My friend Jim Oberg just sent along something of GREAT interest to the UFO community– according to a new scientific test, the Majestic documents are frauds.
The Majestic documents contain thousands of supposedly classified papers by high government officials, including three presidents, and they appear to confirm the reality of the Roswell UFO crash among other high-visibility UFO cases. They were released about 20 years ago, and caused a huge stir among UFOlogists, as they call themselves.
Most people, me included, were skeptical.
If this new claim is true, it looks like we were right. Michael Heiser is a UFO researcher (full disclosure — I have had tangential dealings with him before on the Planet X issue; he thinks Sitchin is a fraud, and I agree, but Dr. Heiser also thinks there is some validity to claims of alien abductions, whereas I think, ah, there is not). He hired a woman named Carol Chaski who has developed a semantic technique which she claims is able to tell if a document is fraudulent or not. It scans a document known to be by a particular author and builds a template based on word usage, grammar, etc. A second document can then be compared to the first to see if statistically it is reasonable written by the same author.
She did this for the Majestic docs, and found only one was possibly written by the claimed author. all the others failed.
Now I have no idea how valid this is; the announcement is on the PR Web site, where you can pay to put up a press release. I have no clue how valid the process is, or whether this is as untrustworthy as, say, a polygraph (which have been thoroughly debunked).
But it’s certainly interesting, and I’ll be curious to see how some of the more vocal and financially-invested religiously fervent UFO proponents react.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Yeah, yeah. Try telling that to the MJ-12 commandos I took down in the Paris catacombs last night.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Sure, that’s what they want you to think.
July 24th, 2007 at 6:46 pm
[...] (more…) [...]
July 24th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Well that’s a surprise. Oh wait! It isn’t!
It was so obvious, but these folks always deny the obvious.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:21 pm
That technique actually sounds very interesting, but I wouldn’t suspect it would be very useful unless they had a large sample size of original material for the author. I wouldn’t think you could simply compare the writings of two documents, and tell if they are the same author. But if you had, say, a short story and claimed Isaac Asimov was the author, it sounds reasonable that you could analyze all of Asimov’s works and see if the style, word usage, etc. is consistent with his writings.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
They’ve used the technique before on things like the Bible, to determine the number of distinct authors. It’s fairly well established in anthropological circles, though whether it actually works worth a damn I have no idea.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
This is just making them mad!!! There were UFO’s apparently over England last night…
UFO sightings bring town to a standstill
It’s just swamp gas. Or mass hysteria. Funny it says “Drinkers spilled out of pubs…” So now drunks are seeing things. How original.
July 24th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Oh it’s…
…gas…
…alright.
July 24th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
[...] on the heels of the Majestic document debunking comes a UFO story, courtesy of the Daily Mail, that has the silliest line [...]
July 24th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
My apologies for the “swamp gas”
I ate a large quantity of baked beans and cabbage last night,
then washed it down with low fat milk.
Not a good combination
Folcrom
July 24th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
April fools!
…20 years too late.
July 25th, 2007 at 1:10 am
These documents were conclusively debunked in Skeptical Inquirer back in 1986-1990. You can find the main articles in the book “The Hundredth Monkey”, edited by Kendrick Frazier.
Among other things a signature of Harry Truman was proven to have been photocopied from another document.
July 25th, 2007 at 1:11 am
Hmph.
Next Phil will be telling us that Doom isn’t a documentary.
July 25th, 2007 at 1:11 am
These documents were conclusively debunked in Skeptical Inquirer back in 1986-1990. You can find the main articles in the book “The Hundredth Monkey”, edited by Kendrick Frazier.
Among other things a signature of Harry Truman was proven to have been photocopied from another document
July 25th, 2007 at 2:06 am
Apparently over 120 people have been abducted by UFOs bearing strange rondels over England in the last week, only to mysteriously reappear at so-called ‘evacuation centres’ where government-employed medics have been ‘looking after’ them!
July 25th, 2007 at 5:30 am
I read about the technique in New Scientist a few years ago. I believe it has been applied to the works of Shakespeare to determine if Francis Bacon wrote the plays. I can’t recall the conclusion, however.
July 25th, 2007 at 5:54 am
I suspect there might be a problem with applying these techniques to government documents – at least any of the government documents I’ve ever worked on – because they’re not usually the work of a single author. They tend to do the rounds of umpteen people, accumulating endless conflicting revisions which eventually get hammered out by a committee.
Has this analysis technique been validated against similar documents of known authorship?
