Air Force in 1988 after being sent a copy of the Eisenhower memo and determined it to be fraudulent.

Further alleged MJ 12 documents and investigations
In 1994, UFO proponent Don Berliner received an anonymous mailing containing documents purporting to relate to Majestic 12. Berliner later denounced them as a hoax. Throughout the 1990s, Tim Cooper and Robert Wood brought forth a number of other MJ 12 documents, which Klass also exposed as forgeries. Various documents not explicitly mentioning anything relating to Majestic 12 are often touted as "definitive proof" of MJ 12 by internet conspiracy theorists and ufologists.

A 1995 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report reaffirmed NARA's findings. An inquiry was made to NASA and it claimed to be unaware of a Majestic 12 program.

Legacy
The MJ 12 documents have become something of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion of the UFO conspiracist subculture, with some viewing them as "proof" of a conspiracy and others believing them to be a hoax used to muddy the waters by a larger conspiracy. The alleged Majestic 12 committee has become a bridge for UFO hobbyists to cross over into conspiracy theory territory and vice versa, with the committee claimed to be "proof" of Men in Black and part of the Illuminati/New World Order/(insert conspiracist bogeyman here).