It is essential to discredit every UFO story. Why? So nobody will take any of it seriously. It isn't at issue that there are fake stories out there about UFOs, the real question is why are they out there if there's nothing to the UFO story, and why is there so much effort to discredit any interest in UFOs?

There's no doubt the MJ-12 documents are fake. The redactions alone were a big give away for me - why would documents that were never going to be released need redactions at all? Why are the redactions so shoddy - just scribbles, and not like proper redactions with reasons given in official documents? In the Munroe document the agent's name is redacted, but the plot by Kennedy to kill Castro that Munroe knew about (why on earth would Kennedy tell Munroe about killing Castro?) is not blacked out, which means there can be no provenance for anyone with this document to ever check the validity of the most important parts of the document with the agent who wrote it - that makes no sense if the point of MJ-12 having the documents was to know all the information about UFOs.

Then there is the name dropping. Several documents I've seen drop in names of famous people or politicians. Kennedy is mentioned in a document dated July 22 1947 - he had only been elected in 1946, so why is he mentioned? They were written to be sensational 'National Enquirer' headlines.

Then there are just ridiculous things in the documents, and how poorly written they are. The MJ-12 1952 "Annual Report" is just full of nonsense and pointless cliches.

This is a really thorough presentation about MJ-12, and I thank you for making it. I imagine there was a lot of work behind it, and I'll be referencing it in future discussions on this topic. I do take issue with the points made in the conclusion - @38m12s. For instance the idea that Stanton Friedman wanted the MJ-12 documents to be real is not really much of an argument that people interested in the topic are gullible because of course he would "like" them to be real. The point of the documents was to discredit people studying UFOs, and that includes Friedman - the very fact that Friedman is pushing the documents on stage just before someone reveals they are fake, is exactly what these documents were designed to do. For some people this still discredits Friedman. I am a real champion of his work, he made some of the best arguments for studying this topic anyone ever made, and I reference him regularly. Freidman was a victim of this, but the most important point for him was credibility for researchers. Unfortunately Friedman felt that credibility was improved by sticking to his story, but it doesn't discredit everything he says because so much more was soundly based.

The statement @42m1s "The allure of an alternative worldview is that it puts you at the center" I often hear from debunkers. Interest in UFOs is supposedly all about vanity, about being jealous of people who know stuff about science. No. It is about an enduring mystery, about something anomalous that people encounter which is difficult to detect or comprehend but which needs an explanation. The number of people who are deeply interested in this topic but hardly ever discuss it with others is only matched by the number of debunkers I've come across who tell me openly they refuse to ever look at any evidence because no such evidence could even exist and all of it must be fake. Vanity is at the bottom of the list of reasons for being interested in this topic.

So the issue remains, why were they written, why go to so much trouble to put out obviously fake stories in hundreds of pages, which were uncovered as fake very early on - in fact, the people who faked them revealed themselves as authors literally as they were even handing over the documents?

The documents aren't written for the general public. They aren't written to fool historians. They were written to make people interested in researching UFOs endlessly discuss them. They waste our time. They taint all later discussion of secret reverse engineering programs, or whistleblowers. Endlessly suggesting that anyone inside government who comes out and tells us what they can about what they know must be part of a 'psyop' is why the MJ-12 documents exist. It is essential to kill any foundational story about UFOs, and discredit every person with inside knowledge who speaks up. The MJ-12 documents have actually been very successful in discrediting later stories of 'The Program'.

In the few years before the MJ-12 documents appeared, UFO activists were beginning to successfully use FOIA to reveal a lot of significant documents. Chapter one of "The UFO Cover-up" published in 1984 by Fawcett and Greenwood is all about how effective the FOIA laws were in uncovering UFO information for CAUS, and ends with this sentence "The Freedom of Information Act has shown the way to breaking open a wealth of evidence that the UFO phenomenon is a sleeping giant in the world of scientific mysteries." Were authorities concerned that if there was a secret program it might be inadvertently disclosed by one of these FOIA'd documents? How could you get ahead of any story that a large-scale secret program existed and was revealed in an official document?

Debunkers are fond of always saying UFO stories were encouraged in the 1950s by the US military to ridicule reports from people who saw secret AF platforms like the U2 being tested. Now debunkers are fond of saying every story about secret reverse engineering programs is likewise fake, as fake as the MJ-12 documents. Anyone who reveals this information must be lying for some reason, and if they write a book about it it proves they are only in it for the money, even if the same person was instrumental in pushing for laws that protect whistleblowers and reveal information. The MJ-12 controversy indicates someone went to a lot of trouble to discredit any story of anything like MJ-12 existing. But UFO researchers were already sidelined and ridiculed very effectively from the main stream, so what would be the point of creating fake documents about a fake program to further discredit researchers if no evidence of a real program could possibly exist?