by Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we introduced two people, Richard Doty, a self-professed Air Force Office of Special Investigations disinformation agent, and William Moore, a UFO researcher and co-author of the 1980 book The Roswell Incident, who had a profound influence on the UFO narrative in the 1980’s that culminated in a television presentation, UFO Cover-Up? Live!” What was discussed (scripted) on the show was the now familiar narrative of greys, crashed flying saucers, GOVERNMENT recovery of crash debris and alien bodies, and subsequent cover-up. Moore and Doty have since come forward as having been partners in what they claimed was a GOVERNMENT disinformation program targeting UFOlogists. We closed with the hypothesis that Doty was acting on his own and that Moore played along because he had a need to believe and stood to make some money from the “inside information” that Doty was feeding him and his fellow researchers. This week we’ll look at evidence to support that hypothesis.
Because Doty has never confessed to acting on his own when he spread disinformation throughout the UFO community, and the Air Force has never confirmed nor denied that he was acting on orders, the following should be looked at as speculation or a thought experiment. To begin, we need to explore the backgrounds of Doty and Moore.
Moore had a history of promoting fantastic stories based on questionable anecdotal evidence and one in particular based on a tale told by a man who later confessed he made the story up. Before The Roswell Incident, Moore and Berlitz co-authored the 1979 book The Philadelphia Experiment. Moore is listed before Berlitz in the byline.
The story is that there was an experiment in Philadelphia waters (the Delaware River) where a U.S. Navy ship was instantly transported from its dock in Philadelphia to a dock in the “Norfolk, Newport News, Portsmouth area.” The quotes are from a letter presented in the book, with the date given as “days later” after a previous letter dated January 13, 1956. The letters are from Carl Allen (a.k.a. Carlos Allende) to Morris K. Jessup and are the genesis of the story that Moore and Berlitz support with anecdotal and circumstantial evidence. Allen/Allende walked into the headquarters of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization in 1969 and confessed that the letters were a hoax and this was reported in the July-August 1969 APRO Bulletin. There is mention of this in chapter six of the book where it is described as a “so-called ‘confession.’”
Doty’s background can be examined by looking at his U.S. Air Force service records and New Mexico State Police personnel file. His Air Force Duty History shows he worked in law enforcement for his entire military career and spent his final year as a “Food Services Specialist.” This seems like an odd assignment for a CIA trained disinformation agent with highly classified information about UFOs. His personnel file from his time with the state police shows nothing unusual and includes a reprimand for an accident involving a department vehicle and two notices of suspensions without pay, 1 and 2 days respectively, for the accident mentioned in the reprimand and an additional accident. Doty doesn’t seem to have received any preferential treatment from the department.
One thing to consider about Doty’s claim of being a CIA-trained AFOSI disinformation agent is that a person in such a position would be compromising such a program or future similar efforts and would be likely breaking a secrecy oath by revealing their covert activities in a public forum.
The reader is now invited to consider the following events from the perspective that Doty was acting on his own and feeding Moore information he invented and that Moore was less than diligent in his research and possibly culpable in promoting a hoax that put private UFO research into a tailspin.
At the 2009 MUFON Symposium, Brad Sparks and Barry Greenwood presented a paper titled, The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12. The paper begins with the information that Robert Pratt, a reporter, author, and former MUFON Journal editor, recorded phone conversations with Moore without telling him. They were working on a book that would reveal information Moore was getting from Doty. Pratt suggested it be fictionalized, and Moore begrudgingly went along with that idea. Their work on the book “fizzled out” by 1984, and nothing from it was published.
They were discussing Moore’s recent meetings with Doty. Sparks and Greenwood describe Moore being in contact with a “mysterious AF Colonel” code-named “Falcon” and that Doty, code-named “Sparrow” was acting as the middleman. According to Sparks, Moore told him “he was passing to Doty every scrap of information he and his fellow Roswell investigator, nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman, collected on their Roswell investigations and on UFO research and UFOlogists.”
The reader is told that “evidently” Doty, “the colonel,” and the AFOSI set up a feedback loop where they gave forged documents to Moore that supported the information Moore gave to Doty. What was being developed in this loop was the story that the GOVERNMENT had recovered crashed saucers, live and dead aliens, and that there was a secret group known as MJ-12 that prepared briefings for every U.S. president since Harry Truman. The first briefing document was said to have been updated for each president and one reportedly prepared (by MJ12 according to the cover page) for Jimmy Carter in June 1977 was called “The “Aquarius Document” because the subject of the briefing is identified as “Project Aquarius.” The document is included in the paper and contains this revelation:
“EBE reported that 2,000 years ago his ancestors planted a human creature on earth to assist the inhabitants of earth in developing a civilization.”
One thing to notice is that Earth is used as a proper noun in this context and should have been capitalized. There are also two punctuation errors in the briefing in the form of a missing apostrophe where “Aliens” is being used in the possessive. Errors like these have been noted throughout the documents related to MJ-12 by various researchers such as Jacques Vallée.
There was also an “Aquarius Teletype” dated Nov 80. Near the bottom of section 2, just before section 4 (there is no section 3 for some reason), there is this line: “The official US government policy and results of Project Aquarius is [sic] still classified Top Secret with no dissemination outside official Intelligence channels and with restricted access to MJ-Twelve.” This was a very early mention of MJ-12 and possibly the first seen by researchers as the teletype made the rounds before the briefing document. Kevin Randle describes the teletype’s provenance.
According to Randle, Moore said he had seen the original document and that he had been handed a “retyped” version of the document on March 2, 1981, and told to give it to Bennewitz. Bennewitz never showed the document to anyone, so his having it didn’t serve any purpose.
The document made its way into the UFO community through Peter Gersten of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. Moore claimed that he had three copies and that one was in a briefcase that was stolen from his car in San Francisco after he had had a meeting with Gersten. According to Moore, he “never received a satisfactory explanation of how he (Gersten) received that document.”
This was the beginning of the MJ-12 mythos and just before the “Majestic 12” documents hit the scene. These caused a great deal of excitement among UFO researchers. If these could be shown to be real, they would prove that the GOVERNMENT had recovered saucers and aliens and was hiding this from the public. The first indication that the documents were forged is that they came in an envelope with a postmark from Albuquerque, home of Kirtland AFB, where Doty was assigned.
Next week: The MJ-12 documents.