Sleeper Agent: On Richard Doty, The UAP Disclosure Cult, And Spiritual Authority
In which alleged flying objects are identified as Harmonialist religion
In the previous essay, I explored the Harmonialist religious discourse of the UAP Disclosure cult and showed how an “invisible college” of UFO believers within the ‘deep state’ has sown confusion for decades, using misinformation and disinformation, in order to monopolize spiritual authority. Richard Doty emerges as a key figure in this history. Anticipating a future revelation of extraterrestrial technology, the Disclosure community wraps itself in science, and includes a great number of very high-level scientists, but it is not science. It is Harmonialism, an old time American religion that wears science like a skin, shedding its form in every generation to replace the old science-skin with a new one, because real science marches on.
“I was born on February 15, 1950 in New York State and retired from the United States Air Force in November 1988 as a Master Sergeant”, Doty writes. He says that his father Charles and uncle Ed Doty had worked on Project Blue Book, the public UFO investigation which was just shutting down right as Rick joined the Air Force in 1968. Recognized for his family connection, Doty says that his very first assignment was guarding a gigantic hangar that held a secret spaceship, which he was allowed to observe exactly once during an experiment. He was being groomed for the world’s most secret program.
His logical next stop was Saigon. “About two months before departing for Vietnam, my uncle (who had just been promoted) came to the base to visit me”, Doty writes. During a meal at the Officers’ club, “my uncle asked me about my temporary assignment to Indian Springs. I told him I saw something I wasn’t sure about.” Importantly, Rick Doty’s memory of this meeting diverges from his uncle Ed’s memory. “He told me that indeed the object was a captured flying saucer and I was very surprised at the nonchalant way my uncle brought up the subject. I wondered whether it was safe to bring up this type of subject in the club, but my uncle told me not to worry”, he writes. Robert Collins, the main author of the Black World of UFOs, scrupulously includes a note from Uncle Ed confirming they had lunch. “To the best of my knowledge, he did not discuss anything classified”, however.
Rick Doty’s first decade in uniform was unremarkable. Then in 1978, “I was recruited by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) to become an agent”, graduating and arriving “to District 17 OSI, Kirtland AFB New Mexico in May 1979.” He was assigned to work as “a special investigator for UFO reports”, and in that role, he was to “investigate sightings, landings, or contacts with UFOs or extraterrestrials” through means that “would not draw public attention. We were disguised or under the cover of military or other federal agencies while investigating UFO sightings.”
We would run the whole covert UFO collection operation just like any other intelligence operation. We would solicit either wittingly or unwittingly of associates or of “cooperating people” as we would call them. We would recruit these people just as an intelligence officer would recruit people in a foreign country to provide us with information on UFO sightings. When they would give us information about a sighting or a landing, we would use ourselves in a cover capacity, identifying ourselves as some other person. We have even used newspaper personnel, wittingly and unwittingly, and scientists or, we would pose as a scientist.
Assigned to AFOSI in 1980, Doty was involved in “perception management” of Paul Bennewitz with false information. A local contractor and successful businessman, Bennewitz had become interested in UFOs and cattle mutilations during the 1970s. Project Beta: Summary and Report of Status (With Suggested Guidelines), a document that Bennewitz authored and circulated in the UFO world in 1981, is a “labyrinthine fantasy” and “as much a result of disinformation being fed to Bennewitz via AFOSI, as of his own imagining,” Pilkington writes. It is filled with material supplied by Doty.
Bennewitz called Col. Ernest Edwards, who was in charge of base security at Kirtland, and invoked his friendship with the base commander. Edwards assigned the case to Doty, according to Bishop, whose source is of course Doty. Bennewitz was convinced he had been taking pictures of extraterrestrial spacecraft in the night sky and he had received strange radio signals on his home equipment. Doty found the latter issue problematic, and recommended a meeting with the base command, security, and science staff. The NSA and AFOSI-PJ “asked Doty to make another trip before the meeting, this time to the Bennewitz home to see his operation firsthand.” Or so the story goes.
A discrepancy emerges here. In Bishop’s book, Doty took yet another Project Blue Book veteran, Lew Miles, and “a small, easily concealed camera” to take pictures of everything in the Bennewitz home “at the express request of the NSA”. In Collins’s book, Doty drops a different name nine years later. “Headquarters, specifically the PJ branch, suggested I take along UFO expert Jerry Miller”, who was also “a former Project Blue Book investigator”. It is not to be the last time a detail seems to differ in multiple versions of a story, a pattern which Collins calls “vintage Doty”.
Because signals are the domain of the NSA, Doty cites this agency — not his own — as the source of continued interest in Bennewitz after the meeting, in which Bennewitz told a room filled with amazed Air Force officers about the looming alien invasion and the need to defend America. Despite his crazy story, they were interested in just how he had managed to intercept secret Air Force signals, Doty says. When Bennewitz escalated to contacting New Mexico’s Senators in Washington, “the AFOSI decided that it was time to start drawing his attention away from the base.” Doty was now assigned to manipulate a man in declining mental health, a job he would do all too well, according to his own legend.
Nor was Paul Bennewitz to be the last victim of Doty’s influence. By the time he retired from the Air Force in 1988, Rick Doty had already developed relationships with key figures in the present-day UAP Disclosure cult. The following year, he would emerge as the most divisive character in ufology, splitting the larger community as the veracity of everything they had come to believe was called into question. Disconfirmation did not persuade anyone to leave the community, of course. Instead, the destabilized ufologists have treated Doty as an authority, and late in life, a prophet.
The story he tells about the extraterrestrials is classic Harmonialism, another gospel from the stars in the old time American spiritual tradition. Like William Sadler, who concealed the identity of ‘the Sleeper’, the trance medium behind The Urantia Book, Richard Doty presents a story that is unfalsifiable, for the truth hides behind a convenient veil of national security. He says he did it all for his country, but I think he did it for himself, to impress his beliefs upon the community of believers. Richard Doty is the Man In Black who would lead them.
