While we all pore over the U.S. government's UFO document release, I thought I'd use it as an excuse to take a trip down memory lane, back to one of the big controversies of the UFO community. For those who haven't been following, I've been doing a series of posts on the Majestic 12 or MJ-12 documents - which are alleged government documents proving Earth's contact with aliens and the government's cover up of them. In my last post (linked at the bottom of this one), I looked at some of these documents and the UFOlogist Stanton Friedman's research that exposed many of them as being plagiarised and altered emulations of real government documents. Friedman's theory was that many of these MJ-12 documents were made by taking real documents and retyping them to add in details about flying saucers and a government conspiracy. As we'll see, his research appears to have been recently vindicated. The newly released UFO files contain one document that might be very familiar to UFO buffs - a memo written by General Nathan F. Twining entitled "AMC Opinion Concerning 'Flying Discs'". The memo was first released publicly as Appendix R in the Condon Report on UFOs in 1969, but it was written in 1947 at the height of the first big "UFO flap". https://preview.redd.it/rme9o7er740h1.png?width=622&format=png&auto=webp&s=b284c9fdf2d7380f1e1a64d57482064d4e17ea44 The letter is extremely interesting on its own, but I thought I'd discuss in this post its fascinating connections to one of the plagiarised MJ-12 documents - called variously the "Flying Saucer Analytical Report" allegedly penned on 2 September 1947 but first appearing in the early 1990s. Comparing the two, it quickly becomes obvious that the MJ-12 version lifts the entire structure and some of the content of the Twining Memo, with alterations to add in fantastical elements. The Subject and Address Line Starting at the very top, even the subject and address line of the authentic Twining Memo appear to have been copied onto the MJ-12 version. Reproduced below are both documents, first the authentic and then the MJ-12. https://preview.redd.it/8ng8t5dp640h1.png?width=907&format=png&auto=webp&s=3ce2c3157da707a732ce03d5a36e4b8cad58aaf7 https://preview.redd.it/edfgu2dp640h1.png?width=758&format=png&auto=webp&s=562016a08b1ad9b758ed4bd041cc791498eb6399 Twining Memo (authentic): 23 September 1947 SUBJECT: AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs" TO: Commanding General Army Air Forces Washington 25, D. C. ATTENTION: Brig. General George Schulgen AC/AS-2 MJ-12 Memo (questioned): 2 September 1947 SUBJECT: Flying Saucer TO: Commanding General Air Materiel Command Wright Field Dayton, Ohio ATTN: AC/AS-2 Brig. Gen. C. P. Cabell Headquarters, Army Air Forces Washington 25, D. C Both have a subject line referencing Flying Discs or Flying Saucers, both are addressed to a Commanding General - and both are apparently being sent to Brigadier General George Schulgen (the Army Air Forces Commanding General). Both then have an Attention section that mentions "AC/AS-2" Both have text and the date to the upper right hand side. The Format While the wording differs, the structure of both documents is strikingly similar. Both begin with a paragraph starting with "1." that leads in with "As requested by…" then describes the document as being formed from the opinions/conclusions of various people, including "T-2" and "T-3" personnel, then both have a "2." paragraph that contains several lettered sub-points from "a." to "f." that elaborate on some of those conclusions. The Twining Memo begins; 1. As requested by AC/AS-2 there is presented below the considered opinion of this command concerning the so-called "Flying Discs". This opinion is based on interrogation report data furnished by AC/AS-2 and preliminary studies by personnel of T-2 and Aircraft Laboratory, Engineering Division T-3. This opinion was arrived at in a conference between personnel from the Air Institute of Technology, Intelligence T-2, Office, Chief of Engineering Division, and the Aircraft, Power Plant and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3. The "Flying Saucer Analytical report begins: 1. As requested by your letter of 16 July 1947 this office has produced its conclusions on the manufacture, function and possible origin of the above referenced subject. On-site preliminary study data provided by personnel of T-2 and T-3, search and recovery team of the AFSWP, 'Paper Clip' personnel, select personnel of the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group and personnel of the Atomic Energy Commission Advisory Committee was utilized in the construction of our analysis. And here are both documents compared against each other again, again with the Twining Memo as the first, and the MJ-12 version as the second; https://preview.redd.it/dcwkv1dp640h1.png?width=540&format=png&auto=webp&s=bdb85317c54a4a94aa1595345558bc39f94338d3 https://preview.redd.it/wbllv3dp640h1.png?width=520&format=png&auto=webp&s=2a02efd53f4e2e67dda2d9751aa3cbfe88ae156f Direct Examples of Plagiarism It's not only the format of the documents that are similar - the MJ-12 document, which was revealed to the public some twenty years after the Twining Memo was first released, also copies sentences and phrases with very slight changes. Twining Memo; Basic Ltr fr CG, AMC, WF to CG, AAF, Wash. D.C. subj "AMC Opinion Concerning "Flying Discs". MJ-12 version; Basic ltr fr R&D, to CG, AMC, ATTN HQ, AAF, WASH. D.C., AC/AS-2, MAJIC EYES, subj "Flying Saucer". (NOTE: an especially curious aspect of this example is the MJ-12 reproduction appears partway down page 2, even though on the original memo, it is clearly a page header) Twining Memo; Metallic or light reflecting surface. MJ-12 version; Metallic skin of a high polished finish. Twining Memo; The apparent common description of the objects is as follows: MJ-12 version; A general description of the craft is presented: Twining Memo; …a form of propulsion possibly nuclear… MJ-12 version; Power plant may consist of a spherical reactor… The Documents The MJ-12 report goes on to provide a lot of very fantastic and detailed description of these seemingly non-human crafts - that the controls are flexible tubes wrapped in plastic that respond to touch, that they use hydrogen power, that they aren't made of human metals and more. Naturally, the original Twining Memo contains none of this information, meaning a lot of the content of the MJ-12 report is impossible to verify. However, by examining the extreme similarities between the two documents, the examples of blatant copying, and the fact that many of the documents produced by this same "source" were exposed by Stanton Friedman as being forgeries (as I showed in my last post, linked below) - the conclusions from this comparison seem apparent. The UFO Files - Conclusion Thanks to the recently released UFO files, we have a really nice copy of this original Twining memo, available here: https://www.war.gov/medialink/ufo/release_1/18_100754_%20general%201946-7_vol_2.pdf Hopefully, researchers find more gems like this inside of the recent release. Even though we had the Twining Report back in 1969, it's nice to see a proper scan of the thing. Here's a link to the MJ-12 Flying Saucer Analytical Report: https://majesticdocuments.com/pdf/rdlab_analyticalrpt2sept47.pdf My prior post exposing more plagiarism in the controversial MJ-12 documents can be found here; https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1t59eo4/the_834021_documents_new_evidence_confirms/ If you're willing, let me know your thoughts on this. I pulled all this together in a couple of hours after finding the Twining Memo in the UFO files, so I'm sure there's some details I've missed, but I also couldn't find much discussion of the striking similarities of these documents before. Thanks for reading my late night UFO cookery! submitted by /u/tsuyurikun [link] [comments]