Project Aquarius

"Project Aquarius" is the name of a government UFO project that appears in at least three bodies of text: a one-page teletype dated November 17, 1980 from Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) headquarters to the AFOSI district at Kirtland Air Force Base; an eleven-page "Executive Briefing" dated June 14, 1977 that William L. Moore photographed in March 1983; and a text titled "Project Grudge/Aquarius" that circulated in December 1988. The teletype is the earliest document in which the term "MJ Twelve" appears.¹ The text of the teletype is set out on the pages for Majestic-12 and Richard Doty; this page records its movements.

The teletype, November 1980

The message, reference R 171130Z NOV 80, is from AFOSI headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base to AFOSI District 17 at Kirtland, with information to the 7602nd Air Intelligence Group at Fort Belvoir, and answers an October 1980 Kirtland request for photo imagery interpretation under case number 8017D93-126. In the copy printed as Appendix C of the 1990 Moore and Shandera report, the first three items describe negatives and film from the Paul Bennewitz case: a C-5A on approach with a streaking unidentified object, a cylinder-shaped object on a legitimate negative, and an irregular object in seven frames of 8mm film.²³ The penultimate paragraph states that "the official US Government policy and results of Project Aquarius" are "still classified top secret" with "restricted access to 'MJ Twelve.'"²

Moore wrote that he had been told of Project Aquarius at an earlier meeting with Falcon in December 1980, and that on December 29, 1980 he filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Headquarters USAF; the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base sent a negative reply dated February 12, 1981.² Mark Pilkington wrote, from Moore's account, that Doty showed Moore the message on a teletype display on November 17, 1980.⁴ Philip J. Klass wrote that Doty gave the message to Moore in early 1981.¹

Moore's accounts of the copies

Moore told the Mutual UFO Network symposium on July 1, 1989, in answer to a question on "the so-called Aquarius document which purports to be a facsimile" AFOSI message "with a few spurious additions," that "I neither typed nor retyped this document. It was created by AFOSI, or at least I always assumed it was, and it was handed to me in February 1981, with the intention that I would pass it to Bennewitz," whom he understood to be expected to "wave it to the press and others as proof of what he was saying about an alien invasion," after which the document would be denounced as a counterfeit and Bennewitz further discredited; he said a highlighted version showing the real and the added information was printed in the current issue of his newsletter.¹⁰ In the interview of September 30, 1989 that the 1990 report quotes, Moore described what he had said in Las Vegas as being that the document is "a retyped version of a real AFOSI message with a few spurious additions," and answered the question whether he knew who retyped it: "Certainly it was someone involved with the Bennewitz C/I effort, maybe Doty, maybe not."² In the same speech he said that there was "in fact a project Aquarius, possibly two of them," that he had "considerable information about one such project in the 1971-73 time frame and sketchy information about another which may be a later extension of the first one in the 76 to 85 time frame," including "contract and report numbers as well as the names of several individuals who worked on the project," and that researchers should not "deluge the government with freedom of information requests for details of sensitive high-level projects."¹⁰ In the 1990 report Moore and Jaime Shandera corrected the date to March 2, 1981, when at a meeting with Falcon Moore was shown what looked like a government telex on perforated computer paper, was not allowed to keep it, and wrote notes on a legal pad afterward. Several weeks later, in Albuquerque, Falcon and Doty gave him the retyped version, saying changes had been necessary to "sanitize" it. Moore resisted giving it to Bennewitz for several months and on delivery in June 1981 marked his copy so that it could be identified and told Bennewitz it might be a set-up; Bennewitz did not publicize it. Moore said that in the original the agency read "NSA" where the retyped version reads "NASA."²

Moore said that in September 1982 three copies existed: Bennewitz's, one in safekeeping, and one in his briefcase on a trip to San Francisco, where he met in the morning a man later identified as an associate of the attorney Peter Gersten; his car was broken into that afternoon and the briefcase stolen, a theft reported to the San Francisco police on September 13, 1982. Four months later a copy with Moore's pencilled annotations was in Gersten's hands, and Gersten began circulating it to a few people in early 1983 without endorsing it.² Moore showed a copy of the teletype to Brad Sparks and Kal Korff on January 17, 1982 and gave one to the producer of a program for KPIX-TV in San Francisco in 1982, according to Klass; Klass wrote that the researcher Robert Todd established in early 1983 that the teletype was bogus.¹ Moore and Shandera wrote that the subject came up at the March 12, 1983 board meeting of the Fund for UFO Research, which they attended as guests.² After Gersten's meetings with Doty in January 1983, in which, according to the account Gersten gave to Barry Greenwood, Doty said that the National Security Agency communicates with extraterrestrials under a project called Aquarius and discussed the teletype, Linda Moulton Howe and Larry Fawcett showed Robert Emenegger documents mentioning MJ-12 and Aquarius in March 1983.⁵⁶ Howe asked Jerry Miller on April 9, 1983 whether he was the "Miller" of "the 'AQUARIUS Cable.'"⁶

