Eisenhower Briefing Document

The Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) is an eight-page paper, dated 18 November 1952 and stamped Top Secret / MAJIC — Eyes Only, that purports to be the briefing prepared to acquaint President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower with Majestic 12, a covert committee said to have been created by President Harry S. Truman to manage the recovery and concealment of crashed non-human craft and biological entities. Attributed to Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first Director of Central Intelligence and the document's designated "MJ-1," it summarizes the July 1947 Roswell incident, the recovery of four non-human entities, and the ongoing Project Grudge and Project Sign investigations. It is the first and most studied of the Majestic documents, the photographic roll on which it surfaced in 1984 having launched the entire MJ-12 controversy. Its authenticity is contested: Stanton Friedman and the physicists Robert M. Wood and Ryan Wood rated it the strongest item in the corpus, while Philip J. Klass, Kevin D. Randle and the FBI held it to be a fabrication.

Discovery

In mid-December 1984 an undeveloped roll of 35 mm film, bearing a New Mexico postmark and no covering note, was pushed through the mail slot of television producer Jaime Shandera. When developed, the film yielded duplicate sets of eight pages: a seven-page briefing prepared for Eisenhower together with an appended memorandum. Shandera shared the material with researcher William Moore, co-author with Charles Berlitz of The Roswell Incident (1980), and the two — joined by Stanton Friedman — concluded the briefing was genuine. Friedman conducted the primary authenticity analysis of the EBD over the following years.

Critics noted that less than two years before the drop — on 16 April 1983 — Moore had reportedly told fellow ufologist Brad Sparks that he was contemplating the creation and release of hoax Top Secret documents to flush out insiders, an account first published in the Skeptics UFO Newsletter in March 1997.

Content

The briefing identifies twelve members of the Majestic 12 committee and frames the recovered craft and bodies as the most highly classified matter facing the incoming administration. It describes a single crash near Roswell, recounting metallic debris on one site and, about two miles away, the wreck and the bodies of four extraterrestrial biological entities, all stated to have died in the crash. The astronomer Donald Menzel is named among the committee — a listing that prompted Friedman's later investigation of Menzel's classified career.

The briefing carried a printed list of attachments, of which only one was reproduced on the 1984 film. The reproduced item, the Truman–Forrestal memo, was labelled "Attachment 'A'"; a further "Attachment 'H'," said to contain maps and photographs of the recovered craft and bodies, was listed but never forwarded — its absence depriving the corpus of the one element that would have been hardest to forge. Examination of the filmed pages found no staples or wire but small eyelets in the paper, taken to indicate that some form of attachment had once been bound to the briefing.

Attachment A: the Truman–Forrestal memo

The eighth and final page of the filmed briefing is "Attachment 'A'," a short memorandum dated 24 September 1947 from President Harry S. Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal that purports to be the founding charter of Majestic 12, directing the formation of a covert committee to address the security implications of the recovered craft. Because the memo arrived bound to the briefing on the same roll of film and has no independent provenance, it is treated here together with the EBD rather than as a separately leaked paper; the briefing itself cites it as "Special Classified Executive Order #092447." Researchers attribute the impetus for the committee to Vannevar Bush, who had reportedly dealt with anomalous-craft incidents as early as 1941.

The memo became the single most disputed page in the collection. Philip J. Klass reported that the Truman signature was a pasted-on photocopy of a genuine signature — accidental scratch marks included — lifted from a letter Truman wrote to Vannevar Bush on 1 October 1947. Kevin D. Randle, citing the document examiner Peter Tytell, noted that the signature does not touch the bottom of the typed text, contrary to Truman's habitual placement, and that the typeface most closely matched a Smith-Corona P102 not produced until after 1966 — long after the memo's claimed 1947 date. Barry Greenwood, then of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, checked the Truman Library's catalogue of executive orders and found none issued on 24 September 1947 and no gap in the numbering sequence for that period. Stanton Friedman countered that the paper functioned as a "special classified executive order" that would never have appeared among the published, unclassified orders, and that minor differences in the signature were consistent with authenticity rather than forgery; Moore, Shandera and Bruce Maccabee argued along the same lines.

Authentication

Stanton Friedman and Robert M. Wood each concluded that the briefing contains no decisive anachronism or fabricated technical reference, Wood assessing its overall narrative as substantially accurate while allowing that certain details appear to have been deliberately altered. Wood read those alterations as false clues inserted by people inside the programs to confuse any would-be authenticator.

Against this, Philip J. Klass identified the briefing's hybrid civil/military date format — "18 November, 1952," with both a comma and a non-positional zero — as matching William Moore's habitual personal-letter convention, presenting it as evidence of Moore's authorship. Kevin D. Randle argued that the cumulative defects across the EBD and its attachment pointed to a hoax assembled in the 1980s rather than a paper written in 1952, while acknowledging Friedman's view that the "lack of provenance is bothersome, but understandable" given that any genuine leaker would have been violating security. The FBI examined the documents after their release and concluded they were not genuine government records, and the U.S. Air Force has maintained that no committee such as MJ-12 ever existed.

See also

• Majestic 12
• Majestic documents
• List of Majestic-12 members
• Roscoe Hillenkoetter
• 1947 Roswell incident
• Cutler-Twining memo
• MJ-12 Special Operations Manual
• 1952 MJ-12 surrender agreement

References

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