By Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we looked at the Majestic-12 papers and how UFO researchers came to believe that they had been hoaxed. Air Force Office of Special Investigations Special Agent Richard Doty was thought to have been responsible for faking the documents and author/researcher, William Moore, introduced them to his fellow researchers and then presented them to the media. This week, we’ll look at how Moore and Doty became involved in the television production UFO Cover-Up? Live!
Along with the excitement and confusion generated by the MJ-12 documents, there were rumors that there was a modern version of the MJ-12 group leaking information about the GOVERNMENT’S secret UFO program. This group reportedly used the names of birds as code names and became known as “The Aviary.” This seems to come from a “UFO Working Group” made up of people who were members of or had connections to the military and intelligence communities and had a genuine interest in the UFO subject. This was first written about by Howard Blum in his 1990 book, Out There.
It also seems that some of the people were open to the new age mystical ideas that had permeated throughout those communities in the 1980’s that were the subject of the 2006 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson. These were people who conducted remote viewing experiments and went to spoon-bending parties, and one of them, Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, went on camera and described how he had tried (unsuccessfully) to walk through walls.
Doty seems to have become involved with this UFO working group and teamed up with one of them, Robert Collins, a career Air Force intelligence officer, who claimed his Aviary code name was “Condor.” They wrote a 2006 book, together with Timothy Good, titled The Black World of UFOs: Exempt From Disclosure.
Much has been written about the Aviary and who might have been members. Isaac Koi posted a thread in 2015 titled Remote Viewing & UFOS; Stargate, Galactic Federation + the Aviary (CIA index + 92,010 pages) on the Above Top Secret forum. Adam Gorightly looks at the subject in his 2021 book, Saucers, Spooks, and Kooks and includes “a list of reported Aviary members derived from multiple sources:”
Richard Doty = Sparrow
Robert Collins = Condor
Ernie Kellerstraus = Hawk
Dale Graff = Harrier
John Alexander = Penguin
Jaime Shandera = Woodpecker
C.B. Scott Jones = Chickadee
Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green = Blue Jay
Dr. Hal Puthoff = Owl
Dr. Ron Pandolfi = Pelican
Isaac Koi’s thread provides links to many of the articles written on this subject.
Several of the people in the above list have publicly stated that they were, indeed, part of this group, and descriptions of it range from it being an informal discussion group of military and intelligence insiders with an interest in the paranormal and UFOs to, in Gorightly’s words, “insider spooks that were trying to poison the well of UFO research.”
Gorightly sides with the informal discussion group idea and we do here as well, because it seems to be the simplest explanation.
For the purposes of this story, we’re particularly interested in Robert Collins. Collins and Doty appeared as “Condor” and “Falcon” respectively on UFO Cover-Up? Live! They appear in silhouette with their voices electronically altered in pre-recorded videotapes.
Gorightly references an article by Vince Johnson, The Aviary, the Aquarium, and Eschatology. In it there is a list of reported Aviary members similar to Gorightly’s, which omits Pandolfi’s name but has his code name, Pelican, and a description of Pandolfi’s position at CIA “as a physicist with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, who mans the ‘Wierd [sic] Desk’ (UFOs, etc) at CIA.” Pandolfi is described in Section H4 of Koi’s thread as the “successor of Kit Green as the CIA’s ‘Keeper of the Weird,’ working on the CIA’s ‘Weird Desk.’”
Johnson asked Pandolfi, whom he refers to only as “Pelican” throughout the article, about the Aviary. According to Johnson, and in Johnson’s words, Pandolfi said that “the Aviary is nothing more than the product of the somewhat-deranged mind of “Falcon,” retired Air Force Captain Robert Collins…” Pandolfi went on to describe how Collins was discharged from the Air Force after being arrested inside the security perimeter of the Manzano nuclear weapons storage facility. According to Pandolfi, Collins told his captors that he was there “to meet the President.”
Pandolfi also said that Collins sent him letters with his, Pandolfi’s, real name on the outside (we assume that meant the envelope) and his “code name” in the letter and that he, Pandolfi put the letters up on the walls of his office to amuse his colleagues.
Gorightly references a section in The Back World: Exempt From Disclosure, where Collins describes a meeting at the home of Ernie Kellerstrauss that included Moore, Shandera, Doty, and John Alexander. According to Collins, “they began talking about the E.T. who was an ‘ambassador’ or liaison to the U.S.”
Looking at various lists of purported Aviary members, one can see that there are a few names that have been associated, by their own admission, and documentation that can be found in Koi’s thread, with a remote viewing program, called “Project Stargate,” set up by the DIA at Fort Meade, Maryland, in 1978. Gorightly references interviews that Bruce Maccabee conducted with Ernie Kellerstrauss (Lt. Col. USAF Ret.) and published, in 1985, in an article titled “Hawk Tales.” Starting on page 59 of the article, Kellerstrauss (referred to only as “Hawk” by Maccabee) describes getting information from Dale Graff, a one time director of Project Stargate, about EBEs (one of whom liked to go to the beach), recovered craft, and a book where all of this this was documented. Kellerstrauss talks about Graff’s intense interest in the paranormal and out of body experiences on page 62.
In his Epilogue on page 64, Maccabee wrote this: “One other thing should be mentioned to put this into a special historical context. In the middle 1970s the CIA established a top secret program to investigate remote viewing.” Maccabee describes that some remote viewers reported seeing UFOs and tells the reader that this “established a connection, not an expected or wanted connection, between the remote viewing program and UFO investigation … Thus, in 1985, at least in part as a result of Hawk’s testimony, it became apparent that these two parallel investigations were ‘welded together’ at a highly classified level.”
What seems to have happened is that information from remote viewers and other dubious sources (particularly Doty) took on a life of its own. This information got passed around military and intelligence circles, fed out to UFO researchers, who fed it back to them in a feedback loop, and a lot of outlandish stories came out of this that some of those involved in the feedback loop came to believe. Even though the stories had nothing to back them up, because they came from GOVERNMENT insiders, they took on an air of credibility. With the Majestic-12 papers in the public discourse, that a version of this group might exist in the present day didn’t seem that far-fetched. This all set the stage for the wild tales that were going to be presented as fact by credible-seeming sources in front of millions of viewers on UFO Cover-Up? Live!” Because Moore and Shandera were the ones who brought the Majestic-12 documents to the public’s attention, and because they seemed to be in touch with a secret group of GOVERNMENT insiders, they were scheduled to be the first guests, and Moore served as a technical consultant.
Next Week (finally): “UFO Cover-Up? Live!”