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.
Alongside Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men, there are three other noteworthy books that tell us something about Rick Doty. First was Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth by Greg Bishop, published in 2005. In 2012, Christopher Lambright published X Descending. More recently, Doty contributed to The Black World of UFOs: Exempt from Disclosure in 2014, where he gives the fullest accounting of his own life and the message from the aliens in any print source.
Lambright confirms that Miller accompanied Doty to the Bennewitz home a few weeks after the November 1980 meeting. Neither Doty nor Miller was at the meeting, according to Air Force records. Miller’s role is “a mystery, though it always seemed rather convenient that a former Project Blue Book investigator happened to be right at hand.” Indeed, Miller may simply be a detail that Doty has added in the telling, Lambright suggests. Nor does the story of NSA interest make much sense, as Bennewitz never actually intercepted any signals or built any radio electronic equipment in his home, after all. Lambright knew Bennewitz and “to my knowledge he never claimed anything of the sort”, for his home-built equipment “was designed to measure fluctuations in magnetic fields and, by all accounts, produce linear graphs—not decoded messages.”
Lambright speculates that Doty may have been the first to suggest that Bennewitz “had actually been picking up and decoding signals from NSA facilities located in the area east of Albuquerque.” Conveniently, the truth or falsity of NSA interest is hidden behind the wall of national security classification. Lambright also casts doubt on Edwards’ role in assigning Doty to the case. An August 1980 Complaint Form reporting strange sightings at Kirtland is “concocted”, Lambright thinks, in order to “make it appear that there was a rash of sightings being reported” in the area along with Bennewitz’s sightings.
Furthermore, the meeting was in November 1980, but according to ufologist Bill Moore, Doty first approached him about becoming an informant on Bennewitz’s activities that October. According to Moore, in 1981 yet another Project Blue Book veteran, scientific advisor J. Allen Hynek, gave Bennewitz a computer that had been programmed to deliver hoax messages from aliens. Problematically, however, “Moore was the sole source for the Hynek story”, and seems to have gotten it from Doty. Hynek was well-respected in ufology, having been a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind with a cameo appearance on screen. As the founder of a scientific Center for UFO Studies, Hynek was a trusted professional, so disinformation that undermined his image could fracture the community.
Bishop also writes that “Richard Doty, Ernest Edwards, and Thomas Cseh, as well as their kin in the NSA and CIA, had all been monitoring [Bennewitz’s] phone calls, travel, mail, and visitors beginning in late 1980.” Lambright was unable to retrieve anything about Bennewitz from the NSA using the Freedom of Information Act. Again, this claim seems to come from Richard Doty, or from Doty through Bill Moore. Bishop relates how Doty oversaw the creation of an entire fake underground complex at Sandia Military Reservation. “Doty also claims that fake air vents were positioned around the mountain, sticking up out of the ground to drive the ‘underground base’ point home.” Once again, the original source is Doty himself. Doty tells Bishop about “a rotating lens which we mounted on searchlights. There were generators buried in underground rooms for power, and the whole thing ran on automatic, so we didn’t have to keep people stationed up there” to distract Paul Bennewitz. The alleged ruse involved a helicopter overflight of the land feature, supposedly to cover up an experimental laser satellite observation station.
Late in 1981, Doty invited Bennewitz to board a “Huey”- type helicopter for a private tour of the Archuleta Mesa. They flew him out of Kirtland and, talking over the noise of the engine through their wired crash helmets, Doty carefully pointed out the almost impossibly inaccessible (by ground) areas where the Air Force “props” had been planted, telling Bennewitz that these were places of concern and that he might want to ask his alien radio buddies what was going on. “He was pretty impressed with all the attention,” recalled Doty.
But all this manipulation failed, for the laser project was visible at the right shutter speed. Somehow, Bennewitz figured it out. “Bennewitz represented the weak link in security. After the AFOSI found out he was taking pictures of the laser, they again broke into his home, located the pictures, and replaced them with blank frames”, Bishop writes. The source, once again, has to be Richard C. Doty.
