Aliens and belief in their existence have been part of human imagination for centuries.
In contrast to the almost regular news articles in the time of the Space Race during the Cold War that were widely held as hardly believable, except among people referred to as conspiracy theorists, nowadays it seems there is an increase in legitimate research that proves that something must exist out there.
When in December 2017 the New York Times published an article revealing the details of a five-year-long Pentagon investigation into “unexplained aerial phenomena,” readers seemed to take a much more believing approach to the news. Former senator Harry Reid voiced his opinion in a tweet that read “The truth is out there.”
One controversial thing that took place the same year was the release of alleged leaked government documents relating to an investigation by the group Majestic 12 on crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft and the alien travelers that were on board.
The first series of such documents appeared in 1984. Despite being determined as “completely bogus” by an FBI investigation, the idea of a secretive government cover-up is still upheld by some UFO conspiracy theorists.
Majestic 12, the alleged leaked documents stated, was formed in 1947 under President Harry Truman and was a top-secret group comprising military personnel and scientists.
The documents named top officials including Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first director of the CIA; Dr. Vannevar Bush, a former wartime chair of the Office of Scientific Research; and Dr. Donald Menzel, a prominent scientist and astronomer working at Harvard University.
The latest document, which appeared in 2017, allegedly contained proof that the 1947 UFO crash in Roswell indeed happened. It was a four-page section of a supposed Majestic 12 preliminary briefing from 1989, that claimed the group was in possession of seven crashed spaceships and the preserved bodies of 27 deceased aliens.
Could the so-called Majestic Documents possibly be real?
UFO and paranormal researcher Nick Redfern was among the first people to dispute the credibility of the 2017 “leaked” pages.
Aside from numerous grammatical errors in the cryptic text, Redfern highlights that the style is not consistent with government documentation. Also, and perhaps most importantly, the document confused the chronology of the different events that it was trying to prove.
One of the most widely derided parts of the document was an interview with a captive alien that did not even mention the language in which the interview was held.
Describing the transcript of the alleged interview for OpenMinds.Tv, Nick Pope, a UFO journalist and former employee of the British Government’s Ministry of Defence, compared it to “a high school student attempting (badly) to write a science fiction short story.”
However, there are defenders of the documents, most prominently Dr. Robert Wood and his son Ryan Wood, who argue that rigorous analysis has proven them to be genuine.
The father and son provide counter-arguments for every inconsistency, insisting that the documents could very well be the proof of life existing outside of the Earth.
UFO scientist and nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman has extensively analyzed the Majestic Documents and has evidence for some of them being forged. Dr. Wood and co., however, maintain that Friedman still cannot exclude with certainty the possibility that part of them could be the real deal.