Within The Eisenhower Briefing Document
Why the Truman Memo Matters to the MJ 12 Case
The Eisenhower briefing cites a disputed Truman-to-Forrestal memorandum, so the packet's two central documents cannot independently authenticate each other.
On this page
- How the memorandum is used to establish MJ 12's creation
- Why dependent documents are not independent corroboration
- How doubts about the attachment affect the briefing
Page outline Jump by section
Introduction
The Truman-to-Forrestal memorandum matters to the MJ-12 case because the Eisenhower Briefing Document does not merely sit beside it: the briefing expressly relies on it. The purported 1952 briefing says that the Majestic-12 group was established by a classified presidential order on 24 September 1947 and immediately directs the reader to “Attachment A”. Its attachment list identifies that item as “Special Classified Executive Order #092447”. The accompanying one-page Truman memorandum, bearing the same date, supplies the supposed presidential authority and names “Operation Majestic Twelve”.[Wikisource]en.wikisource.orgMJ-12 DocumentMJ-12 Document - Wikisource, the free online library…
That relationship creates an important authentication problem. The briefing and Truman memorandum arrived together through the same anonymous source, and one cites the other. They therefore cannot straightforwardly be treated as two independent witnesses proving that MJ-12 existed. More importantly, serious doubts have been raised about the Truman memorandum itself, particularly its signature and documentary form. Those doubts reach directly into the briefing’s central claim about MJ-12’s creation.
How the Truman memo establishes MJ-12’s creation
The Eisenhower briefing makes a remarkably specific institutional claim. It describes “Operation Majestic-12” as a research-and-intelligence operation responsible directly to the President and says that the twelve-member controlling group was created on 24 September 1947 on the recommendation of Vannevar Bush and Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Instead of leaving that assertion unsupported, the text adds a parenthetical direction to “Attachment A”.[Wikisource]en.wikisource.orgMJ-12 DocumentMJ-12 Document - Wikisource, the free online library…
Attachment A is therefore presented as the briefing’s documentary foundation for the organisation’s origin. In the enumeration at the end of the briefing, it is described as “Special Classified Executive Order #092447”. The one-page Truman memorandum then tells Forrestal that, following their recent conversation, he is authorised to proceed with his undertaking and that the matter will henceforth be called “Operation Majestic Twelve”. It also places future decisions under the Office of the President, after consultation with Forrestal, Bush and the Director of Central Intelligence.[Wikisource]en.wikisource.orgMJ-12 DocumentMJ-12 Document - Wikisource, the free online library…
That division of labour between the documents is easy to miss. The 1952 briefing supplies the retrospective story: when MJ-12 began, who supposedly formed it and who belonged to it. The Truman memorandum supplies what appears to be contemporaneous presidential authority. Without the attachment, the briefing is essentially a five-year-later assertion that Truman created MJ-12. With it, the packet appears at first glance to contain a 1947 founding instrument.
There is one genuine historical circumstance that makes the date look plausible. Truman’s official appointment records show that at 11:30 a.m. on 24 September 1947 he met Forrestal and Vannevar Bush, with the meeting arranged at Forrestal’s suggestion. Two days later, Truman’s calendar records the first National Security Council meeting with figures including Forrestal, Sidney Souers and CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter.[trumanlibrary.gov]trumanlibrary.govDaily Appointments of Harry S. Truman | Harry S. TrumanDaily Appointments of Harry S. Truman | Harry S. Truman
That is useful contextual evidence, but it is not documentary confirmation of the memorandum. The appointment record establishes that Truman, Forrestal and Bush met; it does not state that they discussed unidentified flying objects, recovered craft or MJ-12. A document dated to coincide with a real meeting can be historically well researched without being authentic. For authentication purposes, the question is not simply whether such a meeting could have occurred, but whether the purported memorandum can be traced independently to Truman’s government records.
Why the two documents are not independent corroboration
The strongest-looking feature of the original MJ-12 packet is also one of its most misleading if the documents are counted separately. A 1952 briefing says Truman created MJ-12 in 1947; a 1947 Truman memorandum appears to confirm precisely that. But independence requires more than agreement.
According to the account published during the original controversy, both the Truman/Forrestal memorandum and the seven-page Eisenhower briefing reached Jaime Shandera together in December 1984 on an anonymously supplied roll of undeveloped 35 mm film.[Skeptical Inquirer]skepticalinquirer.orgSkeptical Inquirer That means there was no independently discovered Truman memorandum in one archive and separately discovered Eisenhower briefing in another. The two central documents entered the evidential record through the same provenance event.