Lambright confirms that Kirtland AFB “has been involved in a variety of research areas including adaptive optics, laser weapons, and the effects of electromagnetic pulses (EMP)” since 1963. Paul Bennewitz had been interested in UFOs since 1948, he writes, deploring the appearance of Myrna Hansen in May of 1981. Hanson had been abducted, she said. Fascinated, Bennewitz hosted her in his home and had Leo Sprinkle, a psychologist and hypnotherapist who taught at the University of Wyoming, fly to Albuquerque so he could help Hanson remember the experience better. Strangely, “Bennewitz and Hansen both wanted to do the hypnotic regression in Bennewitz’s Lincoln Town Car, parked in the family garage — the windows sealed with thick aluminum foil. Both were under the impression that the aliens were beaming some sort of ‘rays’ at her and controlling her unconscious mind.” Lambright concludes that Bennewitz “had been planting dangerous ideas in her mind, made more receptive by her fear and confusion.”
“It seemed to make them both feel better, so I went along with it”, Sprinkle tells Lambright. He returned weeks later to find Bennewitz a changed man. “Sprinkle was aghast at the startling transformation in Bennewitz: “Between May and June, his demeanor, his reaction to me, and his attitude and take on the whole situation was much different. His attitude toward me as a colleague had changed.” Whatever caused Bennewitz to enter his mental health spiral had taken place during the time he was absorbing the abduction revelations of Myrna Hansen. Doty does not seem to have played a significant role in this affair, but Hansen’s story involved mysterious cattle mutilations, which immediately drew Bennewitz’s interest. Hansen’s case “forged” the link between UFOs and cattle mutilations in the public mind, Lambright says. It was Linda Moulton Howe who linked them both with unmarked US Army helicopters.
Doty approached Howe in person. She later described him as “tense and nervous” when he brought her to the Kirtland AFOSI office in his car. During the drive, Doty told Howe that a UFO landing recorded in 1971 had taken place in 1964 – a strange bit of misinformation. Sitting in his “boss’s office” with her back to a row of windows, Howe learned that her documentary about the cattle mutilations, Strange Harvest, had “upset some people” by coming “too close to something we don’t want the public to know about.” Greg Bishop writes that “Doty now claims to know nothing about cattle mutilations, but when pressed will hint that it might have something to do with concerns over environmental contamination.” At the time, he “agreed with Howe’s assertion that extraterrestrials were capturing cows, but in contrast to his claims of knowing most of the UFO/government story said that the details and reasons were ‘classified beyond his need to know.’” Then he showed her a fake document.
The top page was titled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States.” As she leafed through the sheaf of material, her eyes scanned other things like “crashes of silver disks,” “alien bodies,” and “extraterrestrial biological entities.” Doty asked her to move from the chair she was in to a large green one in the middle of the room. “Eyes can see through windows,” he said.
The document said that an extraterrestrial biological entity, or EBE, had been recovered from the Roswell crash site and lived in a safe house near Los Alamos Laboratories for six years before it died. Howe was incredulous. She wanted to know why she had been chosen for this revelation. “Because independent reporters like you are much easier to control,” Doty replied. As she pressed him with questions, his face turned red and he did not return her gaze. Doty added confusion later by claiming that Howe had been recorded through the mirrored walls. “On later reflection, she thought that this was because she had moved out of optimal camera and microphone range, but it may also be due to the fact that this was the AFOSI’s first attempt to openly sell their stories to a UFO researcher.” Or maybe it was just Richard Doty’s first attempt to openly tell his stories to an actual journalist. Was this meeting really sanctioned at all?
We are left to wonder. Doty could not come through, and so his promise to supply documents and film for a documentary on UFOs could never be fulfilled. “After months of on-again, off-again meetings and assurances that she would be getting the film, Doty called to tell Howe that he was out of the project”, Bishop writes. “He handed her off to a series of other contacts who also made excuses and announced more delays” until HBO gave up and canceled the project. Doty tells Bishop that the operation was designed to protect Air Force secrets and prevent the documentary from being made. But what if Doty was freelancing the whole time?
