Saturday, July 26, 2008

Edgar Mitchell and Roswell

Over the last couple of days, there has been a lot of talk about what Dr. Edgar Mitchell apparently told an audience in Great Britain. In some versions, these stories seemed to suggest that Mitchell had some sort of communication with alien creatures while on the moon, and said that there was, indeed, a cover-up.

On Friday, July 25, Mitchell had the opportunity to clear up some of these misconceptions when he appeared on BlogTalkRadio’s ShapeShifting, hosted by Lisa Bonnice. He did say there was a cover up at Roswell, but also suggested that NASA knew nothing about it, or rather he had no information to suggest that NASA knew about it.
In response to one of Bonnice’s questions about Roswell, Mitchell said:
I was talking about the Roswell incident, the Roswell visitation primarily, but there have been many others that have been reported that I have no personal awareness of but that was the one that I was really talking about... and my information comes from what I call "the old timers," because I grew up in the Roswell area and when I went to the moon, some of the old timers from that period, some locals, and others military and intelligence people, who were under rather severe oaths to not reveal any of this and kind of wanted to get their conscience clear and off their chests before they passed on, selected me and said, independently - this wasn't a group effort - independently that maybe I might be a safe person to tell their story to. And all of them confirmed, and what I'm saying is they confirmed the Roswell incident was a real incident and they in some way had some part in it that they wanted to talk about.
Mitchell continued by saying:
Well, that the crash of an alien spacecraft in the Roswell area was a real event and much of the lore, I can't say all of the lore, but much of the fact that dead bodies were recovered and live ones were recovered, that they were not of this world, was the story. And of course it was reported in the Roswell Daily Record one day and promptly denied the next day and a cover story of a weather balloon, and that was pure nonsense. That was a cover-up.
Later, Mitchell told Irene Klotz from the Discovery Channel:

Subsequent to that, I did take my story to the Pentagon - not NASA, but the Pentagon - and asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told them my story and what I know and eventually had that confirmed by the admiral that I spoke with, that indeed what I was saying was true.

The whole interview can be seen is at:
And then, echoing the story related by Barry Goldwater and his attempts to see the crash material, the admiral told Mitchell:

...There was a UFO crash. There was an alien spacecraft. This gentleman [the admiral] tried his damndest to get me in and like so many others in the administration over the last 60 years, since JFK's time, was unable to. He was told 'Admiral, you don't have a need to know, and therefore go get lost,' essentially.

Let’s take a look at this carefully. Mitchell isn’t saying that he saw any of this, that he was working with inside information, but was talking to the people who were involved, in Roswell. Clearly these were people he trusted and that they felt they could tell him about it because of who he was. But this adds little to what we already know about Roswell. He provides no names, though I suspect we could identify some of them if we wanted.He then goes off on what I believe to be a tangent, but it also supplies us with a clue about the source of some of the information.

He said:
Here the Air Force is charged with presumably protecting the skies and the advanced technologies of our nation and the intelligence services didn't really know what to do with an alien spacecraft and didn't know whether they were hostile or otherwise, and didn't want the Soviets to get involved with that, or know about it, so the easiest thing to do was lie about it, cover it up and have it classified and deny that it happened. And that's what has happened and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don't know, that President Truman then elected a committee of very high level military and civilian academicians and people and formed the Military and Joint Intelligence Committee.
This is the same sort of thing that Brigadier General Arthur Exon had told me a number of years ago. Exon said that he didn’t know the name of the committee, only that he knew some of the people involved and that he had information about some of the others. Exon provided names, such as Stuart Symington (seen here), who in July 1947, was the Under Secretary of War for Air, General Carl Spaatz, who was the commander of Army Air Forces, and he even suggests that Dwight Eisenhower, who was the Chief of Staff of the Army in 1947, was part of the committee.

Exon told me, "I just know there was a top intelligence echelon represented and the President’s office was represented and the Secretary of Defense [here meaning the Secretary of War] was represented and these people stayed on in key positions even through they might have moved out [meaning changed jobs such as Eisenhower becoming president and Symington eventually becoming a senator]."

Mitchell then identifies what he believed to be the committee. He said:
Abbreviated MAJIC or "Majic 12," that's what it was called, and gave them power to manage this so-called alien presence or crash or whatever they were going to do. And they passed a very secretive bill that gave authority, perhaps too much authority, and over the last 60 years since that incident, things have been continuously covered up, lied about, hidden, and people have not been able to get in to that - including Barry Goldwater when he was a presidential candidate - tried to crack into it and get the information out and was denied. President Ford later tried to get some information out and was denied.
This is where we enter into speculation by Mitchell. Both Mitchell and Exon suggested that a committee was created to investigate and to exploit the finds at Roswell. Exon called it the "Unholy Thirteen" simply because he had no other name for it, and that was the name he used when discussing it. Bill Moore, Richard Doty, and others received documents suggesting it was known as the Majestic-Twelve, or MJ-12, code named MAJIC.