July 25th, 2007 at 7:39 am
Re Nigel Depledge
My recollection is that the analysis was to determine if the hypothesis that Shakespeares’ works were authored by either Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon could be falsified. The result, if I remember correctly, was that it was found to be very unlikely that either man, either separately or together, authored the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. That, of course, has had no effect whatever on the anti-Stratfordians. Many of them have simply transferred their authorship hypothesis to William DeVere, the Earl of Oxford. Since DeVere left no significant body of work behind, the technique cannot be applied to him and thus cannot be used to falsify the DeVere wrote Shakespeares’ plays hypothesis.
July 25th, 2007 at 10:50 am
I believe the technique has some validity, but my uninformed guess is that I doubt it can be considered a litmus test. I haven’t read the full report – and probably won’t since they want money for it – but I am a bit perturbed by what I know of the manner in which they did this test.
Why did they only test 17 documents out of a set of thousands? Time considerations can’t be it – I wrote a program to do some statistical analysis on a corpus of text and produce random garbage that mimics the author’s writing style in a few hours earlier this year, and it can burn through the collected works of Shakespeare in a couple minutes. Even if they’re working with paper, I would be inclined to guess that high-quality OCR wouldn’t introduce enough noise to counteract the benefit of using a sample set that’s many, many, many times larger.
What about the baseline corpi – how stable are the statistical properties of the authors’ known writing samples? If you can’t account for possibilities such as the multiple author problem that Dunc mentioned or that a person’s writing style might vary depending on a number of factors, then you can’t really be sure of your findings.
Did they compare among documents? The claim that they make – that the documents in the Majestic set don’t appear to be written by their claimed authors – strikes me as somewhat weak. What would be really damning is if they could show strong evidence that all the Majestic documents were written by one or a few people.
July 25th, 2007 at 10:51 am
As Dune said, I’d be very skeptical if anybody claimed one person wrote any government document on extraterrestrials. I recently wrote a request for people to be appointed for certain jobs (something they were required to do by regs) and copies of the appointment letters. That simple request letter got edited by 3 people before it got to my destination.
I’d by surprised if any signed, presidential document got through without being edited by multiple people, and I’d put money that any classified document signed by the president was written almost entirely by someone else, reviewed by the president then signed. The odds aren’t too bad that the president didn’t even read it first–just scanned it for general content and assumed that it said was it was supposed to say.
July 25th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Computer text analysis is fraught with assumptions and limitations. Whilst the MJ-12 documents may well be hoaxed (there are lots of other UFO documents that are also hoaxes), no one should think that this non peer-reviewed study is definitive.
July 25th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
While I’m convinced the whole UFO nonsense is just that, I have to wonder at the accuracy of this ‘ALIAS’ program. I’d hardly call this the smoking gun (or … anti-smoking-gun… gun-de-smoker…?)
July 25th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
I have to agree with DisownedSky: while it’s no surprise that the MJ-12 papers were hoaxes (and everyone completely forgets the ridiculous “Investigating UFO Abductions…LIVE!” TV one-shot that appeared in 1988 where Moore and Friedman claimed to have backup from two spooks who allegedly oversaw the aliens and fed them strawberry ice cream) and really poorly designed ones, rebuttals from bad sources are just as…well, bad. While it’s great to hear that someone else agrees with us, I don’t trust any source who uses PRWeb to sell both this presentation and his new book. Now, if he’s willing to submit a paper to a peer-reviewed journal, I’d worry less about how this might be a case of yet another UFO crank attempting to get “validation” by selectively quoting skeptics’ kind words in response to a relatively legit bit of research.
July 26th, 2007 at 1:12 am
I suppose I’m among those who are surprised that anyone is still messing about with the MJ-12 garbage. They’d been trashed by the time I even heard of them, on the circumstances of their appearance alone, much less the little things like all being typed on the same typrewriter and using photocopies of the President’s signature. The only people who still considered them a “smoking gun” were also impressed by the veracity of Betty & Barney Hill, I suspect.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Once again we have the typical skeptics spewing forth the constant mission impossible scenario. Phil and his misinformed but always so well informed (not)… wanna be scientists and wanna be astronomers pleading the never never case but really not studying the facts. Sure there may not be aliens falling from the sky, and sure the mj documents may not be real. Unfortunately for you debunkers concrete visual evidence of UFOs are real. Just ask, Gov. Fife Symington, Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, Russian General Leonid Alexive, President Jimmy Carter(Yes so dont have a yak attack). Former U.K. Admiral of defense Lord Hill Norton, Astronaut Col. Gordon Cooper Former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta as well as at least 50 other military and commercial pilots who are willing to testify (besides Pres Carter and Russian General) to congress in order to declassify top secret documents relating to information concerning UFOs. Pres Bush has recently refused (of course) immunity to any witnesses concerning the release of those documents…So before you debunkers spew the typical answers, why dont you research the info I have given you before the old swamp gas answer…….This is 5 years after Out of the Blue by the way
August 3rd, 2007 at 10:07 pm
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