The Architecture of Secrecy: MJ-12, Recovered Craft and the Origins of a UFO Legacy Program
Written by Christopher Sharp - 17 June 2026
If you believe the documents, the architecture of the greatest secret alive today can be seen being built.
It begins in the late 1940s, in the shadow of World War Two.
Cities had been destroyed. The atomic bomb had changed warfare forever. The United States was constructing the CIA, the National Security Council and the permanent machinery of the modern security state.
Then, according to the disputed Majestic documents, something arrived that made even the weapons of that age look primitive.
The papers claim that President Harry Truman established Majestic 12, or MJ-12, following the alleged recovery of a non-human craft in 1947. Its task was supposedly to secure the wreckage, study the technology and prevent the truth from escaping a tightly controlled circle of military, intelligence and scientific officials.
The implications were terrifying.
The alleged visitors could evade radar, outrun the fastest aircraft and enter American airspace at will. Their intentions were unknown. Only two years after the end of the most destructive war in human history, officials appear to have considered whether the next conflict might come not from Moscow, but from space.
That is the picture presented in ‘Not For Disclosure’, the new book by Jonathan Caplan KC.
Caplan is not a conventional UFO researcher. He is one of Britain’s leading barristers, with a career built on weighing evidence, testing competing explanations and finding weaknesses in complex cases.
His conclusions do not rest only on the Majestic papers.
In the book’s preface, Caplan says he has ‘met and interviewed many of the key people in this twilight area’, including nuclear physicist and Roswell researcher Stanton Friedman, Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, John Keel, Gordon Creighton, Jacques Vallée, Timothy Good and Steven Greer.
He also writes that some of his contacts must remain confidential because of their official positions. They are, he says, ‘privy to some extraordinary information about this topic’.
Caplan acknowledges the limitation this creates. Some information cannot be publicly sourced, while other material cannot be used at all. But he says he includes confidential information where he is satisfied by it and has permission to publish it.
‘I have been able to open some doors largely because I have been trusted as a King’s Counsel,’ he writes.
Caplan also compares the documents with presidential diaries, appointment calendars, official positions and established historical events.
Again and again, he finds that the people were where the papers say they were. The meetings happened. The dates align. The officials held the stated responsibilities.
His most striking new evidence includes an unpublished page from an alleged MJ-12 report found among the papers of researcher Tim Cooper.
It describes a top-secret meeting with Truman at Blair House on 14 July 1949.
The document says the subject was whether the United States should share knowledge of ‘MAJESTIC findings’.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower was allegedly recalled to Washington and asked to formulate ‘a policy of defense for U.S. and NATO’.
The meeting itself is historically real.
Truman’s and Eisenhower’s records confirm that an off-the-record gathering took place at Blair House that evening. Senior figures from the administration, Congress, defence and the atomic-energy establishment attended.
The accepted explanation is that the meeting concerned international atomic policy. However, the Majestic document presents a far more extraordinary account.
It states that ‘use of atomic weapons has been considered as a last line of defense’ against a massive aerial assault on the United States and allied countries. It adds that ‘Secretary of State Marshall and Defense Secretary Forrestal have agreed a consensus with other allied countries.’
Yet the document suggests that even setting aside existing geopolitical divisions would not be enough to create an effective collective response.
It reads:
‘Even with the co-operation from the Russians, such agreements would not produce the unified front so desired in the event such an attack would occur.’
Instead, it describes proposals for a deeper level of international cooperation, involving the exchange of technology, intelligence and physical material.
It states:
‘The Administration proposed that: ‘know how’ of new technologies would be shared with [deleted]; an agreement for pooling of information; and that an unspecified number of flying saucer component parts be stored in [deleted] by US members of MAJESTIC.’
The document also suggests that conventional defensive measures had already failed, stating that fighter interception had ‘proved fruitless’.
Referring to the death of Captain Thomas Mantell while pursuing an unidentified object in 1948, it recommends that military aircraft avoid close encounters and maintain a non-threatening approach.
The document portrays officials confronting a threat without precedent.
An intelligence capable of entering defended airspace. Craft capable of defeating existing radar and aircraft. Technology so advanced that recovered components were treated as strategic assets. Intentions that remained completely unknown.
Another document published by Caplan is a CIA letter dated 30 June 1953. It refers to an ‘Advanced Contact Group Meeting’ held at Holloman Air Force Base six days earlier.
The letter says the report was reviewed by senior CIA officials, approved by Director Allen Dulles and supported by the intelligence branches of the armed forces. It also says no copies were made. Photographs, recordings and notes were placed under special control, accessible only through the National Security Council.
Caplan places the Holloman letter inside a structure he says was created six years earlier.
The Majestic papers claim that, on 24 September 1947, less than three months after Roswell, Truman established MJ-12 through a classified directive.
According to the documents, he acted at the urging of two men positioned at the heart of America’s emerging national security state.
One was Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and a central organiser of the early atomic-bomb program that became the Manhattan Project.
The other was James Forrestal, the newly appointed first US Secretary of Defense, who would die less than two years later after falling from a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. His death was officially described as suicide, although its circumstances would fuel speculation for decades.
