Donald Menzel
PersonScientistDonald Menzel
PersonScientistDonald Menzel was a Harvard astrophysicist and a leading scientific UFO skeptic of the early Cold War, later listed as a member in the disputed Majestic-12 papers.
Donald Menzel was a Harvard astrophysicist and a leading scientific UFO skeptic of the early Cold War, later listed as a member in the disputed Majestic-12 papers.
Donald Howard Menzel (1901–1976) was an American astrophysicist who directed the Harvard College Observatory from 1954 to 1966 and became one of the most prominent scientific skeptics of flying saucers in the early Cold War. He wrote three books arguing that UFO reports were misidentified natural phenomena. After he passed away, his name appeared among the members listed in the disputed Majestic-12 papers, which has kept him at the center of arguments about those documents.
Born in Florence, Colorado, and raised in Leadville, Menzel earned chemistry degrees at the University of Denver and a doctorate in astrophysics at Princeton in 1924 under Henry Norris Russell. After a period at Lick Observatory he joined Harvard in 1932, where he specialized in the sun, developed the first coronagraph in the United States, established a solar station at Climax, Colorado, and later helped found the Air Force-sponsored Sacramento Peak Observatory in New Mexico. During World War II he headed a Navy intelligence division that worked on enemy codes, and he continued defense work on radio-wave propagation afterward. He became acting observatory director in 1952 and full director two years later, and his popular A Field Guide to the Stars and Planets (1964) was a best-seller.
Menzel's UFO books were Flying Saucers (Harvard University Press, 1953), The World of Flying Saucers (1963, with Lyle Boyd) and The UFO Enigma (1977, with Ernest Taves). They explained sightings as stars, aircraft, mirages and unfamiliar atmospheric effects, and he attributed a saucer he saw on a 1955 Air Force weather flight to a mirage of the star Sirius. For the 1968 Congressional UFO Symposium he submitted a prepared statement, "UFO: Fact or Fiction?", which described the spacecraft explanation as "a modern myth."
The Eisenhower Briefing Document, received on film by Jaime Shandera in 1984 and made public in 1987, names Menzel among twelve "designated members" of a secret committee on recovered craft. The FBI called the document "completely bogus" after the Air Force reported that no such committee had been authorized, and critics found copied signatures and formatting errors in it. The researcher Stanton Friedman took the opposite view. After reading Menzel's papers at Harvard and elsewhere, he argued in a 1987 memo and later writings that Menzel was well placed for such a role, citing a 1960 letter to President-elect Kennedy in which Menzel described a long association with the National Security Agency and a top secret clearance. Friedman suggested that Menzel's debunking might itself have been disinformation. No authenticated record has established that the committee existed.
Menzel's name kept circulating in 2026. Around the Roswell anniversary in July, posts on r/UFOs promoted the researcher Ryan Purkey's writing on Menzel's alleged ties to the case. The commentator Red Panda Koala and other posters cast him as the first in a line of government-aligned public scientists who debunked UFOs on television, and in October, after David Grusch raised magnetohydrodynamics on Joe Rogan's podcast, posters cited Menzel in arguments about UFO propulsion. Menzel, who passed away in 1976, endures as a model of confident public UFO debunking and as one of the most debated names on the MJ-12 list.
Part 25 of a series reassessing the documentary record behind the 1933 Magenta narrative. TL;DR Historical Palomar plates contain unexplained, star-like marks. Some have been recovered by a separate detection pipeline; that establishes reproducible marks in the scans, while their physical origin remains disputed. The Earth-shadow claim has several reported significances under different comparisons. The original paper’s coverage-adjusted result is 7.6σ, rather than its idealized 22σ headline....
Part 16 of a series reassessing the documentary record behind the 1933 Magenta narrative. TL;DR Historical Palomar plates contain unexplained, star-like marks. Some have been recovered by a separate detection pipeline; that establishes reproducible marks in the scans, while their physical origin remains disputed. The Earth-shadow claim has several reported significances under different comparisons. The original paper’s coverage-adjusted result is 7.6σ, rather than its idealized 22σ headline....
Just posted the other about the connection between Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) and UFO/UAP after David Grusch just mentioned it in his new Rogan interview and a new paper on MHD and plasma physics just dropped In David Grusch’s new interview with Joe Rogan last week, he mentioned the idea that Magnetohydrodynamics, or MHD, are central to how some UFOs/UAPS achieve anti-gravity. (Some of you mentioned EHD, Electrohydrodynamics, which I think is what Thomas Townsend Brown was researching. Also,...
In David Grusch’s new interview with Joe Rogan last week, he mentioned the idea that Magnetohydrodynamics, or MHD, are central to how some UFOs/UAPS achieve anti-gravity. (Some of you mentioned EHD, Electrohydrodynamics, which I think is what Thomas Townsend Brown was researching. Also, shout-out to Richard Banduric and others talking about Extended Electrodynamics.) MHD has long been discussed as being central to how UFOs achieve anti-gravity, and it was brought to my attention weeks back th...
David Grusch mentioned Magnetohydrodynamics being tied to UFOs in his new interview with Rogan. Both Donald Menzel and two different reports about the Roswell craft back this up.
Anyone remember what episode this was from? Trying to find a clip for a video edit I'm working on. So background context, there's this whole theory floating around about a "lineage" of public science communicators (Donald Menzel, then Carl Sagan, then Neil deGrasse Tyson) who each held classified national security ties while also being the loudest public skeptics debunking UFO/UAP sightings. Menzel apparently had a Top Secret clearance and consulted for the CIA/NSA while writing books saying...
Probed ingest of: The Basement: John B. Alexander | Green Beret, Spoon Bender, UFO Investigator
Ryan Purkey’s excellent work on Donald Menzel of MJ-12 and his connection to the Roswell incident. Happy Roswell anniversary!
Happy Roswell Anniversary! Here’s a great article by Ryan Purkey about Donald Menzel’s ties to the Roswell incident.
This documentary touches on how there’s a through line going back to the 1940s of a government approved “scientist” debunking UFOs on tv in America Menzel - Hynek - Paige - Sagan - Billy Nye - Neil DeGrasse Tyson https://t.co/qSZQEEzv7H [Quoted] Science and UFOs This video starts immediately after the Michigan UFO Flap of 1966. It covers the Congressional UFO hearings of the 1960s, James McDonald, Edward Condon, Carl Sagan, the AAAS, the NAS, and the close of Project Blue Book. It attempts to...
