by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In the midst of the excitement created by the publication in 1980 of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, a set of documents reportedly came into Moore’s possession that seemed to support the story of a flying saucer recovery near Roswell and a secret government body, Majestic 12, that handled such things. These became known to UFO researchers and later, the general public. They consist of eight pages, seven of which are seemingly a briefing document for President Eisenhower, and an additional page, which is a letter dated September 24, 1947, from President Harry Truman to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal authorizing the creation of Majestic 12. The subject of the briefing document is “Operation Majestic Twelve,” and the collection of pages is often referred to as “The MJ-12 Documents.” Naturally, UFO researchers considered the possibility that the documents had been forged. Barry Greenwood and Brad Sparks came to the conclusion that they had, as did the FBI, which has made copies available on their website with “BOGUS” written across every page. The questions we’ll look at in this blog are who might have forged them and why.
Supporting the idea that the documents were forged is the fact that Moore had become involved with self-proclaimed CIA-trained Air Force Office of Special Investigations disinformation agent, Richard Doty. According to Moore, he was recruited to keep tabs on UFO researchers and aid in an AFOSI disinformation operation, primarily directed against Paul Bennewitz (who was convinced he was seeing flying saucers over Kirtland AFB and had visual and radio surveillance equipment trained on the base), and Doty was his main contact. In exchange, he said he was promised inside information on what the government knew about UFOs.
Brad Sparks and Barry Greenwood wrote a paper titled The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12 that they presented at the 2007 MUFON Symposium in Denver, Colorado. The title of the paper refers to secret tapes Robert Pratt made of phone conversati0ns with Moore while they were working on a book telling a fictionalized version of the story of Moore’s contact with Doty and secret UFO information he thought he was getting from the U.S. military and intelligence community. In the paper, they tell the story of a feedback loop between Moore, Stanton Friedman and Doty, where they would give Doty all the information they were getting on their investigation of Roswell, and he would give them documents that supported their conclusions. This seems to have come to a head when, according to Sparks and Greenwood, an associate of Moore’s, Jaime Shandera, received an envelope in the mail on December 11, 1984, with an Albuquerque postmark. In it was a roll of exposed 35mm film that contained pictures of the MJ-12 documents.
Once researchers became aware of the documents in late 1985, there were some who immediately looked into the documents’ authenticity and tried to determine their origin and source. According to Sparks and Greenwood in their paper, Sparks compared what MJ-12 documents he had access to with the “Aquarius document,” a document linked to Doty and known to be fake, another “suspect” document concerning frequency jamming at Kirtland, and a “FOIA-released UFO report by Richard Doty from AFOSI,” and concluded they all came from the same typewriter, which implicates Doty. Another argument by the authors against the authenticity of the documents is that the “Roswell UFO crash site” is wrongly described therein as being 75 miles from Roswell when it is actually 62 miles from Roswell. Perhaps the most damning evidence that the documents were faked was discovered by Philip Klass. Klass reported he found a letter in the Bush collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress dated October 1, 1947, from Truman to Vannevar Bush that has a signature identical in every way to the signature on the letter to Forrestal indicating that the signature on the Forrestal letter was photocopied. Going with the arguments that the documents are fake and that Doty was the creator, was their creation and dissemination sanctioned by AFOSI, and if it was, why?
To explore these questions, it helps to know who was where and when. Greg Bishop was a friend of Moore’s and interviewed both him and Doty for his 2005 book, Project Beta. According to him, Bennewitz had been filming lights he was seeing over the Manzano Weapons Storage Area at Kirtland starting in late 1979 and, beginning in early 1980, wrote “hundreds of letters” to Jim Lorenzen of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (of which Bennewitz was a member) describing his research and also described the lights to “acquaintances” at Kirtland (Bennewitz had a company, Thunder Scientific, and worked on military contracts).
According to Bishop, Moore, who was on APRO’s board of directors at the time, was approached in September 1980 by a man identifying himself as a colonel who promised him UFO information in exchange for his help in keeping tabs on UFO researchers. Doty, he was reportedly told, was to be his contact. According to an AFOSI “Multipurpose Internal OSI Form” (page 9 of pdf) dated October 28, 1980, Bennewitz contacted Kirtland to warn them of the threat of “Aerial Phenomena” against Manzano that he had evidence of. Doty visited Bennewitz at his house on October 26, and Bennewitz’s surveillance equipment is described on the form. A meeting was set up at Kirtland that is described on a form dated November 26, (page 6 of pdf) that took place on November 10, where Bennewitz presented his evidence before high ranking officials that there was an alien threat and said that he was in contact with the aliens.
KIRTLAND 7After this, the story told by Bishop and others who have written about this is that Moore was enlisted by Doty to assist in a disinformation campaign against Bennewitz where his fears about an alien invasion would be confirmed in order to destroy his credibility. Bennewitz ended up in a mental health facility in August 1988.
As to whether there really was an AFOSI sanctioned campaign targeting Bennewitz, a form dated July 30, 1981, describes a meeting Doty had with an aide to U.S. Sen. Peter Domenici of New Mexico, Mr. Tijerios. Tijerios described that Domenici’s sole interest in coming there (he had left prior to the meeting) was to know if AFOSI had conducted a formal investigation of Bennewitz. According to the form, “Mr. Tijeros was informed that no formal investigation of Bennewitz was conducted by AFOSI,” which is not quite saying there was no campaign targeting him.
At this point, looking at Doty’s service records (page 2) is helpful. According to them, he left Kirtland AFB and was stationed at Lindsey Air Station in Germany on January 12, 1985. This is just one month after Shandera received the documents in the mail. Given the resulting furor created by the documents, this could have been a grand parting gesture by Doty or an effort by AFOSI to keep Moore and his associates chasing their tails in Doty’s absence. What’s noteworthy is that just under two years later, Doty is back at Kirtland, and his duty is listed as “Food Services Specialist.” According to Philip Klass in the January 1991 Skeptics UFO Newsletter (page 4 of pdf), Doty was transferred to Germany to work in counter-intelligence and his superiors there came to suspect that he was “concocting tales” about contacts with communist agents. He is said to have failed a lie detector test, been dropped from AFOSI, and spent his last year in the Air Force in charge of the mess hall. According to his service records, Doty retired in October 1988.
Doty joined the New Mexico State Police in December 1988 and retired as a sergeant in February 2015. There is evidence that he continued to fabricate UFO hoaxes during this time, a major one being “Project Serpo,” which was supposedly an exchange program between Earth and a planet called Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli star system. The existence of the project was “revealed” in a series of emails to different researchers starting with Victor Martinez in November 2005. An investigation by Ryan Dube and Stephen Broadbent, who founded the “Reality Uncovered” forum revealed (page 11 of pdf) that the IP addresses of the emails were the same as Doty’s.
So, the question remains, were the MJ-12 papers part of an AFOSI sanctioned disinformation program? If they were, why was Doty sent to Germany in the midst of an active operation? In any case, it seems that AFOSI was well aware that the documents were faked and wanted to keep that knowledge between friends. In a communication (page 8) stated to be “classified secret in its entirety,” dated December 12, 1988, included with the FBI copies of the documents, there is this: “The Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Air force, advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus.” The documents had been released to the press by Moore and his associates on May 28, 1987. As of this writing, no one has been arrested for leaking or being in possession of the MJ-12 documents (stamped “Top Secret”), and AFOSI has made no statement on the Bennewitz affair.
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