Hangar 1, MUFON and Mandate 0463

Hangar 1: The UFO Files, opens with the statement,

"The following incidents are from real case files.

They are from actual UFO investigations."

Here's what Mutual UFO Network's website says about the series:

"The premise of each episode is to examine a number of MUFON cases, looking for patterns that tie in to historic UFO events and try to show what the alien agenda may be. Actual footage and recreations will be used along with expert testimony...  The show will showcase MUFON’s mission to educate the public about the UFO phenomenon. 

Stay tuned because the 'truth is out there' or shall we say, it’s actually in HANGAR 1.” 

Illustration

In the first episode of Hangar 1: The UFO Files episode one, “Presidential Encounters,” there's a clip showing a document used to illustrate the US Government UFO cover-up. 

According to the show, after President Eisenhower met aliens at Muroc Air Force base in 1954, he tightened the lid on UFO secrecy. The narration states, "A secret policy was adopted that stated that any information on the matter of extraterrestrials was a matter of National security and therefore classified." They show and quote from a document, Mandate 0463.

"under no circumstances are the general public or public press to learn of the existence of these entities, the official government policy is that such creatures do not exist."

The problem is, it's a phony. 

Hangar 1 The UFO Files - Presidential Encounters - Video Dailymotion

Mandate 0463 seen at 3:26

Public Exposure

Jason Colavito’s blog was the first one to examine the false document:

They show a document on screen labeled “MANDATE 0463” from 1 March 1954, but I can find no record that this paper actually exists outside of the show...

Here’s the MAJESTIC-12 language attributed to “Chapter 5: Extraterrestrial Biological Entities” of the Group Special Operations Manual dated April 1954, reformatted on this show to fabricate a “1 March 1954” memo, by computer, in Times New Roman... "Under no circumstances is the general public or public press to learn of the existence of these entities. The official government policy is that such creatures do not exist, and that no agency of the federal government is now engaged in any study of extraterrestrials or their artifacts. Any deviation from this stated policy is absolutely forbidden.” This is the same text Hangar 1 uses, but they excerpt only some sentences from the MJ-12 manual in crafting their own fake memo.

The whole thing we see on screen appears to be a complete fabrication from this passage of the fictional MJ-12 documents, and no one on this show acknowledges or addresses the deception involved in creating this fake document as an “illustration.” http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/review-of-hangar-1-ufo-files-s01e01-presidential-encounters  (3/2/2014) 

A Fake Based on a Fake: SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual

The SOM 1-01Manual

SOM 1-01 was evaluated as a fake by reputable UFO experts, including MUFON's Richard H. Hall and Thomas P. Deuley:

The SOM 1-01 manual arrived in the mail to Don Berliner as a roll of film from an anonymous source. This immediately raises suspicions, since there is no identifiable source whose veracity and reputation can be checked and no original documents that can be subjected to forensic analysis...We believe this to be a hoax document; a deliberate fake designed to mislead the public and to plant false information in the UFO research community... See http://www.cufos.org/ros5.html 

Robert Hastings has also written about "SOM 1-01" in Operation Bird Droppings
"As was the case with the earlier batch of MJ-12 'documents' that surfaced 25 years ago, the newly-disseminated MJ-12-related SOM-01-I 'field manual' is undoubtedly a forgery."
More recently, in MJ-12: The Hoax That Quickly Became a Disinformation Operation.

For example, MJ-12 was prominently featured during the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, held in Washington D.C. in May 2013. Linda Moulton Howe breathlessly characterized the MJ-12-related SOM 1-01 Special Operations Manual—which directs military personnel how to recover crashed UFOs and dead aliens—as having “stood the test of time”. Hardly! Military document expert and longtime UFO researcher Jan Aldrich has discovered over 50 factual errors and/or discrepancies in military protocol in the so-called “manual”.
http://www.theufochronicles.com/2014/10/mj-12-hoax-that-quickly-became.html

For some reason, SOM 1-01 was not used in the show. Instead, a different counterfeit document was created.

Mandate 0463: Further Discussions

A blurry look at "Mandate 0463"

Shortly after the broadcast of Hangar 1 episode: “Presidential Encounters,” other authors wrote about the use of Mandate 0463. 

Tim Printy at SUNlite: The show then decides to present something called Mandate 0463 (dated 3 March 1954), which states that the existence of aliens is to be denied by all DOD departments/personnel. Does such a document really exist? The document states that it was created at the 2374th meeting of the DOD on March 1, 1954. The DOD was created September 18, 1947. There were 2356 days between these two dates. According to Jason Colavito’s blog, some of the wording comes from the MJ-12 SOM-1 manual Chapter 5. 5 This document looked fabricated... (May 2014) http://home.comcast.net/~tprinty/UFO/SUNlite6_3.pdf

Made for TV document.

