"MJ-12, Majestic twelve, Majic. It had started during that golden Cold War summer of 1947. It had staged the first sighting of unidentified flying objects over Mount Rainier on June 24 and followed that debut two weeks later with the Roswell 'crash' of alien spacecraft. The idea was simple enough: convince Stalin that UFO's existed and that the United States was in possession of their technology. That would keep Uncle Joe on his toes.
Then, as with so many other government programs, the original plan gave way to bigger things. Majestic consisted of a top-secret twelve-man directorate (hence the name) that included...top members of the nation's scientific, aerospace, and military communities. They decided that as long as they were at it, MJ-12 could serve another, even higher purpose: keeping the taxpaying U.S. citizenry alarmed about the possibility of invasion from outer space, and therefore happy to fund expansion of the military-aerospace complex. A country convinced that little green men were hovering over the rooftops was inclined to vote yea for big weapons and space programs.
So what began a half century ago with the towing of some pie-shaped reflective disks behind a camouflaged aircraft over Washington State soon evolved into a 'black' program with a yearly budget running into the tens of millions of dollars. But Americans are easily bored. The problem quickly became how do we keep them interested? After a while, mere sightings of flying saucers just weren't enough. MJ-12 had to devise more elaborate entertainments: physical evidence, scorch marks in the grass, traumatized animals (easy enough), cars whose batteries had inexplicably gone dead while their occupants were staring google-eyed at the funny lights. When the thrill of disabled vehicles and freaked-out pets wore off, JF-12 had no choice but to start providing glimpses of the alien darlings themselves. This was trickier. For one thing, it meant finding dwarfs with security clearances. For this reason, aliens have gotten considerably bigger over the years.
~ Christopher Buckley, Little Green Men
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