Barry Greenwood's name came up during a discussion with Paul Dean. Paul recently published an article, The Fake 1961 "Special National Intelligence Estimate", and a $1000 Offer To Prove It Genuine... at his blog, UFOs -
Documenting The Evidence. The alleged SNIE recently received attention when it was identified
as the MJ-12 document endorsed as being authentic by Dr. Hal Puthoff of To The Stars Academy. Majestic 12, or MJ-12 is the alleged US government group in charge of covering up the UFO secrets, supported only by counterfeit documents from anonymous sources.
Talking to Paul about UFO documents (genuine and otherwise) and the role they played in UFO research, I wondered if anyone had ever done a historical overview. Paul suggested I check with an expert.
Talking to Paul about UFO documents (genuine and otherwise) and the role they played in UFO research, I wondered if anyone had ever done a historical overview. Paul suggested I check with an expert.
Barry Greenwood is a UFO
historian, and he is currently engaged in diligent work to archive original literature
and documents for posterity. He co-authored Clear Intent with Lawrence Fawcett in 1984, later reprinted as The UFO Cover-Up.
In 2007, Barry co-authored a paper with Brad Sparks, “The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12.” With Paul’s prompting, I emailed Barry and asked him
for his view, noting:
This recent noise about the SNIE document has
me wondering about the contrast between the fakes and the genuine instances of
leaked documents. …Donald Keyhoe received some leaked material, but it was
contemporary, not the allegedly decades-old stuff that
periodically surfaces.
Barry Greenwood promptly replied and graciously gave me
permission to share his thoughts, presented here as a guest column.
UFO Documents: Provenance
and Credibility
by Barry Greenwood
With regard to Keyhoe,
he received contemporary documents from known sources. Sometimes, sources were
not named but the information was not sensationalized and survived the passage
of time. In Flying Saucers- Top Secret, he talked of "Hidden
Cases" where they were aggravatingly thin on researchable detail. I spent
time over the last three years in the NICAP files looking for these reports but
they are missing. Keyhoe was derelict in not having safety copies of these
reports in a safe place and now they are lost to history. I asked Gordon Lore
about this but he was not in the loop. I guess Keyhoe thought he could live
forever!
There was always hoaxing
in this subject but the transition of the usual hoaxing to deliberate
falsification of government documents crossed a line in the late 1970s. We
finally had achieved some sort of credibility in what the government knew about
UFOs by gaining access to official inquiry and investigations that revealed
they didn't quite know what it was with what they dealt. Then a few fakes
appeared followed by one in the military [Richard Doty] who planted fakes in government
files and had those officially released via FOIA, a nefarious act that was
eventually supported by major names in UFO research. This same source
continued to circulate questionable documents as real. But by then every
government paper officially released had a taint of "how do you know that
is real?" A more effective watering down of what we had achieved, I can't
recall and it took little effort.
So now more
"leaks" about the same topic [MJ-12] still appear over
40 years later and are still embraced as genuine despite this long history of
hoaxing and taint. The persistence is eye-opening and has the appearance of a
cult relentlessly pushing their agendas. What really astonishes me is how
a very simple rule of thumb has been, and is being, ignored. I explained very clearly
in Clear Intent that provenance of documents is vital to the
credibility of the information. We filed FOIAs and kept cover letters to
establish the sources of the information as authentic, already knowing that
fakery was underway and illegitimately competing for the attention of UFO
researchers. The common theme of the fakes was that the sources were mysterious
and it took a leap of faith to accept the contents. A large percentage of
people are gullible, even very gullible, about the sensation of information
on UFOs. If the information promised to satisfy articles of belief, it was
embraced before any investigation as to the authenticity of that
information. I think this contributed to Stan Friedman's rabid promotion of
questioned documents. Not knowing from where information came opens the
door to fiction becoming fact in the minds of ones seeking quick conclusions
about a mysterious topic.
With regard to the SNIE
paper, Paul may have told you the details but he approached me a while back
with this document. He said it came from a prominent person [affiliation
redacted] who wanted input as to whether or not is was genuine. It took
about ten seconds to see it was another MJ-12 hoax, again unattributed as to
source and likely from the Richard Doty/Tim Cooper school of document fakery.
Cooper has said he had about 4000 pages of “leaks" acquired under very
suspicious circumstances, which could provide a years-long supply of
continuous attention to the MJ-12 conspiracy. Cooper eventually admitted all the documents were fake.
The CUFOS site hosts a nice biography of Barry Greenwood, and he also maintains his own site, Barry Greenwood UFO Archive.
