Welcome to "Meet the Conspiracies", a devlog series in which I'll be introducing the six playable factions of Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. I'll be discussing the history of the real-world conspiracy theory, how they'll be depicted in the game itself, and how reasonable I personally think it is to believe in the underlying conspiracy theory.

Meet the Conspiracies, Part 1:

Majestic 12

If there is a "main character" faction in Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, it would probably be Majestic 12. Based on the UFO conspiracy theories that reached the height of their popularity in the 1990's, MJ12 are a clandestine para-government created by the United States to coordinate with the Zeta Reticulan (Grey) aliens who began visiting the Earth in the late 1940's.

The "Real" Majestic 12

While the UFO phenomenon in its modern form goes back to Kenneth Arnold's 1947 encounter with "flying saucers", the name Majestic 12 comes from a set of documents first circulated in 1he 1980's by UFOlogist Bill Moore. Moore was a prominent member of MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network, an organization which was an eclectic mix of legitimate scientists, who were interested in investigating UFO sightings with skeptical rigour; full-on conspiracy theorists like Bill Cooper, whose MUFON seminars would become the primary inspiration for the mythology of The X-Files; and people somewhere in the middle, like Stanton Friedman. 

Stanton Friedman was a controversial figure throughout his life: a nuclear physicist by training, he became the first person to conduct a serious civilian investigation of the Roswell incident. By the time of Friedman's investigation in the 1970's, the incident had been long forgotten by the public. His investigation is the only reason why you've ever heard of Roswell, and it's because he scored a legitimate scoop: an interview with a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who had been on site for the debris recovery, who admitted on the record that the "weather balloon" story had been a cover-up. 

(Never mind that a later official inquiry would reveal that the object which crash-landed on the Brazel farm was actually a MOGUL spy balloon, which was highly classified at the time of the incident - so highly classified that none of the personnel in Roswell knew what the thing actually was - this, too, would simply be folded into the narrative of the Roswell cover-up, launching Friedman to international fame.)

Friedman would become the primary evangelist for the Majestic 12 documents, documents which purported to prove the existence of a secret committee, created by the Truman administration, to act as the United States government's liaison with the extraterrestrial visitors. Bill Cooper would spin Majestic 12 into the centrepiece of his worldview, a world where the US was trading human lives for alien technology: the aliens would be allowed to abduct and experiment upon American citizens, in exchange for tech that would give them an edge over their Soviet rivals - and allow them to increase their control of the domestic population.

The only problem was that the Majestic 12 documents were fake. Bill Moore, one of the purported "discoverers" of the documents, was almost certainly the true author: an idiosyncratic date format on the documents matches the one Moore was known to use, and journalist Howard Bloom claimed to have heard Moore shopping around a novel by the title of "MAJIK 12" in the years before the documents were revealed to the public. Moore had used his ties to Friedman to launder the documents, giving them to somebody he knew had credibility in the UFO community, but who was also credulous to a fault. The highly public exposure of Majestic 12 as a fraud, at a MUFON event, would eventually lead to Bill Cooper abandoning UFO conspiracy theories altogether, in favour of the slightly less fantastical New World Order conspiracy theory which he would advocate on his radio show, The Hour of The Time.

To this day, the documents still have some true believers, but most UFO conspiracy theorists have adopted the same line that Cooper would in the immediate aftermath of the exposure of the hoax: there really is a secret government agency that negotiates with aliens, and maybe even secretly runs the government, but Majestic 12 isn't it, and the documents were created as a disinformation program to make UFO researchers look foolish. But let's be honest: with people like Stanton Friedman in their ranks, they didn't need the help.

Majestic 12 in SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS

In the mythology of the game, Majestic 12 is the youngest of the great conspiracies, and the only one created directly by a state government - but while they may have been established by the United States federal government, their loyalty is firmly with the aliens.

While all of the playable factions can recover crashed UFOs for a bonus to their research, Majestic 12 has a unique Alien Tech Tree available only to them. This alien technology is the source of their unique faction features, and is the key to their specific victory condition: preparing the world for alien colonization. 

One of their unique faction abilities is that Majestic 12 can use the alien technology to clone exact duplicates of people, letting you abduct troublemakers and replace them with "people" loyal to the conspiracy. The clones aren't totally functional, though, so don't replace someone who you need to rely on for their skills.

Regardless of regional control, Majestic 12 begins the game in control of Area 51 in the Midwestern United States, which functions as their headquarters.

Plausibility Rating: 2/10

Majestic 12 scores high points for being, fundamentally, a claim that the US government is trying to control the world. That's not even a conspiracy theory, that's just objectively true. It loses a massive amount of points, however, for being a proven hoax. Ultimately, the whole Majestic 12 incident ought to be a massive stain on the legacy of the UFOlogy movement, and the only reason it seems to have had staying power even into the 1990's is that, objectively, the name slaps. 

Who do you want to learn about next?

Post a comment and let me know which conspiracy should be highlighted next:

• The Illuminati
• The Freemasons
• The Communist International
• The Jesuits
• The Church of Satan