Introduction. 1.1. What Are the Majestic Documents?

1.1. What Are the Majestic Documents?

The term “Majestic documents” refers generally to thousands of pages of purportedly classified government documents that prove the existence of a Top Secret group of scientists and military personnel—Majestic 12—formed in 1947 under President Harry Truman, and charged with investigating crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft and their occupants. Majestic 12 personnel allegedly included a number of noteworthy political, scientific, and military figures, including: Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the first CIA Director; Dr. Vannevar Bush, wartime chair of the Office of Scientific Research; James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy and first Secretary of Defense; General Nathan Twining, and Dr. Donald Menzel, an astronomer at Harvard University.

More specifically, the Majestic documents refer to a series allegedly classified documents leaked from 1981 to the present day by unidentified sources concerning Majestic 12 and the United States government’s knowledge of intelligent extraterrestrials and their technology.

The documents date from 1942 to 1999. Due to the explosive nature of their content, the Majestic documents are considered by many to be the core evidence for a genuine extraterrestrial reality and alien visitation of planet Earth in the 20th century. United States government personnel have denied their authenticity, primarily on an opinion rendered by AFOSI, the U.S. Air Force counterintelligence office.

 

1.2. Previous Research on the Majestic Documents

The Majestic documents have undergone thorough forensic authentication with respect to non-linguistic issues and methods. The researchers have tested the documents in the following ways:

1. Physical dating of the ink, pencil and paper

2. Dating by matching the reproductive process (typography) of the typewriter, printer, copy machine, or mimeographic machine

3. Dating by use of language of the period

4. Watermarks and chemical composition of paper

5. Comparison of handwriting

6. Comparison with known events of record

7. Comparison with known styles for government memoranda and correspondence

8. Comparison with known or expected security procedures

9. Logic of content

10. Records of provenance

11. Eyewitness testimony of individuals mentioned in documents.

 

1.3. Nature and Objectives of the Current Study

This study fills the existing research void created by the absence of strictly linguistic approaches to the problem of authenticating the Majestic documents. The goal of the research presented in this study was to determine whether the Majestic documents that carry a signature were indeed written by the people to whom authorship is attributed.

Toward achieving this goal, the study employed state-of-the-art computational linguistic methods of authorship attribution. In some cases, these techniques have been pioneered by Dr. Carol Chaski, a recognized leader in this type of linguistic research. These methods have been employed, validated, and approved numerous times in various courts of law. It is the opinion of the authors that the utilization of these methods is the most reliable and testable means of authenticating or refuting the authorship attribution of those Majestic documents that bear the name of an author.

The focus of this study, as noted, is validation or falsification of the authorship attributions of the Majestic documents. As such, the scientific methods employed for this study cannot be used to validate the content of any of the Majestic documents whose authorship proves genuine. The computational methods of the research cannot determine the truth of written content. It can only determine whether or not that content was written by the attributed author

The remainder of this paper details the application of computational linguistic methods to determine the authenticity of authorship attributions of the Majestic documents. The paper is divided into the following sections:

• Description of the Majestic documents included and excluded in the study

• Overview of the linguistic testing methods used in the study

• Explanation and interpretation of the test results

• Overview of how these same methods have held up in courts of law

• Suggestions for future linguistic research of the Majestic documents