When people think about unidentified flying objects (UFOs), they tend to think of flying discs piloted by gray beings with large heads and enormous eyes. They tend to think that these sightings only started relatively recently and that belief in UFOs is some sort of modern religion brought on, perhaps, by the very justifiable fears of a nuclear age. But a study of the phenomenon quickly reveals that people have been seeing UFOs since the beginning of recorded history and perhaps a lot longer than that.

Naturally, as technological advances and the creation of flying aircraft became realities, the sighting of UFOs increased, as did the interest in potential contact with aliens. Some of the American investigations of UFOs from the 1940s and 1950s were documented, but nothing exemplifies the debate between those who believe that extraterrestrials visit the Earth and skeptics than the top secret papers that emerged in the 1980s and seemed to prove the existence of a shadowy secret organization known as MJ-12 or Majestic 12. To believers, these papers proved beyond a doubt not only that UFOs were real and of extraterrestrial origin, but also that the federal government had been aware of this since the 1940s and had even managed to recover one or more crashed alien spacecrafts. To skeptics, this notion simply proved how gullible UFO believers were. There was no middle ground - people either believed in the MJ-12 papers completely or laughed at them.

Decades later, it's finally possible to take a more balanced view of the history of the MJ-12 papers, including where these documents originated from and who created them. It now seems virtually certain that there never was an organization called Majestic 12 and that the papers describing it were faked, but what makes the story truly fascinating is that it now also appears likely that these papers were faked by people actually working within the Air Force or another government agency.