Editing Roswell incident (section)

===Majestic 12 hoax===
{{main|Majestic 12}}
{{external media
| video1 = [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCsKMZKgeHY Bill Moore addresses MUFON,  July 1 1989]
}}
Majestic 12 was the purported organization behind faked government documents delivered anonymously to multiple ufologists in the early 1980s.<ref>{{harvnb|Pflock|2001|p=193}}</ref> All individuals who received the fake documents were connected to Bill Moore.<ref>{{harvnb|Pflock|2001|pp=193–194}}</ref> After the publication of ''The Roswell Incident'', [[Mirage Men|Richard Doty]] and other individuals presenting themselves as Air Force Intelligence Officers approached Moore.<ref name="Goldberg-2001-p213">{{harvnb|Goldberg|2001|p=213}}</ref> They used the unfulfilled promise of hard evidence of extraterrestrial retrievals to recruit Moore, who kept notes on other ufologists and intentionally spread misinformation within the UFO community.<ref name="Goldberg-2001-p213"/> At a 1989 [[Mutual UFO Network]] conference, Bill Moore confessed that he had intentionally fed fake evidence of extraterrestrials to UFO researchers including [[Paul Bennewitz]].<ref>{{harvnb|Gulyas|2016}}: "Bill Moore, in 1989, gave a talk at the Mutual UFO Network symposium which he revealed his role in the Bennewitz affair and other connections with government and military intelligence operatives [...]"</ref> Doty later said that he intentionally gave fabricated information to UFO researchers while working at [[Kirtland Air Force Base]] in the 1980s.<ref>{{harvnb|Kloor|2019|p=53}}</ref> Roswell conspiracy proponents turned on Moore, but not the broader conspiracy theory.<ref>{{harvnb|Goldberg|2001|pp=207, 214}}</ref>

The Majestic-12 materials have been heavily scrutinized and discredited.<ref>{{harvnb|Gulyas|2016}}: "The MJ-12 papers have been the subject of an enormous amount of scrutiny, [...]"</ref> The various purported memos existed only as copies of photographs of documents.<ref>{{harvnb|Korff|1997|p=171}}</ref> [[Carl Sagan]] criticized the complete lack of [[provenance]] of documents "miraculously dropped on a doorstep like something out of a fairy story, perhaps '[[The Elves and the Shoemaker]]'."<ref>{{harvnb|Sagan|1997|p=88}}</ref> Researchers noted the idiosyncratic date format not found in government documents from the time they were purported to originate, but widely used in Bill Moore's personal notes.<ref>{{harvnb|Peebles|1994|p=266}}</ref>

In this variant of the Roswell legend, the bodies were ejected from the craft shortly before it exploded over the ranch.  The propulsion unit is destroyed and the government concludes the ship was a "short range reconnaissance craft".  The following week, the bodies are recovered some miles away, decomposing from exposure and scavengers.<ref>{{harvnb|Saler|Ziegler|Moore|1997|p=19}}</ref>