“Doty and Bennewitz were the conduits, if not the source, for much of the UFO mythology that had emerged since the early 1980s”, Pilkington observes. “Within the UFO community it was assumed that the CIA, the National Security Agency and others were tools in the cover-up of the Truth, but the Bennewitz affair suggested that the opposite might be the case, that these agencies were in fact responsible for much of the UFO mythology.” Unless it was Doty and not the agencies at large. Pilkington reveals that when Bishop interviewed Doty at a Denny’s restaurant, he was not allowed to record or take notes. Bishop later introduced Doty to the world in a 2005 broadcast of Coast to Coast. During the discussion, Doty offered his Harmonialist testimony that extraterrestrials exist on Earth right now. “Here was a man whose name was almost synonymous with deception about aliens and UFOs, and he was trying to tell us that it was all true.”
This was the outcome Doty had perhaps wanted when he met Bill Moore in October 1980, the same month that Moore and co-author Charles Berlitz published The Roswell Incident. In the telling of both Moore and Doty, a third individual, “Falcon”, introduced them after passing Moore a false document, which he called out at the beginning of the second, three-way meeting. “You passed the test”, the man called “Falcon” said. It was a strange trust-building exercise, but it worked. Thereafter, Doty was to be his contact. Moore would keep him up to date on the cutting edge of UFO research, the hot rumors and interesting cases, in exchange for information that the government wanted to release “in a controlled way”. It was to be a managed disclosure. “Moore would later perform many other services for the AFOSI which were completely unrelated to the UFO subject”, Bishop writes. “These activities kept him interested in the intelligence game, and allowed his ‘handlers’ to keep their hooks in.”
Moore visited the AFOSI offices at Kirtland a number of times in the next year. During one of these visits, Doty wanted to know about a report of a flying disc that had supposedly crashed near Aztec, New Mexico in the late 1940s. “Even though he had eventually determined that the story was a hoax perpetrated by a well-known confidence trickster named Silas Mason Newton, Doty grilled him on the details”, Bishop writes. “In later disinfo releases to eager UFO researchers, Doty and his superiors repeated the story, knowing that a cursory look at history would confirm the rumors they wanted to spread.” It seemed to be a ‘leak’ from ‘insiders’, but it was “an elementary act of disinformation.” AFOSI, or perhaps just Doty, was learning what the ufologists already thought, and then misdirecting them.
Moore’s research partner Jaime Shandera received an anonymous envelope in December 1984 containing what purported to be documents showing that a special research and government body called MJ-12, or ‘Majestic Twelve’, had controlled and studied the remains of a crashed alien spacecraft and its occupants. Suspicious of the information, Moore held out on publication under intense pressure by ‘Falcon’ (or Doty) until 1987. When he revealed the truth at a MUFON conference in 1989, “many of Moore’s colleagues could not handle the cognitive dissonance that he had laid on them. They chose to reject everything he had said in the past”, Bishop writes. Yet the community rejected these new revelations as well.
“Falcon” was an official with the Defense Intelligence agency, possibly a man named Dale Graff, if he ever existed. He is mentioned in X Descending as one of the “Aviary”, a trusted group of ufologists that Doty belonged to in 1988, when he had taken the code name for himself. Moore refers to his own association with “Falcon” and Doty as “the Aviary”, too. Code names were more than a fun game, they were a cult in action.
As if they took a page from Theosophist Charles Leadbeater’s infamous little book, future Bigelow associate Hal Puthoff was “Partridge”, while Christopher ‘Kit’ Green was “Blue Jay”, and John Alexander — named in Skinwalkers at the Pentagon — was “Chickadee”. Robert Collins, the primary author of Black World of UFOs, was “Condor”. In April 1989, we learn, “Kit Green took center stage by proposing several lines of attack involving disclosure strategies.” These same people have been having the same conversation among themselves since the 1980s, and Doty has always been one of them. They have become the 21st century ‘UAP Disclosure’ “movement”. They called themselves that even before the 2017 New York Times article that launched the careers of our new UAP Harmonialists.
