It is now hard to believe that it is 20 years since the Majestic 12 or MJ-12 documents were released to the public by William Moore in the United States, and Timothy Good in the United Kingdom.

For the first time these documents seemed to officially confirm that the U.S. government did recover a crashed saucer at Roswell in the summer of 1947 and that the Majestic 12 committee was formed by President Harry Truman on Sept 24, 1947, to investigate the implications of this incident. Since then more MJ-12 documents have surfaced that indicate the United States has secretly worked with aliens and utilized their technology.

Through the stories of whistleblowers, and the recovered memories of abductees, it seems that our planet has attracted all manner of aliens. They range from humanoids, the notorious grays, to "reptoids" and praying mantis creatures. In secret underground bases they keep vats of human body parts to produce medication for their genetically deficient bodies.

They have mutilated cattle and abducted thousands of people against their will. Some are peace loving, others are war-like and bloodthirsty. Some are solid, physically real beings with "nuts and bolts" craft; others are ghostly entities that skip into and out of our physical universe. World governments, and especially the U.S. government, have worked hard at keeping this all secret through the use of debunking, disinformation and ridicule.

Ufology, like any other subject, goes through great changes. The belief that UFOs are vehicles piloted by aliens from outer space has dominated ufology since the 1950s. The contactees of the 1950s told of meeting friendly humanoid aliens who took them for rides to the Moon, Mars and Venus. Their claims were either ignored or dismissed by the more scientifically inclined UFO investigators, who only considered sightings of UFOs by reliable witnesses.

By the 1960s, sightings of UFOs landing and disgorging their occupants became more acceptable but were still viewed with some suspicion. This all changed when the story of Betty and Barney Hill's abduction was published in John Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey in 1966.

"Exopolitics" is an area of ufology that has emerged over the last decade, but its origins are rooted in the 1970s. One of the key factors was the release of Steven Spielberg's film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (CE3K) in 1977. In the post-Watergate period, its story about a secret government project devoted to contacting aliens and spreading disinformation about UFOs certainly hit a nerve.

The media publicity surrounding CE3K, which was based on real UFO reports and stories, brought forward more alien abduction reports. Simultaneously, the long-forgotten crash of a flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico, and many other similar crash cases were re-examined and re-evaluated.

The late 1970s seems to have been a fertile time for the spreading of information and disinformation. Lieutenant Colonel George Edwards (retired, U.S. Air Force), spoke about his involvement in the development of the Avrocar VZ-9, which was an 18-foot diameter flying saucer-like aircraft. There were high hopes that this would be a "flying jeep" for the Army. Unfortunately, it did not fly very well and the project was cancelled in 1961. It was Edwards' view that the U.S. Air Force was really testing an alien flying saucer elsewhere and that they used the Avrocar project as an explanation for any saucer sightings.

During this period Jacques Vallee came into contact with a shadowy character called "Major Murphy." He had worked for the U.S. Intelligence services and advised Vallee to look beyond the organized UFO groups. They were probably influenced and controlled by official agencies. To do this they could easily feed rumors that they wanted to be circulated to "useful idiots." In this sense Moore can be regarded as having been a useful idiot in the promotion of the MJ-12 documents.

Vallee's Major Murphy explained that the Germans had developed disc-shaped aircraft in 1943 along with electrical discharge weapons. After the war this technology and the scientists who created it were scooped up by the Soviet Union and the United States to carry on this research.

In the next decade reports of abductions became an established part of ufology mainly due to the writings of Budd Hopkins, David Jacobs and John E. Mack. Starting with The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore in 1980, the stories of people who claim to have seen recovered flying saucers and even alien bodies proliferated.

According to John Lear, in a document posted on the Internet on Dec. 29 1987, huge crashed saucers were either taken to Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, or buried at the spot. To tackle the situation President Truman set-up MJ-12, which was a panel of the best military minds of the time and still exists to this day. They referred to the aliens as EBEs (Extraterrestrial Biological Entities).

Lear became interested in UFOs when he was told that three aliens met U.S. Air Force personnel from Bentwaters Air Force Base at Rendlesham Forest in 1980. Becoming fascinated by UFOs he discovered that Germany recovered a crashed saucer as early as 1939. After World War II more saucer crashes occurred in the United States and they contained ugly praying-mantis creatures that were a billion years more advanced than us.

Lear also noted that the aliens created Jesus Christ and that they possess holograms of the history of Earth. In October 1987 Moore and several newsmen were invited to interview an alien, but this meeting was cancelled. Interestingly enough, Michael Applewhite, the notorious leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, was regarded as a Jesus-like figure whose biological structure was transformed by aliens in the 1970s.

Lear has since said that there is intense rivalry between the Nordic, human-like aliens and the grays, and that aliens influenced Adolph Hitler's Third Reich, the Trilateral Commission and the "New World Order."

Deception

In all the stories by whistleblowers and "leaked" documents there seems to be the recurrent theme that the Nazis had contact with alien technology that was used and exploited by the Soviet Union and the United States. The retrieval of crashed saucers and their occupants began in the late 1940s and a secret treaty with the aliens was made in the 1950s. Since then the aliens have broken this treaty and continued abducting people for the purposes of research and nutrition.

It is now part of UFO lore that CE3K was part of a program to get the public used to the idea of friendly aliens. MJ-12 realized they could not reveal the "horrible truth." In response they decided to develop weaponry against the aliens through the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). This was sold to the public as a defense system against Soviet missiles, and appropriately enough it was popularly known as the Star Wars project.

Vallee's informant, Major Murphy, noted that much of the early government research concerned mind control and the use of electromagnetic fields on the body. He wondered if the UFOs could be "psychotropic weapons" that could cause hallucinations and paralyze anyone who gets near them. Furthermore, they could be used as a propaganda weapon to stimulate UFO sightings and reinforce belief in extraterrestrial visitors.

Murphy encouraged Vallee to look at off-the-wall contactee and occult groups that were likely to be ignored by officialdom and scientists. Here could be the breeding ground for manipulation that could instigate long-term social changes. Vallee summarized this esoteric hypothesis by stating:

It could enlist the resources of leading corporations. It could try to manipulate public opinion for its own ends. It could not control science, but it could certainly influence it. And it could produce many of the effects UFOs seem capable of manifesting. The persons controlling such a "psychotropic" technology might even have already achieved contact with other forms of consciousness and might know the real nature of UFOs, or they might try to convince others that they do. (Jacques Vallee, Messengers of Deception, And/Or Press 1979, p. 206.)
As Vallee acknowledges there are several weaknesses to this hypothesis, and like all conspiracy theories, it can spread paranoia, fear and responses beyond the control of the manipulator or manipulators.

Such a hypothesis leaves open the possibility that UFO beliefs are open to manipulation by a wide variety of groups, from the weirdest occult organizations to government departments.

Film producer Paul Kimball on his blog site "The Other Side of Truth" succinctly notes that today exopolitics threatens to corrupt everything that is good within ufology -- it undermines the search for the truth; it turns the scientific and historical methods on their heads; it is populated by dark characters of questionable repute, in the form of whistleblowers … It replaces evidence with dark conspiracy theory.

Worst of all, it spreads dissension within the ranks. Lear and his ilk can be regarded as rumormongers who used the perceived validity of the MJ-12 documents to fuel their increasingly wild claims. Through various media, these stories have been repeated, changed and enhanced to the extent where it is very hard to separate truth from speculation and fiction. On the other hand, they are seeding the truth or variations of it to the public for the day when the WHOLE truth will emerge on the world stage for all to see. Who really knows?