At this point it doesn’t really matter who is right about the name of the committee, or even the exact nature of it. What is important is that we have two very highly placed people who were talking about an oversight committee that was investigating Roswell and setting policy about UFOs. We have the names of some of those people who appear on both lists. Exon, for example, said that Roscoe Hillenkoetter (seen here) was on, as was James Forrestal who became the first Secretary of Defense in 1947.

Now we have further corroboration of this committee and while we, inside the UFO community argue about who is right about it, the real story goes relatively unreported. First, we had an Air Force brigadier general, who was in the right place at the right time to know, tell us about this committee.

Now we have a former astronaut tell us about this committee and if he wants to call it the Majic 12, then so be it. But the important point is that we have another man who should be in a place to know. We should be looking for the committee rather than arguing among ourselves about who is right about this and who is wrong. Maybe the MJ-12 documents are fraudulent, or maybe not, but that really isn’t the point. The point is that there was, and is, a committee controlling this information and we should be searching for that.

When we look back into the history of UFOs, we see a couple of things. First, prior to July 8, 1947, the government and especially the military, didn’t care about all the stories of flying saucers. The newspapers are full of speculation, reports, eyewitness accounts, and columns attempting to explain what is going on.

Then, on July 9, the day after the story breaks in Roswell, we see newspaper articles saying that the Army and Navy moved today to suppress stories of the flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere. This was a wire story and I have found it, and variations of it, in many newspapers. Why, suddenly, on July 9 does the Army and Navy care about these stories? I will note that many newspapers stopped reporting them.

Edward Ruppelt (seen here), who was, at one time the chief of Project Blue Book wrote in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, wrote, "The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files. And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyes fanatics, they were scientists - rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts..."

So, rather than trying to prove the name MJ-12 is correct, we should be combining forces to find out all we can about the oversight committee. Searches in the past have been limited to the men whose names appear on the MJ-12 document. Maybe we should expand it to include those mentioned by Exon. Maybe we’ll find something there.
For now, we have Edgar Mitchell clearly on the record talking about the Roswell UFO crash based on his conversations with the people of Roswell he personally knew, talking about the oversight committee which he labeled MJ-12, and talking about the continuing government cover up about UFOs. We have an Air Force general telling us some of the same things. Isn’t it about time we began to take some of this a little more seriously and work together to unravel this rather than worry about who is right and who is wrong?

15 comments:

Lord Balto said...

Bravo.

I think Mitchell has finally tipped the scale toward the reality of UFO contacts. Note I didn't say "extraterrestrial." Vallee may still be right. They don't have to be from space to be physical.

Bob Barbanes: said...

Wow, it's Saturday evening and I just heard the Mitchell story on ABC national news! Maybe this story will have some "legs" as they say.

The story included a voice quote from Mitchell (presumably from the UK radio program): "If they were hostile we'd be gone by now." Yikes!

I wonder how a certain YouTuber is going to react to this revelation? Mitchell will no doubt be dismissed and discredited as a kook.

esperanto41 said...

As a casual reader for several decades about ufology, Roswell, etc., I was struck by something Edgar Mitchell said in the Lisa Bonnice interview of 2008-07-25: his use of the phrase “Military and Joint Intelligence Committee”, i.e., filling out the acronym “MAJIC” -- a complete nomenclature I don’t recall ever seeing heretofore. So I Googled the whole phrase in quotes, and the only results were from the Bonniface transcript, including your blog.

--Gene Keyes
Berwick, NS, Canada

PS: Today, The New York Times reminds us "On This Day: On July 26, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Quite an eventful month, that July 1947.

cda said...

Please do not get excited over Ed Mitchell. He seems to be repeating things he has heard and read about. There is nothing new in his 'revelations' (although I did not see the program). He has been sucked into Roswell because he once lived near there and knows, or knew, a number of people from there.

Concerning the so called 'oversight committee' Ruppelt talks about (he does not use this term) this was the CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, consisting of H.Marshall Chadwell, Fred C.Durant, H.P.Robertson, plus a few others. I think a few at the time were pro-ETH. This was in 1952-53. The last two named above served on the Robertson Committee. Ruppelt was talking about the Lubbock Lights affair when he mentioned the CIA gang in his book.

Brad Sparks revealed all this long ago, so there is no need to speculate any further.

KRandle said...

Sorry CDA, but your response is non-responsive... Mitchell tells us of what he learned by talking with people he knew and who were involved... not quite the same as reading about it and latching onto it because he lived in Roswell once.

The same thing with your comment about the oversight committee. True, Ruppelt didn't use those words, but he describes something at a high level who had complete access to the Blue Book files... and that smacks of oversight.

Yes, I knew about this from long ago, which is why I had the information at my fingertips. That Brad identified these men and that two of them were on the Robertson Panel does not negate the point of some sort of oversight. We don't know if they exercised their power later, after Ruppelt left, but I would suspect something like that after Levelland.

While your comments are interesting, as always, they really do not advance our knowledge.

starman said...

"They don't have to be from space to be physical."

They are obviously technological, and where else would an advanced system come from? The center of the Earth?

As for Mitchell, I don't doubt the basic truth of Roswell. But at least two things he said convince me he's a disinformation agent. Just like so many others....

cda said...