Collins writes that MIB “really are government people in disguise”, specifically “members of a rather bizarre obscure unit of the Air Force Intelligence known in the past as the ‘Air Force Special Activities Center’ (AFSAC)” that has been around since 1949. “AFOSI is an organization whose operations have always been closely allied with those of the 1127th/AFSAC and it is not uncommon for OSI personnel to be assigned to special duty within the unit as they certainly were during the Bennewitz affair.”
As part of their mission, the 7602nd received information on unidentifieds and analyzed it, and passed it on to other interested groups in the intelligence world. By 1983, their budget was just over $4 million, about 30 percent of which was earmarked to pay civilians. Some of these civilians almost certainly were members of public UFO groups like MUFON, CUFOS, and APRO, or were otherwise influential in the community.
“The ‘PJ boys’ were sent out when matters particular to the most sensitive installations and projects were concerned”, Bishop writes. In the previous chapter, we encountered AFOSI-PJ in conjunction with the “invisible college”, which Bishop identifies. “Variously identified by such names as ‘The Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group’ and ‘The UFO Working Group,’ private associations of retired officers and intelligence types have been quietly looking into the matter for years”, he explains. “Many of these men are now working under the banner of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a group that is extraordinarily well funded by tea bag and real estate magnate Robert Bigelow.”
They are not even hiding it. As we observed in the previous chapter, Christopher Green goes out of his way to lend Doty credibility, which is absurd. He cites ex-CIA Director Richard Helms to Collins: “Always believe what Richard Doty tells you about UFOs.” Helms, who died in 2002, could not be reached for comment.
The truth, according to Doty, in his own words, is that it took a year for “them” to figure out how to speak with the surviving Roswell alien. “The methods they used were not made clear” to Doty, and “they” were disappointed to learn the alien was “basically a mechanic” who “certainly did not know it all”. Eventually, a doctor invented a device to implant in the alien’s throat so that he could speak English. Doty calls this being EBE-1, and tells us that his people “have been exploring planet Earth since some 25,000 years ago” through the use of “human helpers” around the planet, both “colonies or as individuals”. Until 5,000 years ago, “they populated the earth with a “human helper” in Mongolia. A second alien came to Earth as part of an exchange program from 1964 to 1984, Doty writes, and was the beneficiary of the speaking device invented earlier.
Their planet is in the Zeta Reticuli star system. They live for centuries and travel to our solar system in a matter of weeks. “They seem to bend the distance between Earth and their planet in traveling, which shortens the duration of travel”, Doty writes. “They only have liquid wastes and not solid waste; they transfer all the food they eat into liquids. Their bodies extract the liquid out of the food, but they can eat some basic food products like the vegetables and fruit that we eat. They have problems digesting meat products or they don’t eat meat on their planet” – they are vegans, but they do enjoy strawberry ice cream, Doty says. (Collins marks the last statement as obvious disinformation, but does not explain why the rest of it can be believed.) Despite “some differences in the ovary system”, the Zeta Reticuleans reproduce in a similar way to humans. Though they are obviously far advanced of humans, they have an uncanny talent for condescension. “They can regulate their IQ according to the culture they are in contact with”, Doty says, sounding … a bit racist? “Supposedly, if they are visiting a primitive planet, they can ‘lower their IQ’ in order to communicate with the culture.” Code-switching, as the kids call it.
According to Doty, the aliens have a “Yellow Book” that is essentially their Bible and history of the universe. EBE-2 brought a copy of this book with him to Earth and translated it into English. Unfortunately, humans “would take a lifetime to read the book and another lifetime to understand it”, which explains why it has not been disclosed yet, perhaps. “They have a universal religion and the simplest way to state it is that they believe in the universe as a supreme being rather than a supreme being creating the universe.” That is Harmonialism, plainly stated.
