Majestic 12 - Membership

Membership

All the alleged original members of MJ-12 were notable for their military, government, and/or scientific achievements, and all were deceased when the documents first surfaced (the last to die was Jerome Hunsaker, only a few months before the MJ-12 papers first appeared).

The original composition was six civilians (mostly scientists), and six high-ranking military officers, two from each major military service. Three (Souers, Vandenberg, and Hillenkoetter) had been the first three heads of central intelligence. The Moore/Shandera documents did not make clear who was the director of MJ-12, or if there was any organizational hierarchy.

The named members of MJ-12 were:

• Rear Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter: first CIA director
• Dr. Vannevar Bush: chaired wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development and predecessor National Defense Research Committee; set up and chaired postwar Joint Research and Development Board (JRDB) and then the Research and Development Board (RDB); chaired NACA; President of Carnegie Institute, Washington D.C.
• James Forrestal: Secretary of the Navy; first Secretary of Defense (replaced after his death on MJ-12 by Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, 2nd CIA director)
• Gen. Nathan Twining: headed Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AFB; Air Force Chief of Staff (1953–1957); Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff (1957–1961)
• Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg: Directed Central Intelligence Group (1946–1947); Air Force Chief of Staff (1948–1953)
• Gen. Robert M. Montague: Guided missile expert; 1947 commander of Fort Bliss; headed nuclear Armed Forces Special Weapons Center, Sandia Base
• Dr. Jerome Hunsaker: Aeronautical engineer, MIT; chaired NACA after Bush
• Rear Adm. Sidney Souers: first director of Central Intelligence Group, first executive secretary of National Security Council (NSC)
• Gordon Gray: Secretary of the Army; intelligence and national security expert; CIA psychological strategy board (1951–1953); Chairman of NSC 5412 Committee (1954–1958); National Security Advisor (1958–1961)
• Dr. Donald Menzel: Astronomer, Harvard; cryptologist during war; security consultant to CIA and NSA
• Dr. Detlev Bronk: Medical physicist; aviation physiologist; chair, National Academy of Sciences, National Research Council; president Johns Hopkins & Rockefeller University
• Dr. Lloyd Berkner: Physicist; radio expert; executive secretary of Bush's JRDB

According to other sources and MJ-12 papers to emerge later, famous scientists like Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Karl Compton, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Wernher von Braun were also allegedly involved with MJ-12.(see also Arguments for below, particularly statements by Dr. Robert Sarbacher)