... and a $1000 offer to prove it genuine...

Usually, when I study a UFO related topic, I offer a full, foundational treatment, complete with in-text-referencing from primary sources, images of old records, and a complete chronological history of whatever matter I’m exploring. The subject I aim to discuss here, however, is not worth such a laborious or scholarly effort. In fact, dealing with it at all brings my conscience out in a rash.

A four-page document, which purports to be a top-echelon “Special National Intelligence Estimate” (SNIE) has been circulating, and gaining traction, within the UFO community. Pretending to have been completed on the 5th of November, 1961, the SNIE is titled “US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND MJTWELVE OPERATIONS  A SPECIAL NATIONAL INTELLEGENCE ESTIMATE” and was purportedly prepared for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by a handful of high-level national security entities. The subtitle of this discombobulated mess is “Critical Aspects of Unidentified Flying Objects and the Nuclear Threat to the Defense of the United States and Allies”, and the supposed serial number is “No. 1-61-E”. Briefly, the subject matter relates to the retrieval of crashed UFO’s, and the risks of nuclear war with the Soviet Union after such events. Researchers Danny Silva and Joe Murgia have presented the document here, here and here. The Black Vault dealt with some of the technical points to the document here.

I first saw this document quite some time ago, and it was the spelling and grammatical errors which immediately caught my attention. The word “Israelis” is misspelt as “Israelies”. The word “parody” should be the word “parity”. And, most outrageously, in the capitalised title, the word “Intelligence” is misspelt as “Intellegence”. Are we expected to believe that senior intelligence officials cannot even spell the very word that their life-long craft is based on? The grammar is just as bad. The phrase “In pursuant to…” should be “In pursuance to…”. The phrase “misguided suspicions…” should probably be “misplaced suspicions…”. And what the hell are “…CIA and DoD postmortem studies…” for a nuclear war that has never occurred? Also stated is that “…It is doubtful that China has a nuclear attack capability at the present time…”. One would think that real authors, being at this level of national security governance and critical intelligence evaluation, would have had a better handle on China’s nuclear weapons status by 1961. There are far more problems, but there’s only so much time one can spend raising them all.

The mention of certain government agencies, which didn't even exist in 1961, is far worse. The Joint Research and Development Board (JDRB) went out of existence in 1948-1949, and was replaced by the Research and Development Board (RDB), which was then abolished in 1953. We see the Joint Nuclear Energy Intelligence Committee (JNEIC) named, yet it was replaced by the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) in 1948. In fact both are named, but only the JAEIC existed in 1961 when the document was allegedly authored. The hoaxers should have made up their minds and settled only on the JAEIC. The listing of the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations (DD/O) is impossible. It didn’t exist until 1973. In 1961, when this dubious SNIE was supposedly created, the future DD/O was called the Deputy Director for Plans (DD/P). Just as bad is the mention of the CIA’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS). It didn’t exist in 1961 either. It was the Foreign Broadcast Information Division (FBID) back then, and it was only in 1965 that the FBID transitioned to the FBIS. Ooops. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is mentioned, but in 1961 it was the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL). It wasn’t until 1981 that LASL became LANL. Having said that, some LASL staffers, ostensibly, used the term “Los Alamos National Laboratory” or “LANL” on select formal LASL documents. One researcher, who would prefer not to be named, has seen such records. Still, the use of an incorrect, if otherwise internally grasped, term in such an important document seems unlikely. Whatever the situation, the impossible organisational red flags I've highlighted are more than enough to warrant extreme suspicion, if not outright scorn. Finally, the document mentions the hoax “MJTWELVE” group, and we all know where that leads. No more discussion on that affair is worth anyone’s time, especially mine.

The SNIE was, supposedly, written in somewhat of a conjunction with two other high level items. “DCID 5/1” was issued in December, 1959, by the Director of the CIA, and was titled “Coordination of US Clandestine Foreign Intelligence Activities Abroad”. While it hasn't been released in full, it had nothing to do with UFO’s. An associated Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) memoranda discusses its contents at length. “NASM 70” was issued in August, 1961, and was titled “Request for Report on Berlin Situation”. Its been released in its entirety, and it had nothing to do with UFO’s either.

Finally, the most suspicious issue with this SNIE document is where it was first place online, and by whom. A discussion of the document, along with links to the actual images, has been sitting here for a decade. Down the bottom there is the name “Peregrine Communications”. And who might they be? They are the one-time publisher of the book “Exempt from Disclosure”. The authors of this short tome are none other than Robert M. Collins, Richard C. Doty, and Timothy Cooper. There are no greater document fakers in UFO history than these three. If one goes to an Amazon listing for this book, which can be found here, the publisher is listed as, you guessed it, “Peregrine Communications”.

So, with all this in mind, I am offering $1000 (USD) to the first person who obtains a formally, officially declassified version of this SNIE record. We know the name of it. We know the date. We know that SNIE’s are top-level records. It even has a code number. With Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) work, or some other archival access provision, in mind, the document should be sitting there in a box just waiting to be requested and released. SNIE’s are not written lightly, or in large volumes. Researcher Jeffrey T. Richelson, whom I worked with extensively before his untimely death, wrote about their significance in his famed book “The US Intelligence Community”. Further, real SNIE’s from the 1960’s have been released in the last twenty years, so it's not like they are untouchable. In anyone wants to take me up on this offer, I’m all ears. It’s an easy $1000 right? We can work out the finer points later, but I think we all know there's little need. My money is safe. The document is a fake. And it's a bad one.