In 1988, a recently retired US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI) Agent admitted to live television that the government is working with aliens at a secret base in the Nevada desert called Area 51 and that “extraterrestrials have complete control of this base.” In the program, the producers blacked out the OSI agent’s face, and he used the codename “Falcon.” The agent’s real name is Richard Doty. It is listed in the IMDB page for the show. Doty has admitted that during his career as an OSI agent, beginning in the 1980s, he engaged in disinformation about aliens and UFOs in the UFO community. Within weeks of the live UFO program airing, a Nevada man named Bob Lazar approached reporters in Las Vegas Claims he worked on alien spacecraft at Area 51. Despite the lack of evidence, Lazar’s claims made headlines, and Area 51, once one of our most secret military bases, quickly became the most famous.
Stories like this make me wonder how much of the UFO myth is disinformation created by the US government and why. It sounds like another UFO conspiracy theory, but Congress is also interested in this question. they NEEDS that the Pentagon’s current UAP investigative program, the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), produced a report that included “the primary historical record of the intelligence community’s involvement with unidentified anomalous events, including…
Is there any reason to believe that the US government is deceiving the public about UFOs? The story of Mr. Doty didn’t know much, but the CIA admitted to deceiving the public about UFOs in a study published in the CIA journal Intelligence Studies titled “A Die-hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–1990.”
According to the study, just like today, credible UFO sightings in the late 1940s and early 1950s brought media attention to the subject. This forced the US Air Forces to develop UFO investigation programs and the CIA to carefully monitor the situation. The CIA did not want to draw attention to the fact that it monitored UFO reports and interfaced with the US Air Force on the matter, so both organizations chose to lie about it.
The report said, “This concealment of CIA interests contributed greatly to later charges of a CIA conspiracy and cover-up.”
The problem worsened in the late 50s when testing of the U-2 spy planes began. The aircraft flew higher than others at the time, and the prototypes were extremely cautious, leading to increased reports of the USAF UFO research program at the time, Project Blue Book. The CIA later estimated that half of the UFO reports during this period were attributed to U-2 aircraft. The report said, “This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive public statements to assuage public fear and protect a highly sensitive national security project.”
The report also covers the CIA’s involvement in a University of Colorado review of UFO information in the late 60s, which led to the USAF’s closure of Project Blue Book and the complete abandonment of public UFO research. Both agencies decided to hide the CIA’s involvement in the report.
Even Roswell was a cover-up, though not of the extraterrestrial kind. Unfortunately, the first volume of the AARO report whitewashed this phenomenon. According to AARO reportin the 1990s, “USAF research did not find or develop any information indicating that the ‘Roswell Incident’ was a UFO event, nor was there any ‘cover-up’ by the USG.”
It goes on to explain how the USAF found that remains collected in the desert in 1947 were part of a classified project to listen to Russian nuclear testing called Project Mogul. This does not include the fact that the USAF research also found that the man in charge of researching the material, General Roger Ramey, took it upon himself to hide that the debris was part of a classified project. Instead, he told the press that they found an ordinary weather balloon and moved the actual debris before taking pictures with the press.
According to 1995 USAF Roswell report“The Air Force has not found documented evidence that Gen. Ramey was ordered to support the weather balloon in his press conference, he may have done so because he knew about Project MOGUL and was trying to divert interest from it, or he understood that the material was a weather balloon based on identification from his weather officer, Irving Newton.”
Ramey’s Chief of Staff, Colonel Thomas DuBose, seen in one of the photos, claimed a affidavit“the material shown in the photos taken in Gen. Ramey’s office is a weather balloon.
Photo: Ramey, left, holding a letter, and DuBose looking at a wind-forecasting device at Fort Worth Army Airfield brought in from Roswell, New Mexico. Source: University of Arlington
DuBose does not claim to have seen or know anything about the material found by the USAF. However, Ramey’s departure from the material and DuBose’s statement have helped propel Roswell conspiracy theories to this day.
This brings us back to Doty, who is the first source to claim that the USAF brought alien bodies to Area 51. He did so in a DOCUMENTS Claiming a cabal of influential people in and out of government controls UFO and alien secrets. If it sounds like The X-Files, it’s because the show was supposedly based on Doty’s stories.
In the late 1980s, Doty worked for the Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Only months after starting his position as an OSI agent, a local technical equipment dealer and paranormal enthusiast, Paul Bennewitz, claimed to have received images and signals from UFOs above the base. According to documents me and OTHERS received through FOIA, Doty and another agent looked at Bennewitz’s findings but found nothing worth investigating.
Doty claimed that someone from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) approached him after meeting with Bennewitz. Doty mentions a DIA agent with the codename “Falcon”—the same name he later used in the TV show mentioned earlier. According to Doty, Falcon wanted Doty to feed disinformation to Bennewitz and make Bennewitz believe that he saw aliens. Falcon said Bennewitz was taking signals and videos of the base’s top-secret activity, and the disinformation was intended to discredit Bennewitz and any Russian spies who may have been watching him.
There is no evidence that Falcon existed or that Doty was ordered to carry out his disinformation program against Bennewitz, but it was effective and drove Bennewitz into a dangerous mental state. Worse, the disinformation that spread Doty and its amplification of the X-Files created myths that could mislead government insiders.
The FBI reviewed some of Doty’s documents and asked the US Air Force what they knew. the documents returned with the word “BOGUS” written in bold black marker. But the question is not whether they are fake. The question is why they come from an active OSI agent—a question that has yet to be answered.
In a op-ed for Scientific American earlier this year, former AARO Chief Sean Kirkpatrick wrote: “…our efforts are ultimately overwhelmed by sensational but unsupported claims that ignore conflicting evidence but capture the attention of policymakers and the public, drive legislative battles and dominate the public narrative.
I agree with Kirkpatrick about the negative impact of “sensational but unsupported claims” on the continuation of UAP research. However, the government must be open and cooperative as well and must investigate and take responsibility for its role in the UAP disinformation.
A version of this article was originally posted on Geek Den.