The briefing then explicitly points back to the Truman document. In evidential terms, the relationship is therefore closer to a claim and its cited attachment than to two independent records. If someone assembled the packet, internal agreement would be expected: a compiler could write the later briefing around the purported founding memorandum, or prepare both so that they reinforced one another.
A useful test is to imagine removing Attachment A. Nothing external in the surviving briefing itself then demonstrates that Truman actually issued the claimed 1947 authority. Conversely, the Truman memorandum does not independently establish the elaborate history recounted in the 1952 briefing: it contains no membership list, Roswell narrative or detailed description of the organisation’s work. Each document performs a different role within one internally coherent package.
This distinction is strengthened by later archival searches. The National Archives says it made extensive searches of Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff holdings for MJ-12 material, while the Truman and Eisenhower presidential libraries also searched for references or copies. Searches of Truman- and Eisenhower-era National Security Council indexes under terms including “MJ-12” and “majestic” were negative apart from the controversial later Cutler-Twining memorandum.[National Archives]archives.govNational Archives Project BLUE BOOKNational ArchivesProject BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects | National Archives… In 1995, the US Government Accountability Office likewise reported that relevant agencies knew the MJ-12 material from documents supplied by non-governmental sources and that there was no evidence the material constituted genuine executive-branch documents.[Government Accountability Office]gao.govGovernment Accountability Office[Comments on Majestic 12 Material] | U.S. GAOGovernment Accountability Office[Comments on Majestic 12 Material] | U.S. GAO
That does not mathematically prove that a deeply classified organisation could never have existed. It does, however, mean the Truman attachment has not acquired the sort of independent archival provenance that would allow it to authenticate the briefing which cites it.
The signature problem reaches into the briefing
One of the most consequential challenges to Attachment A concerns Truman’s signature. Sceptical investigator Philip J. Klass argued that although the signature itself came from Truman’s hand, that did not establish that Truman had signed this memorandum. In his published examination of the MJ-12 papers, he stressed how photocopying allowed authentic signatures to be incorporated into documents containing substituted text. He also reported differences between the purported memorandum and contemporary Truman correspondence in format, typewriter appearance and writing style.[Skeptical Inquirer]skepticalinquirer.orgSkeptical Inquirer
Klass subsequently reported finding the apparent source in the Vannevar Bush papers: an authentic Truman letter to Bush dated 1 October 1947 whose signature matched the one appearing on the disputed MJ-12 memorandum. His 1990 follow-up treated the matching signature as evidence that the purported September memorandum had been constructed using a reproduction of Truman’s genuine autograph rather than signed independently by the President.[Center for Inquiry]cdn.centerforinquiry.orgTruman wrote to Vannevar Bush on. October 1,1947, the original of which. I found in the Bush collection in the. Manuscript…Read more…
This issue is more significant than the observation that a president’s signatures can naturally resemble one another. The allegation is that distinctive details reproduced in both versions indicate the same physical signature image rather than two separate acts of signing. That interpretation has become one of the principal arguments against the Truman memorandum’s authenticity. It is not equivalent to a modern forensic examination of an original 1947 sheet, because no such authenticated original of the MJ-12 memorandum is available for testing. That absence itself limits what can be established.
Supporters of the MJ-12 documents have disputed the inference. The Majestic Documents project, for example, acknowledges that Stanton Friedman found a Truman memorandum to Bush from the same period bearing a nearly identical signature, while presenting the similarity as an authentication issue for further argument rather than accepting it as dispositive proof of forgery.[Majestic Documents]majesticdocuments.comdocuments dated prior to 1948Majestic DocumentsDocuments Dated Prior to 1948 | Majestic DocumentsOctober 29, 2018…
The crucial point for the Eisenhower briefing is narrower. If Attachment A’s signature cannot demonstrate that Truman actually approved the words printed above it, then the briefing loses what appears to be its strongest contemporaneous presidential credential. A genuine Truman autograph reproduced inside a disputed document would authenticate the autograph’s source, not the MJ-12 text surrounding it.
“Executive order” creates another dependency problem
There is also tension between what the briefing calls Attachment A and what the attachment actually looks like. The briefing says MJ-12 was established by a “special classified executive order” and its attachment list calls the Truman document “Special Classified Executive Order #092447”.[Wikisource]en.wikisource.orgMJ-12 DocumentMJ-12 Document - Wikisource, the free online library… Yet the reproduced attachment is headed “MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE”, and “092447” simply corresponds to the date 09/24/47.