Sorry, but why do we need a disinformation agent on Roswell, over 60 years after the events?

I simply cannot see the tiniest, remotest, reason for the US government (or any other government for that matter) still having to tell us the story that perhaps the greatest scientific event of all time never happened, and using 'disinformation agents' to do this.

IrishCicero said...

Great post. We added you to our post at Liberty Peak Lodge.

Thank you.

starman said...

LOL, it is obvious why Roswell was/is covered up. Disclosing the arrival of beings from another world, obviously far ahead of us, could have a PROFOUND impact, even if outright panic didn't happen.
Actually, disinformation is a separate issue from out and out coverup. Like many others, Mitchell freely stated that Roswell was real. But IMO he mislead believers in at least two ways. The government knows some people will see through the balloon nonsense. If they can't prevent some people from believing ETs were at Roswell, at least they can prevent them from drawing certain correct conclusions about the affair. That's the point of disinformation--to supplement the denial.

Kentaro Mori said...

What's puzzling is the coincidence of a flying saucer crash days after Arnold's sighting.

Arnold's sighting is presumedly something casual -- even if they were alien spacecraft, whatever, we assume it was not something planned.

The same goes for a crash in Roswell, though some suggest it was deliberate -- in which case dead alien bodies would suggest something BAD about their methods.

To top it, we all know Arnold didn't see actual flying saucers, and the origins of the term. Though he gave conflicting statements, he later clarified that what he saw was hardly what the term conjured up in people's minds.

And yet, we have people claiming a flying disc, a flying saucer crashed in Roswell.

These could all be just amazing coincidences. Perhaps Arnold saw Pelicans (aha!), by coincidence and ambiguity it came to known as flying saucers, and by coincidence days later an actual alien flying saucer crashed near Roswell. It's possible, stranger things have happened.

But it's puzzling. The old boring skeptical approach of suggesting the Roswell crash was heavily influenced by the popular frenzy over Arnold's sighting, and was very probably not a flying saucer, does seem more easy to accept, prima facie.

We do have, though, all these statements and evidence that suggest otherwise. Mogul is indeed not a perfect explanation -- and if it wasn't Mogul, anyone must recognize there were many bizarre coincidences and similarities between it and the Roswell stories.

In all, you can add to the puzzlement that Roswell went undergound from 1947 for around three decades. Even Mitchell admits he only came to know/be intrested about the alleged Roswell UFO crash in the 1980s. Why didn't the old-timers tell him things before that?

There's so much confusion, Roswell is such a big mess. It very probably has been under one or more disinformation campaigns, MJ12 included.

starman said...

I don't assume Arnold's sighting was not something planned. He noticed objects reflecting sun at him. It wouldn't be at all surprising if they were trying to get his attention. Nothing atypical about that.
Not everybody said a flying disc crashed in Roswell. Kaufmann said it was a batwing device. But I agree that an intentional affair involving corpses would suggest something "bad." And that, in part, might've caused the coverup.

cda said...

To return to Kevin's original posting, Edgar Mitchell's information cannot be regarded as confirming that of General Exon. As Kentaro Mori suggests, this is because Mitchell only learned of Roswell decades later, presumably after reading books, articles & hearing bits of evidence from people he knew. He had no original 1947 knowledge of the case (as far as we know). So I simply do not see how Mitchell's testimony adds anything to what witnesses (whether first, second or third hand) have already said.
Now if he had seen something very similar to the Roswell craft on the moon, had clear photos to back it up, and had confirmation from his co-astronaut Alan Shephard plus recordings of their conversations about it, it would be a totally different story. And he would not have waited until 1982 to tell us either!

We are faced with the idea that because Mitchell was an astronaut he must have had some privileged secret info on the affair, rather like certain AF officers & top scientists. But had he?

spookgle said...

We have likely been existing here on planet "Spider" for 6400 year's,interfaced with Orion whose avian's of several kind's landed here back then.
A gradual subsumption has been a process continuum,from civilization 1 to civilization 2,from jungle to jet plane.And the fight goes on.(Sorry about those alien's but THEY didn't see the SPIDER.)KFC-NOCOLONEL Cuisinetithe--Try holograhamcracker's---With all due respect to Humanity and inanimality---When truth is ugly enough,it is harder to find.

TLC said...

Regardless of whether a strange object was found, even nonhuman bodies, it still does not prove an extraterrestrial origin.

If a ship and bodies were in fact discovered they could be the tulpas - a materialized manifestations of an unknown intelligence on earth. Maybe they are products of the human mind. We just haven't figured it out the mechanisms yet.

Until we can go to the alleged "aliens" home planet, find the factory where they built the ship and match it up to the one that crashed we're just speculating.

Pat said...

As usual, CDA , whoever that learned soul is, knows all, lacks any understanding of why anyone or any agency might be deceitful (unless they believe in the possibility of ufos,) and is vastly more wise than anyone else who might voice a thought. We salute you CDA, we had a term for someone of your prowess in the service, it involved hygiene products and was terribly unsophisticated for someone as clever as you. But accurate nonetheless