Richard C. Doty

Richard Charles "Rick" Doty (born 1950) is a former U.S. Air Force special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). He is best known in ufology for the 1980s episodes in which he presented himself to civilian researchers as an intelligence officer, offered them secret government material, and later acknowledged that much of it was deception. His account is one of the main sources for the story that the Air Force ran a counterintelligence campaign against UFO groups.

Career and the Bennewitz assignment

Doty grew up in Pennsylvania and served about twenty years in the Air Force, with postings in Texas, Vietnam, Washington state, West Germany and South Dakota. By 1979 he was with AFOSI at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. There he was assigned to monitor Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque physicist who had become convinced that aliens at a nearby mesa were interfering with his mind. Doty has said the purpose was twofold: to check whether Bennewitz's activity exposed classified work, and to feed him alien stories that would distract him from it (Skeptoid, 2014). After retiring he worked as a New Mexico police officer.

The MJ-12 approaches (1982–1983)

Doty worked with Bill Moore, co-author of The Roswell Incident (1980), and in 1982 with Moore and Bob Pratt on an unpublished manuscript, The Aquarius Project. On January 10–11, 1983, Doty and Moore met attorney Peter Gersten and described a top-level group called "MJ-12". On March 20, 1983, Gersten passed Doty's claims to Linda Moulton Howe, and on April 9 Howe met Doty in Albuquerque. He told her the MJ-12 story was true and showed her unspecified documents, promising footage and an alien interview that never arrived (Wikipedia: Majestic 12). The MJ-12 papers that circulated in the 1980s were later declared fake by the FBI on November 30, 1988, after AFOSI reported that no such committee had been authorized (Wikipedia: Majestic 12).

Confessions and later statements

In 1989, at a MUFON conference in Las Vegas, Moore publicly described an intelligence network he called the "Aviary" and was shouted down by the audience; he left ufology soon after. Doty later acknowledged in the 2013 documentary Mirage Men, based on Mark Pilkington's 2010 book, that he had been part of an organized effort to mislead UFO researchers. At a 2019 UFO MegaCon in Laughlin, Nevada, he again acknowledged surveilling UFO groups and spreading false information, and said he could now discuss a period at Area 51 (KRQE/Mystery Wire, 2019).

Assessment

Doty's reliability is the core dispute. His admissions give the official-deception thesis its strongest first-hand support, but he has also said that about 80 percent of what he says is untrue, a warning Brian Dunning notes in his review of the film. Many of his most consequential claims, including his account of the MJ-12 documents, rest on his own word and have not been independently verified. He also dates some of his UFO-related assignments loosely, describing one conference trip as minor. He is therefore best read as a documented participant in a real Air Force surveillance and information-operations effort against UFO researchers, whose wider claims about extraterrestrial material remain unproven.