“One of the volumes of Project Aquarius” the hoax MJ-12 documents, “has 30--40 pages devoted to details of their belief in a Deity.” Doty denies responsibility for the MJ-12 hoax and claims to have passed an FBI lie detector test about it. “They claimed, the UFO researchers claimed I released them, I created them” Doty told George Knapp in a 2019 interview. “I went through an investigation by the FBI, I was cleared. I took a polygraph, I was cleared. And again in ’89, a different aspect of it became public”, and the FBI cleared him a second time. Just what crime the FBI was supposedly investigating, Doty does not say.
Like William Sadler, who concealed the identity of ‘the Sleeper’, the trance medium behind The Urantia Book, Richard Charles 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. He has spent decades destabilizing the narratives of ufology in order to monopolize spiritual authority. He is still trying to convince people that some sort of truth is behind his lies.
During the filming of Mirage Men at a ufology conference, Doty attached himself to author Mark Pilkington and documentarian John Lundberg so that “he became our almost constant companion, a state of affairs that occasionally caused us anxiety.” He experienced spells of paranoia. Doty did “some strange things,” Pilkington writes. “One afternoon, Rick approached me with his laptop while I sat working at my own in the conference foyer.”
‘Hi Mark!’ There was a furtive air to Rick’s voice that instantly set me on edge. ‘I have something I want to show you.’
He put the laptop down on the table and opened the screen to reveal a series of photographs and drawings of extraterrestrials, all in the ‘grey’ variety — grey skin, bald bulbous heads, large black almond-shaped eyes, slits for mouths, holes for noses and pencil-thin necks.
‘What do you think of these?’ he asked.
I’d seen almost all these photos before and said as much to Rick. I also told him that I thought they were all fakes; some were models, some were special-effects creations from films. A couple were very well done.
‘Why are you showing me these?’ I asked, making no attempt to hide my suspicion.
‘One of them is real. Which one do you think it is?’
‘I think they’re all fake, I’ve told you.’
‘I’ve seen a living Eben and one of these is a photograph of it.’
He pointed out one of the creatures, a side-on profile of a grey with a longer-than-usual face and a noble, determined look, at least inasmuch as you could read emotion into its alien visage. Its arms were down by its sides and the whole image was cut off above the elbow. I expressed my doubts.
‘This one is real,’ insisted Rick. ‘We called it EBE 2. It lived as a guest of the US government from 1964 until 1984. I saw it being interviewed at Los Alamos.’
John Lundberg then enters the scene to burst the momentary bubble by identifying the photo as “a bust” and “a model. A ufologist I know has it on his mantelpiece.” Still, Pilkington continues to talk to Doty. For some reason, he cannot help but continue to engage a liar, as if he is the mental thrall of a devil. “The real UFOs are imaginary weapons for psychological wars”, Pilkington concludes. “The UFOs are tricksters, as are Rick and all the others like him.” What began as folklore ends as folklore.
Doty retired from a second career with the New Mexico State Police. Along the way, he claims to have been a consultant on The X-Files from 1994 to 1996, appearing as an extra in two episodes and writing an episode, “The Blessing Way”, that was credited to series creator Chris Carter. He was also a consultant on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 alien abduction mini-series, Taken. “I also make frequent trips on special assignments to Washington D.C. concerning the UFO subject”, Doty writes, referring to his association with the invisible college.
“The way I see it, there are two levels to the UFO subject,” Doty tells Lambright. “The lower level is what the public and UFO research groups know, and the other is the one that only a few people know about — the real history of mankind’s interaction with them.” The true story is exclusive to the inner circle. “When pressed as to what this might be, he will only comment that he knows what is involved at that higher level, and that it is unlikely that anyone outside that circle will ever find out what it is”, Lambright says. We are mere plebs, we don’t get to know the inside information.
In his 2019 interview with George Knapp for CBS 8 News Now, Doty said that he first attended UFO Mega Con, the conference in the Mirage Men documentary, in “’83, maybe ’84. I don’t remember the year, but we came here” to Laughlin, Nevada. “There were four of us that came here. And all we did was mingle. We took some photographs. We listened to some interviews. We made some contact with some people, but nothing real serious.” He was a speaker in 2019, by which time Doty had added a past stint at Area 51 into his curriculum vitae.