Critics have therefore checked the claim against Truman’s recorded executive orders. Contemporary numbering around the date does not reveal a gap corresponding to an MJ-12 order: Executive Order 9894 was dated 23 September 1947, followed by Executive Order 9895 on 30 September. A detailed critical examination reproduced by the Center for UFO Studies similarly notes that the Truman Library’s executive-order sequence contains no order issued on 24 September and no missing number in that part of the sequence that would naturally accommodate the claimed document.[Center for UFO Studies]cufos.orgThe Roswell Report R2Center for UFO StudiesGreorge M. Eberhartof MJ-12 "by special classified executive order of. President Truman on 24 September, 1947…
Secrecy complicates the issue: proponents can argue that a “special classified” directive need not have appeared in the ordinary published sequence. But that defence changes the evidential burden rather than resolving it. If #092447 is not a conventional executive-order number, and the supposed order survives only as the memorandum bundled with the anonymous MJ-12 packet, then the briefing is once again relying on the disputed attachment to establish its own terminology.
This is exactly why the dependency matters. The briefing calls the document an executive order; the attachment is used to prove that an executive order existed; and the claim that the attachment was a special secret order comes substantially from the briefing itself. Without an independent presidential file, registry entry, routing copy or related government correspondence identifying the same directive, the reasoning risks becoming circular.
What archival silence does — and does not — establish
The National Archives’ findings are especially relevant because they test whether the internal documentary chain extends outside the packet. Its researchers report extensive negative searches across records of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force and National Security Council. The Truman and Eisenhower libraries also failed to locate copies or references corresponding to the original MJ-12 documents.[National Archives]archives.govNational Archives Project BLUE BOOKNational ArchivesProject BLUE BOOK - Unidentified Flying Objects | National Archives…
The GAO reached a similarly restrained conclusion. Its 1995 review did not claim to have proved the historical impossibility of every secret programme resembling MJ-12. Instead, it reported that agencies had no evidence that the circulated Majestic-12 material represented actual executive-branch documents and that federal archivists had found nothing fitting the claimed records or references.[Government Accountability Office]gao.govGovernment Accountability Office[Comments on Majestic 12 Material] | U.S. GAOGovernment Accountability Office[Comments on Majestic 12 Material] | U.S. GAO That distinction matters: archival absence is strongest as an argument about document authentication, rather than as a universal claim about everything the government might ever have done secretly.
The real historical meeting of Truman, Forrestal and Bush on 24 September 1947 therefore has limited evidential reach. It verifies the meeting date and participants, which is a point in the packet’s favour as period detail. But it does not independently verify the memorandum’s text, its “Operation Majestic Twelve” wording or the briefing’s claim that an MJ-12 group was created that day.[trumanlibrary.gov]trumanlibrary.govDaily Appointments of Harry S. Truman | Harry S. TrumanDaily Appointments of Harry S. Truman | Harry S. Truman
How doubts about Attachment A change the briefing case
The Truman memorandum does not have to be disproved beyond every conceivable doubt for its weakness to affect the Eisenhower briefing. Authentication is cumulative. A later document gains credibility when it accurately cites an earlier record whose provenance can be independently established. It gains much less when the earlier record came from the same anonymous package and is itself disputed.
For the MJ-12 packet, three levels therefore need to be kept separate. The 1952 briefing claims that Truman established MJ-12 in 1947. Attachment A purports to document that presidential authorisation. Genuine historical records independently establish that Truman met Forrestal and Bush on the stated date, but the archival searches reported by the National Archives and GAO have not produced an independently sourced MJ-12 founding directive.[wikisource.org]en.wikisource.orgMJ-12 DocumentMJ-12 Document - Wikisource, the free online library…
That distinction prevents a common evidential double count. The Eisenhower briefing and Truman memorandum can certainly be examined as two physical-looking items with different purported dates and functions. They cannot, however, provide two independent lines of provenance when they surfaced together and one explicitly invokes the other.
The dependency therefore leaves the Eisenhower Briefing Document in a weaker position than its internal structure initially suggests. If the Truman memorandum were independently authenticated from a presidential or Defense Department record series, its citation by the 1952 briefing would become a meaningful point in the briefing’s favour. Without that independent foundation — and particularly while the memorandum’s signature and documentary form remain disputed — Attachment A cannot securely authenticate the document that cites it. The packet’s apparent cross-confirmation remains primarily internal rather than archival.
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Endnotes
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