Sunday, October 12, 2014

Stanton Friedman - William Moore and MJ-12


In this excerpt from an interview I conducted with him in 2003, Stanton Friedman talks about his relationship with fellow ufologist William Moore, who was his research partner on Roswell and MJ-12 for a decade from the late 1970s through the 1980s.

Much grist for the mill here, most of it centering on the cognitive dissonance of what Stan says about Moore's honesty - "Bill was a tricky guy," "He liked to float proposals, run them up the flag pole and see how people would react," he was committing mail fraud - and his blithe brushing off of the prospect that Moore created the MJ-12 documents by saying that Bill couldn't have know certain details so he couldn't have created the documents. What Stan ignores is the probability that Moore was working with someone else (or a small group of people) who could have found all the needed information, namely Moore's other "partner" in the 1980s - Rick Doty.

As for a motive, Stan details that as well, even as he ignores its implications - Moore's financial problems in the 1980s. Nothing like some fake documents to gin up interest in his cash-cow story (Roswell) which was starting to grow cold.

The MJ-12 story really is that simple. Stan has all the facts at his command, but he just can't see the forest for the trees - a triumph of belief over reason and common sense.

Paul Kimball

2 comments:

cda said...

Stan Friedman has remarked in the past that Moore simply "could not have known" certain things that appeared in the MJ-12 Eisenhower paper. Which things were these?

Stan cooperated with Moore on months of archival research well before the MJ-12 stuff was made public, in fact well before the roll of film reached Shandera.

I think Stan is referring to the 'Menzel affair', which he claims was unknown to Bill Moore. In essence this is that Moore knew nothing about Menzel's activities during WW2 and just after, because Friedman only found out himself during research in the 1980s and nobody else had ever looked at all the supposedly secret Menzel papers before Friedman did.

Actually, as I pointed out long ago, Moore did NOT NEED to know all this secret Menzel stuff. He could have made an intelligent guess from what was publicly known about Menzel, and then put Menzel's name down in the MJ-12 group.

And that about sums it up. Friedman's statement about Menzel therefore has no value regarding the authenticity of the MJ-12 papers.

Clarence said...

..as an ex-navy guy who worked in admin, ran a small tech library and worked as a YN for a while, the problem I have with the MJ documents is that they don't "read" like a real military document or manual that I'm, familiar with; they are wordy, repetitive and the contents page is poor and hard to follow....