Me, listening and doing cleanup to the audio version of Chapter 5 of UFOs and the National Security State.
Hi Everyone,
As you know, I am deep in my USO book writing/completion project. At the same time, I have been taking time several days per week to finally complete the reading of the long, long overdue audio book for V2 of UFOs and the National Security State. Considering I published that book back in 2009, I think we can all agree this has been a long time coming.
The book is long and it’s simply a time-consuming project. However, I am now past the halfway point and I think it sounds good. We will definitely have this out soon.
I just finished reading Chapter 5, which I titled “Cloak and Dagger.” It covers the early 1980s and does indeed include a great deal of US government operations against the UFO research community. I often think of this period as the counter-attack, following several very successful years by UFO researchers to obtain important government documents via FOIA, as well as in acquiring leaks regarding crash retrievals and alien bodies. By 1980, it really did look to some researchers that a major breakthrough really was possible.
Well, that did not happen, at least not the way they had hoped. I think that one important reason is that government-intelligence operatives took certain measures. Famously, this probably included the MJ-12 documents. Not that MJ-12 is entirely false. I believe it is, or was, real. But disinformation is always more complex than simply putting out lies and fabrications. You need to mix in truth, sometimes a lot of it, but in such a way that the truth becomes harmless. This is what I argued happened to ufology during the early 1980s.
I was doing sound editing of the chapter and just decided to talk to Tracey about what I had just reviewed in that chapter, which was the fascinating encounter that researcher Linda Moulton Howe had with Richard Dolty of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Most people know something about the MJ-12 documents, but fewer people know that 20 months before those documents were leaked, Linda and Doty had an encounter at Kirtland AFB (April 1983) in which Doty showed her documents remarkably similar to the MJ-12 documents.
This is a truly incredible story and upon reviewing what I wrote more than 15 years ago, I think it holds up very, very well. So Tracey just started recording me talking about it. We had a great discussion and I did a fairly thorough job of going over the details.
This goes to show that the US government has had a longstanding interest in monitoring and at times attempting to derail legitimate UFO research. I am not saying Doty is the villain here. As I see it, he was “doing his job.” Even so, he was playing a game with Linda. For her part, she handled herself extremely well. As interested as she was in his “information,” she never took the bait fully to publicize any of it, and did not discuss it with anyone until after the MJ-12 documents leaked in the summer of 1987 and she was interviewed about her encounter. Doty immediately denied key parts of the meeting, but it’s fair to say no one believed him.
This is thirty minutes long and Tracey succeeded in getting me going on this one. It’s a fascinating story that remains relevant to this day.
Richard