By then, Doty had been subject to so many wild rumors about Paul Bennewitz that he seemed immune to criticism on the subject. “Paul was just … he was so infatuated with the subject of UFOs that he did this to himself”, Doty said. The case was still mysterious to Doty. “He was collecting frequencies that were up in the high gigahertz that we didn’t have at that time period in the 1980s. So it had to come from an ET source, an extraterrestrial source, not a terrestrial source.” Reader, this is nonsense. Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted the first experiments in communication in this radio band during the 1890s.
Referring to his friends in the UAP Disclosure cult, Doty claimed to know “in excess of 30 former intelligence or retired intelligence officers, they all believe this is an absolute real phenomena, UFOs, and that there’s some sort of a threat.” Indeed, Doty was keen to play up the threat perception of UAP, invoking “national security”. Doty claims that Bill Moore was approached because he had become a Soviet research contact, so AFOSI flipped Moore into their own source. As always with the UAP Disclosure gang, the true nature of a threat matters less than the perception that a threat exists.
Cold War spy tales clearly inspire Doty’s imagination. In X Descending, Chris Lambright documents how he discovered Doty claiming in 2005 on the History Channel website that he had served in Laos as an Air Force Combat Controller during May of 1968 when a secret electronic observation post, LS-85, was overrun by North Vietnamese forces. Problematically, Doty’s service records indicate that he did not go to Air Force basic training until later in August of that year, which would have been right on schedule for an 18-year-old man who had graduated high school that spring. “Is it deception, or simply confusion (perhaps like the earlier confusion over whether it was his father or his uncle who was involved with Project Blue Book?)” Lambright asks. Reader, I say it is all deception.
Lambright reveals that Bill Moore described Doty telling a similar story about Laos in 1982. Lambright includes a long appendix on his attempts to fact-check Doty’s impossible claim of service in Laos. “Equally puzzling is that none of the online messages I found in which [Doty] described any Air Force service included any mention of having worked with AFOSI.” Lambright still remains too credulous of Doty, as all of these authors do, on the topic of extraterrestrials, for he is too intrigued by the possible tenuous connections to the CIA suggested in Doty’s story. Even Pilkington, the most skeptical of these writers, still admits the desire to believe some truth exists behind the lies of Richard C. Doty. They cannot help themselves.
The Men In Black have been real for decades. They are bricoleurs, the term Claude Lévy-Strauss and Wendy Doniger coined for recyclers of spiritual content. The MIB do not challenge belief in order to stop the believers from believing. Instead, opposition pours fuel on the fires of faith, while lies disorient the believer into spiritual dependency. MIBs use disinformation and misinformation and national security imperatives to launder their Harmonialism rather than conceal crashed flying saucers or the corpses of extraterrestrial visitors. UAP ‘research’ offers a scientific skin for the Disclosure cult to wear and walk among us. Doty has been a member of the secret conclave of the UAP for decades, indeed his fingerprints are all over its most sacred hoaxes. The occult priest is now 76, but he will still take your confession.
Throughout this series, we have seen over and over again how the spiritual medium — the person through whom messages are transmitted from the universal consciousness to humanity — always struggles to monopolize spiritual authority over Harmonialist belief. Richard Doty has achieved this control, yet his spiritual revelation is puny compared to Emanuel Swedenborg, the first Harmonialist. Doty delivers no scripture to us; his “Yellow Book” will never appear.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted for the Swedish prophet, Rick Doty’s influence “must be excessive also, and have its tides, before it subsides into a permanent amount.” The cult of UAP disclosure had to raise a new generation of MIBs to survive. Their revelatory activism culminated in David Grusch, with his crescent-moon smile, his second-hand fables, and his depth of true conviction. The old time American religion was back, better than ever. They are still selling the same old story, though.