Page Content (OCR)
56 pened, and thus the Majestic-12 documents would have to be part of a hoax. The chances of this being the case have de- creased almost to zero, and so the possibility that the docu- ments were created out of whole cloth seems minimal. The story of Majestic-12 emerged from the catacombs of the US. Intelligence community (including the CIA, NSA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and a few other intensely inconspicuous operations), in De- cember 1984, in a manner guaranteed to create suspicion. It arrived in a plain envelope having no return address but an Albuquerque, New Mexico, postmark in the form of a can of exposed-but-unprocessed black-and-white 35mm film. The innocuous-looking package arrived at the home of Los Angeles movie producer Jaime Shandera, who was known to be working with UFO investigator Bill Moore in intelligence- related activities. When developed and printed, the film revealed eight pages of a purported briefing paper for president- elect Dwight Eisenhower, dated November 18, 1952. It de- scribed the discovery, recovery, and preliminary analysis of the remains of what crashed seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico. Moore and Shandera, together with Stanton Friedman, spent the next two years trying to determine if the document was genuine or phony. Subtle clues and mysterious messages from a growing collection of intelligence (or disinformation) contacts led to furtive phone calls and meetings, but not to much of substance that would enable them to state with confidence that the Eisenhower briefing paper was real. By the spring of 1987, the matter remained as puzzling and inconclusive as ever. Under circumstances not yet clear, another copy of the docu- ment was sent to English UFO writer Timothy Good, engaged in preparing a book about governmental involvement with UFOs. He received his copy in March 1987 and included it in his Above Top Secret, published in England in May. By then, Moore and Shandera had released a preliminary version of their document, in an unfortunately abbreviated and censored form, CRASH AT CORONA