Robert Sheaffer also covered the use of Mandate 0463:

MUFON has fabricated documents to look like genuine secret government UFO documents, and presented them in Hangar 1 as if they were authentic, with no explanation or disclaimer. If that isn't downright dishonesty, I don't know what else to call it. (3/13/14) http://badufos.blogspot.com/2014/03/mufon-jumps-shark.html

Sheaffer’s article is particularly interesting because a MUFON representative replied to it:

Terry Montgomery Groff March 13, 2014 at 3:03 PM "No, MUFON claims these programs are based on files in a real storage area in Cincinnati, Ohio that they call Hanger 1. Everything in the program does indeed have associated files in storage including information on Presidential encounters."

Besides the UFO skeptics, there were also online discussions of it at forums such as: 

http://www.theparacast.com/forum/ 

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/19/pg1/srtpages

Facebook, at various pages and groups, including, UFO UpDates and "The 'Official' Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Facebook Page, with Rich Hoffman and Steve Hudgeons, Jr. 

Hangar 1 producers may not have been aware of the criticism, but members and officials of MUFON were. The Mandate 0463 clip was used again Nov. 14, 2014 in a MUFON promotional film:

Mandate 0463 is presented at 50 seconds in.

Negligence, or willful misconduct?

More documents "made for TV"

The Mandate 0463 document is a fake, made for television. Hangar 1 features plenty of discussion of speculative and undocumented material, but that is really a whole other topic. By displaying phony documents such as Mandate 0463, it seems to indicate that MUFON or the show's producers are having trouble distinguishing fact from fiction. Or, that they are unconcerned with the difference.

The UFO topic is polluted enough with misinformation and mistakes. There's no need to manufacture new ones. Was Mandate 0463's use in Hangar 1 negligence, or willful misconduct? 

In the public eye, this is exactly the situation that prompts the media to ask, “Idiot or Liar?”

 - - -

To learn more about Hangar 1: The UFO Files:

Jan Harzan is the executive director of MUFON and is featured on the program. 

MUFON Headquarters: 3822 Campus Drive Suite 201 Newport Beach, CA 92660

949-47MUFON or 949-476-8366

Hangar 1 is produced by Go Go Luckey Entertainment. 

IMDb gives the senior credits for the  “Presidential Encounters” episode as:

Mitch Marcus

...

director

Amy Cron	...	senior story producer
Christopher Lauer	...	line producer
Douglas Segal	...	executive producer
Kevin Tavolaro	...	senior story producer
Paul Villadolid	...	executive producer

MJ-12, The "Pratt Sensitive" Documents, Cash-Landrum, Doty and Moore

Some big UFO news broke in 2007, about MJ-12 and how it came to be. Majestic 12, or MJ 12 was said to be the secret US government cabal that controlled UFO information. At the MUFON 2007 Symposium, Brad Sparks presented a paper that he co-authored with Barry Greenwood:

The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12 by Brad Sparks and Barry Greenwood (PDF)

The paper was based on documents from UFO journalist, Bob Pratt, notes from his meetings and calls with William L. Moore and Richard C. Doty. The key point of interest to the authors of the paper was that Moore and Doty were discussing MJ-12 and the related concepts before any documents were known to exist, and they planned to use it as the basis for a UFO science fiction novel.

Bob Pratt

Bill Moore

Rick Doty

There's discussion of Paul Bennewitz, Roswell, abductions, alien bodies, crashed and recovered flying saucers, ETs influencing our cultural and religious history (Jesus was one of theirs), espionage, disinformation and so much more! At the site Reality Uncovered, the article, Bill Moore's Disinfo- A Vehicle for Injected Social Memes examines the concepts and how they were spread.

Immediately after the release of the Sparks/Greenwood article, there was a round of heated debate, even among the author themselves! Some of the saga is chronicled at UFO UpDates starting Aug. 13, 2007.

The Documents: "Pratt Sensitive"

Shortly after the Sparks-Greenwood article was published, James Carrion, then MUFON director, released a PDF of the original 60 pages of Pratt documents:

Bob Pratt's documents on Moore and Doty: "Pratt Sensitive" (PDF)

It's a rare opportunity to see how fraudulent information was seeded and spread into UFO lore.

 

The Doty Cash Landrum Disinformation

My particular interest in the Pratt documents are the early bogus claims Richard Doty made about the Cash-Landrum case, which are very elaborate and colorful. A sample: 

Betty Cash, Vikie Landrum and Colby Landrum, were not contacted by AFINTEL because of their involvement with civilian UFO people. It was determined that these three could be used to further the "UFO explanation" and thus provide effective cover for the real nature of the affair.

Doty's "disclosures" on the C-L case are not the only comments he's made on it, and he was central in building the legend that the UFO was a malfunctioning US military experiment. He's been spreading lies about the case ever since. While I suspect he originally began exploiting the case chiefly because it was new and a hot topic. However, Doty's bogus input influences and contaminates the way the case is discussed, even now.

An illustration similar to Doty's description of the Cash-Landrum UFO shape

Richard Doty was there when the MJ-12 legend was created, and it's just one of the many pieces of disinformation he used to pollute the UFO topic.