The alleged directive stated: ‘Hereafter this matter shall be referred to only as Operation Majestic Twelve.’
It also said that all future decisions should rest ‘solely with the Office of the President’.
Caplan then checks the document against the historical record.
Truman’s appointment calendar and Forrestal’s diary confirm that the President met Bush and Forrestal at 11.30 am that day.
That does not prove what they discussed. But the meeting was real.
MJ-12 is said to have included Forrestal and Bush, the chiefs of the Army, Navy and Air Force, the directors of the CIA and counterintelligence, and scientists including Robert Oppenheimer and Donald Menzel.
Caplan writes that four Hungarian physicists linked to the alleged program, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and Theodore von Kármán, referred to themselves as ‘the Martians’. Dr Robert Sarbacher, a nuclear physicist who was consulted by the Pentagon, has independently confirmed that von Neumann was involved.
Caplan suggests this may have reflected their work on recovered non-human craft, although the page does not provide the underlying source for that interpretation.
The nickname proves nothing by itself. But Caplan says all four later worked on Majestic projects involving recovered non-human craft.
These were the scientists who had unlocked nuclear power. They were now, according to the papers, being asked to understand technology far beyond anything humanity possessed.
The secrecy also appears to have spread quickly beyond America.
Days after the alleged Truman directive, Forrestal, Bush and Army Secretary Kenneth Royall met Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Henry Tizard.
After returning to Britain, Tizard proposed the Flying Saucer Working Party. Its chairman later wrote that, ‘following the lead given by the Americans’, its work should receive ‘as little publicity as possible’.
The provenance of the Majestic archive remains disputed.
Many of the documents passed through researcher Tim Cooper, whose unidentified source claimed to be a former CIA counterintelligence officer.
After Cooper’s death, Ryan Wood was allowed to examine his remaining papers and digital files. That search produced the unpublished Blair House page and the Holloman letter.
It also produced a photograph that Caplan published for the first time.
The black-and-white image shows what he describes as ‘a large luminous saucer’, with a row of wooden chairs in the foreground.
The chairs give the object an enormous scale.
Caplan is careful. He says the image, if genuine, could show a photograph projected onto a screen. It could also show a physical object behind a screen in a secure facility.
He admits it is ‘impossible to check its provenance’.
But he also raises the possibility that it may be ‘the only available photograph of a recovered non-human craft in the possession of the US authorities’.
Having examined the historical architecture of secrecy, Caplan turns to the modern Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) debate and recent developments, presenting several revelations that closely align with allegations independently shared with Liberation Times.
The first is that efforts to debunk the UAP topic have long formed part of the official response. According to Caplan, this practice has involved multiple organisations, including the CIA’s Air Warfare Analysis Branch, an analytical component within the Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center (WCPMC).
Secondly, a small number of members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have been informed - on a very limited scale - on the recovery of UAP craft. Caplan adds that some members of the House Intelligence Committee’s CIA Subcommittee have also been given access to this information.
Thirdly, the WCPMC receives information from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which assists its role in studying the origins and agendas of types of non-human craft.
One implication is that the Air Warfare Analysis Branch within WCPMC, which is alleged to have played a role in debunking the UAP topic, is also responsible for assessing the origins and characteristics of non-human craft.
Finally, Caplan claims that, in 1994, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, the US government learned that a craft had landed in Russia as part of an anticipated encounter and that its occupants had met with members of the local militia.
This claim echoes comments made by Dr Eric W. Davis, a theoretical physicist, former Pentagon contractor and propulsion researcher, who has stated that not all UAP recoveries involve crashes. According to Davis, some craft have simply landed and been recovered empty, while in other cases their occupants have allegedly left the craft behind.
Davis said:
“Two-thirds of the crash recoveries, or recoveries, of UAP occur in the maritime environment, and that makes sense because pretty much three-quarters of the earth is covered by ocean, so that kind of goes together well.
“The other 1/3 are recoveries on the land, and they are not always a crash. Sometimes they just land, and there's no ‘UFOnauts’ inside of them driving them; they're empty. And occasionally there might be ‘UFOnauts’ who've been known to walk away from the craft when they're inside; they walk away, and the craft is left there for us to recover.
“There have been very few crashes, actually, not that many, and it's very small in number comparatively.”
Liberation Times has separately been informed of allegations that Russia possesses a recovered tic-tac-shaped craft.
Liberation Times also understands that at least one American Embassy has sent a CRITIC cable, used for the transmission of exceptionally urgent information, to Washington concerning a reported UFO landing on foreign soil.
It becomes clear in Caplan’s book that the CIA now plays a central role in the UAP legacy program, something previously reported by Liberation Times.
Asked by Liberation Times, how he would advise the Trump administration today regarding the topic of UAP disclosure, Caplan responded:
“They need to be prepared to agree with the Department of Justice that, where the public interest concurs, immunities should be offered if required to those lower down the ladder to enable them to come forward and speak to Congress and the FBI.”
Whether amnesty and immunities are provided is currently a point of discussion amidst speculation that the Trump administration is contemplating such an action.
Jonathan Caplan’s new book, published by Penguin, can be found by clicking here.