The Air Force Intelligence Service told Peter L. Clarke of KOB-TV on December 5, 1983 that its files held only a copy of a message of unknown origin that had apparently been placed in circulation in at least three cities, forwarded to it by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, that AFOSI had reviewed it and confirmed it was a hoax, and that it had no record of receiving it from AFOSI; the letter enclosed the message with its security markings removed and other Air Force Intelligence documents generated by it.⁷ Pilkington wrote that in 1983 Air Force Intelligence opened an inquiry titled "Possible Unauthorized Release of Classified Material" that noted the claimed originator, a Captain Grace, did not exist, and that the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey named in the text had ceased operations in 1970.⁴ Doty wrote to Greenwood on March 3, 1988 that "I know of no secret Government investigation of UFOs. I have never heard of MJ-12," a statement Klass set beside the presence of "MJ Twelve" in the teletype.¹ In late 1988 Moore reconstructed the original from memory and 1981 notes and then compared it with Doty, who supplied a few more changes; Moore and Shandera wrote that Falcon took no part and that the result is a "very close approximation."²

The Executive Briefing, March 1983

Moore and Shandera wrote that in early March 1983 Moore received a telephone call telling him to "go and pick up" information and to follow instructions carefully or "the deal is off." After a cross-country trip he was at a motel on the edge of a mid-sized city in upstate New York at 5:00 p.m., when a man delivered a sealed manila envelope and said "You have exactly nineteen minutes." It held eleven pages of what purported to be a Top Secret/Orcon document headed "Executive Briefing, Subject: Project Aquarius," dated June 14, 1977. Moore photographed each page by lamp light with a quarter beside it for scale and read the text into a recorder, saying "line" at each line end; the courier counted the pages and left. Moore and Shandera described the pages as a transcription of notes rather than a briefing, and wrote that the photographs were too poor to reproduce.² Klass wrote that Moore showed Sparks several heavily censored pages on October 19, 1984, whose cover read "ATTENTION: THIS DOCUMENT WAS PREPARED BY MJ12. MJ12 IS SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS SUBJECT MATTER," and whose second sheet stated that "only MJ12 has access to Project Aquarius," that there were "only two copies," and that the document would be destroyed after the briefing.¹ Moore and Shandera wrote that Lee Graham obtained a partly expurgated half-page in 1985 that circulated as the "Snowbird Document," and that in May 1987 they released portions of two more pages.²

Other texts under the name

Howe wrote that the briefing paper Doty showed her at Kirtland on April 9, 1983 included paragraphs on Project Sigma, Project Snowbird and, last, Project Aquarius, "an overall project with the goal of accumulating and archiving all available information about alien life forms," some of whose data had been used to advance the space program.⁶ Howe's book reproduces, from a computer-network statement of December 18, 1988 by Milton William Cooper, a text headed "Executive Briefing, Subject: MAJI, Project Grudge/Aquarius (TS/MAJIC)," which states that Aquarius contains sixteen volumes, was established in 1953 by order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower under control of the Central Intelligence Agency and MAJI, and assumed responsibility for UFO investigation after Project Blue Book closed in December 1969, and that lists subordinate projects including Plato, Sigma and Redlight.⁶ In a first-person chapter of Exempt from Disclosure credited to him and headed as taken from four interviews by Moore and Shandera in the 1980s and later updated, Doty stated that on joining AFOSI District 17 in May 1979 he was briefed into a program on UFO information and read an official document that "mentioned a 'Project Aquarius,' which contained 16 volumes of information."⁸

Pilkington wrote that in notes of a January 1982 conversation with Moore, Bob Pratt of the National Enquirer recorded "Govt . . . UFO Project is Aquarius, classified Top Secret with access restricted to MJ 12 (MJ may be 'Majic')," and that the book Moore, Pratt and Doty planned was titled The Aquarius Project; he attributed this to Greenwood and Sparks's 2007 paper, which was not obtained.⁴