Although its existence, if not its authenticity. is certain, the provenence of the Cutler/Twining memo for a long time, remained fishy. In his 1992 book, Crash At Corona (Paragon House), Stanton Friedman reported that his comrades William Moore and Jaime Shandera were directed to the memo by a postcard with a New Zealand post-mark but an Ethiopian return address. The Cutler/Twining memo ostensibly came from the office of Eisenhower assistant Robert Cutler, and was addressed to Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining. It concerned the rescheduling of an MJ12 meeting in 1954. It appears between a pair of folders dealing with completely unrelated Air Force topics. Friedman argued that it was smuggled into the archives by the post-card writer or a co-hort possibly working for the National Archives or the Air Force "as the means of access to such material is carefully controlled by the security-conscious National Archives staff." That consciousness is actually directed more at preventing the theft of materials from the archives than attempts to smuggle things in. The opportunity to actually hold and look at the memo and make an independent judgement is available to any researcher now.

(Stanton Friedman has done some quite remarkable research over the years, including uncovering papers establishing the secret life of 1950s UFO debunker Donald /'Aenzel-another alleged MJ12 signatory and possible MJ12 back channel to JFK. The quality of his research is such, in fact, that I have encountered UFO researchers who think Friedman may have struck a deal with the intelligence community--a compliment, in my view-in order to get his hands on some of the material he has surfaced over the years. Under this scenario, Friedman's ill-advised support of Jerry Anderson, an ostensible witness to a second saucer crash in New Mexico, was deliberate disinfo to discredit the Roswell story. Strangely, Friedman has joined the chorus of critics who now say the same thing about the "alien autopsy" footage, even though he has successfully defended the original MJ12 documents against similar criticism from skeptic Phil Klass. Klass had argued that addressing conventions on the MJ12 docs do not live up to a mythical standard of uniformity in classification and dating formats. He lost a thousand dollar bet to Freidman when Freidman "established" the common sense observation that different government offices often show dates and salutations differently.)

Readers of this trek through only two avenues of research (FOIPA and National Archives) will have no doubt determined by now that this type of research can lead to major discoveries, but more often than not leads primarily to the accumulation of small bits of information over time.