Ryan Wood
Ryan S. Wood is an American UFO researcher, document analyst, and president of Majestic Documents (majesticdocuments.com), the primary online repository for Majestic 12-related government documents. He co-authored Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology (2005) with his father Robert M. Wood, cataloguing 74 alleged global UFO crash-retrieval cases with a structured evidence rating system. Wood has presented at MUFON symposia and numerous UFO conferences, applying forensic document authentication methods — including paper, ink, typeface, and provenance analysis — to a corpus of leaked government documents relating to the U.S. government's extraterrestrial management programs.
Background and education
Ryan Wood grew up in a household deeply engaged with the technical and analytical dimensions of the UFO phenomenon. His father, Robert M. Wood, is a retired aerospace engineer who worked for McDonnell Douglas for over three decades and applied rigorous scientific methodology to the analysis of leaked MJ-12 documents beginning in the 1990s. The collaboration between Robert M. Wood and Ryan Wood represents a generational transfer of research methodology, with Ryan bringing additional skills in database management, web publishing, and conference presentation to the work initiated by his father.
Ryan's interest in the UFO phenomenon originated in childhood, at approximately age fifteen, when Stanton Friedman came to dinner at the Wood family home and described his work investigating UFO crash retrievals at Douglas Aircraft Company. Despite this early exposure, Ryan spent his twenties and thirties primarily in professional engineering careers — in semiconductors, computers, aerospace, and eventually fusion energy.
The significant moment came in 1994 when his father obtained the Special Operations Manual (SOM 1-01). The first joint conference presentation by Ryan and Robert — at John White's Connecticut UFO conference, the 10th and final year of that event — produced a notable public response: Linda Moulton Howe stated publicly that it was the first time she had encountered what she regarded as genuine evidence of authenticity in the MJ-12 field.
Ryan Wood's academic background and professional skills have been applied specifically to the task of building a systematic archive of claimed government documents relating to extraterrestrial contact management. His base of operations has been described as Menlo Park, California.
Majestic Documents (majesticdocuments.com)
The website majesticdocuments.com, which Ryan Wood operates, hosts what its administrators describe as the most comprehensive public collection of Majestic 12-related documents. These include the Truman-Forrestal memo (the alleged September 24, 1947 authorization for MJ-12, hosted at majesticdocuments.com/pdf/truman_forrestal.pdf), the Eisenhower Briefing Document, the Roosevelt non-terrestrial memo (February 22, 1944), and numerous supporting documents spanning the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and subsequent administrations.
Michael Salla has cited majesticdocuments.com documents as primary sources in his research on secret space programs: the FDR memo on "Non-Terrestrial Science and Technology" is cited in Insiders Reveal Secret Space Programs and Extraterrestrial Alliances (2015), with documentary analysis credited jointly to Robert Wood and Ryan Wood.
The authentication methodology applied to these documents by the Woods involves multiple independent lines of analysis: physical paper and ink dating where originals are available; typeface analysis using period-correct font references; formatting conventions of classified documents from specific agencies and date ranges; provenance tracing; internal consistency analysis; and comparison against known authentic documents from the same era. Ryan Wood has publicly stated that the totality of the evidence — no single document is treated as decisive — supports the authenticity of the core MJ-12 document set.
The site also hosts analysis of Project Moondust and Project Blue Fly — two Air Force programs for the recovery of foreign and unidentified spacecraft — which the Woods treat as the operational arm of the MJ-12 extraterrestrial recovery mandate.
The Kennedy assassination document
Among the more consequential documents according to Robert M. Wood is one that Robert and Ryan interpret as an MJ-12 authorisation for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The document contains a passage in a "project environment" tab stating that "the weather is lacking precipitation, it should be wet" — with "wet" being Cold War intelligence tradecraft for a killing operation. Ryan contextualised this in terms of Kennedy's documented attempt to share UFO information with the Soviet Union: documents from the National Archives (NASA Memorandum 271 or 273) show Kennedy requesting the sharing of data about "unknowns" with the Russians, which Ryan described as a plausible motive for his assassination alongside other factors.
Majic Eyes Only (2005)
Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology, co-authored by Ryan Wood and Robert M. Wood and published in 2005, is the most comprehensive attempt in the UFO literature to systematically catalog alleged crash-retrieval incidents with a consistent evidentiary rating system. The book examines 74 cases from around the world, spanning from the pre-World War II era through the early 2000s. Each case is evaluated on a multi-factor evidence scale assessing physical evidence, documentary evidence, witness testimony, corroboration, and the quality and number of independent sources.
