use in the military until the 1970s. As pointed out by debunker Philip J. Klass, in available examples of Hillenkoetter letters and memoranda, the conventional military date format is used.
Also, according to Klass, a Los Angeles document examiner has determined that the typewriter used to type the MJ-12 document was not available before 1963.
Researcher Kevin Randle points out another significant discrepancy in the MJ-12 document: "The document is constructed as a briefing paper for President-elect Eisenhower, suggesting that Eisenhower had no knowledge of the Roswell crash. The problem is that Eisenhower, as the Army Chief of Staff in July 1947, would have been completely aware of the Roswell crash."
The MJ-12 report does not resemble in style or substance anything else that I have seen originating from the government, and I have examined hundreds of government documents originating from the same period, many of them dealing with UFOs. The document is also not written in typical "bureaucratese," that elusive jargon so valued in government circles.
The main problem with the MJ-12 document for me, however, is that it solves too much, wrapping up too many of the loose ends of the contemporary UFO controversy, and "proving" exactly what most UFO buffs "already know." Little new information is offered on the alleged saucer crashes themselves, which is rather odd given the fact that this constitutes our first clear look inside the "Cosmic Watergate" so toured by Moore, Stanton Friedman, and others. If this in fact is a briefing provided to Eisenhower, then it is a comic book briefing that would have raised far more questions in the President-elect's mind than it answered. The loose ends that are wrapped up in the document also neatly intersect with the specific stated beliefs and investigative involvement of the men most closely associated with the report: Shandera, Moore, Friedman.
After the publication of the MJ-12 briefing documents, another unsigned document was allegedly discovered in the National Archives, dated July 14, 1954. This is a purported memo to General Nathan Twining, Air Force Chief of Staff, from Robert Cutler, Eisenhower's Special Assistant for National Security. This document states, "The President has decided that the MJ-12 SSP briefing should take place during the already scheduled White House meeting of July 16, rather than following it as previously intended."
The alleged memo was unsigned, with Cutler's name and title typed at the page bottom. Advocates of the authenticity of the original MJ-12 pages claim that the Cutler memo provides proof positive that the document--and the alleged secret MJ-12 consulting group--
was real, while detractors suggest that the memo is just another fake.
The authenticity of the Cutler memo, this supposed confirmation, is doubtful. Advocate Stanton Friedman insists that the memo is real because "it was in a classified box in a classified vault," but this only points up Friedman's willingness to overlook the obvious in his anxiety to verify the MJ-12 document. What would have stopped someone from carrying the Cutler memo in with them when examining the supposedly secure box?
Jo Ann Williamson, Chief of the Military Reference Branch, has indicated that "this particular document poses problems" in a number of ways. Williamson points out that it is not typed on government letterhead and does not have a watermark; it does not have a top secret registration number; it is the single document with a notation about MJ-12 in the folder in which it was found; the marking TOP SECRET RESTRICTED INFORMATION attached to it was not used until many years after the Eisenhower administration; and Robert Cutler was traveling in Europe and North Africa on the day the memo was supposedly issued.
Other significant factors, possibly the most significant in the evaluation of the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents and the Cutler memo are the associations of their recipient and primary