The Eisenhower briefing documents appear to have been prepared on an R. C. Allen machine, which was manufactured in the 1940s. The typewriter and typeface used for the Truman memorandum is a matter of dispute. Friedman argued that it was prepared on a Remington P4 from the 1940s, a machine also used by Bush for his memoranda. This reinforced Friedman’s belief that Bush prepared the memorandum. Other typewriter experts have suggested the memorandum was prepared using either a Ransmayer and Rodrian 664 (no manufacture dates offered) or an Underwood UP3A, which was manufactured from 1933 until 1946. Kevin Randle, who argued strenuously against the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents, spoke to an expert who believed the memo typeface was most consistent with a Smith Corona P102 (a “slam dunk,” said the expert), which was used on typewriters only after 1966. Randle challenged Friedman, Moore, and Shandera to produce their experts, which they did not do, and which led him to charge that the experts probably never existed.62
An especially controversial point about the document was its mention of Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel as a member of MJ-12. For decades, Menzel was the world’s leading UFO debunker. Could Menzel really have belonged to a group like MJ-12? It seemed like a bad joke. To the surprise of all, however, Friedman soon learned that Menzel was closely tied to the American intelligence community as a cryptologist, and had a long-standing association with the National Security Agency (NSA). A 1960 letter from Menzel to President-elect John F. Kennedy mentioned his Top Secret clearance and “some association” with the CIA. In the 1970s Menzel wrote that he “was a consultant with Top Secret Ultra Clearance to the National Security Agency.”63 Menzel and Vannevar Bush were also friends from the early days of the war. Randle argued that these discoveries proved nothing, as “almost any scientist who was alive and working during the early 1940s was probably involved in some sort of work for the government.” But this misses Friedman’s point that Menzel was at the top of that power pyramid.
Many people, including UFO debunker Philip Klass, criticized the dating style of the documents, such as “07 July, 1947,” which was never a standard military format. Neither the comma nor the initial zero should have been included, and certainly not for a presidential briefing paper to a five-star general. Klass also discovered that the style of dating happened to be a type used by Moore himself in several letters to Klass! That would seem to clinch it, except that (a) Moore also used several other dating styles, and (b) Friedman found a wide range of dating styles in the archives, including the day, month, comma, year format. Moreover, the format was common in France, where Hillenkoetter had served for some time. Friedman also emphasized that dating formats of the time were not set in stone. His opponents, such as Joe Nickell and John F. Fischer, countered that no one has found any other documents, whether from Hillenkoetter or anyone else, containing the extra zero
Friedman brought the MJ-12 documents, along with about twenty other documents written by Hillenkoetter, to a notable linguist, Dr. Roger W Wescott of Drew University. Wescott said there was no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter himself. That statement holds for the controversial presidential briefing memorandum of November 18, 1952.
Randle countered that Wescott’s expertise was in linguistics, not in the examination of questioned documents. Indeed, Wescott later realized he had stepped into “a hornet’s nest” and stated that, while he thought its fraudulence unproved, he “could equally well have maintained that its authenticity is unproved.”65
The main argument against the documents’ authenticity, and the one which swayed most UFO researchers, concerned Truman’s signature. Klass found that it matched a letter in the Truman archives: a xeroxed letter written by Truman to Bush on October 1, 1947. Thus, it appeared that the forger simply tacked a real signature on to a fake letter. The discovery of tampering was enough to turn most seasoned researchers away.
Surprisingly, not everyone was persuaded that this meant the documents were faked. In the first place, the identical signature was found on a copy of a document addressed to, of all people, Vannevar Bush. A careful study of the signatures shows the MJ-12 signature to be much stronger than the copy it supposedly came from (the signature on Truman’s letter to Bush is thin and broken in places). If the MJ-12 signature was forged or copied, how could it have come from the document found by Klass (the original of which, incidentally, has never been found)? It may be that both signatures are from the same missing source.