The book draws directly on the document corpus assembled at majesticdocuments.com and represents the applied culmination of both Woods' authentication work. Key cases in the book include:
- The Roswell UFO crash (July 1947), the best-documented case and the anchor of the MJ-12 document chain
- The San Agustin crash (July 1947), a second New Mexico crash site referenced by multiple witnesses
- The Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash (March 1948), a case researched by Frank Scully and later by Scott and Suzanne Ramsey
- Multiple international cases from South America, Europe, and Asia, documented through government records and witness testimony
The 2002 UFO Congress convention in Laughlin, Nevada, at which Ryan Wood spoke, was an early platform for his crash-retrieval catalog research. He was quoted as stating: "People need to be reminded that the government can and does keep secrets, and very well. They kept the Stealth fighter secret for many years."
At the same conference, Wood elaborated on the cover-up's cost: "The great crime of the cover-up is that the government has deprived the world of an opportunity to have a higher standard of living, advanced electronic technology and a chance to solve many of the medical problems of the world."
He also stated, consistent with the reverse-engineering thesis: "Area 51, a top secret military research installation said to be located at Groom Lake on the Nevada Test Site, is the likely home of about 1,000 of the brightest military research scientists in the world. They are studying crashed alien craft, like that reportedly recovered from the famous incident in 1947 in Roswell, N.M." Wood further noted that fiber optics may have been developed in part through "reverse engineering — studying crash remains of alien craft."
Conference presentations and public profile
Ryan Wood has presented at MUFON annual symposia, the International UFO Congress (including the Laughlin, Nevada annual convention), and other forums. His presentations typically focus on the MJ-12 document authentication evidence and on specific crash-retrieval cases, drawing on the database methodology developed for Majic Eyes Only.
A fellow presenter at the 2002 International UFO Congress, a reporter who interviewed Wood noted that even otherwise skeptical researchers at the conference acknowledged the depth of Wood's document archive research. Unlike some figures in the UFO community who rely primarily on witness testimony, Wood's methodology centers on documentary evidence — a distinction that has made him a particularly credible figure to researchers coming from legal or intelligence backgrounds.
Researcher Kevin Randle has independently discussed the Aztec crash case in the context of Wood's conference presentations: "I want to say Ryan Wood talked about that, but there were a bunch we talked about when he was here."
Collaboration with Michael Salla
Michael Salla's 2015 book Insiders Reveal Secret Space Programs and Extraterrestrial Alliances cites the Woods' document authentication work as foundational to the documentary chain connecting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 memo acknowledging non-terrestrial science to the Harry Truman September 24, 1947 authorization of MJ-12. Salla's citations to majesticdocuments.com URLs appear throughout the footnotes of that volume, treating the Woods' archive as primary source material.
The Truman-Forrestal memo, which authorizes Operation Majestic 12 and is hosted at majesticdocuments.com/pdf/truman_forrestal.pdf, is the document most frequently cited by Salla and other researchers as the founding charter of the UFO cover-up management apparatus. Ryan Wood's role in making this document and its authentication analysis publicly available has been central to the broader research community's ability to engage with the MJ-12 question.
Role in the Bill Tompkins editorial project
Robert M. Wood's reputation as a specialist in authenticating leaked documents led directly to his involvement with Bill Tompkins: Tompkins contacted Robert Wood in 2009, and the two discovered they had worked at Douglas Aircraft Company at the same time — Robert starting in June 1950, Tompkins arriving in March of that year — in the same classified enclosure overseen by Wolfgang Kluge. Robert Wood subsequently served as chief editor of Tompkins's memoir series Selected by Extraterrestrials, a role that extended the Wood family's authentication methodology from documents to personal testimony — Ryan Wood's majesticdocuments.com archive and Robert Wood's editorial work on the Tompkins volumes together form the most systematic effort in the field to apply forensic standards to both documentary and testimonial evidence of the UFO cover-up.
William Cooper's testimony on Naval control of alien projects
William Cooper's 1989 lecture on the Majestic 12 secret government — the same body whose documents Ryan Wood authenticates — stated that "all alleged alien bases are under complete control of the Department of Naval Intelligence and all personnel who work in these complexes receive their checks from the Navy," and that Area 51 and the S-4 facility were placed under Department of the Navy authority with clearances requiring executive presidential approval. Cooper's detailed account of the MJ-12 funding structure — a "multi million dollar secret fund" organized through the military office of the White House and channeled through the Chesapeake Division of the Navy engineers — is consistent with the documentary chain that the Woods have assembled at majesticdocuments.com regarding the institutional architecture of the extraterrestrial management apparatus.