-
In December 1984, in the midst of continuing contact with their own
sources (Doty and a number of others) who claimed to be leaking the
secret of the cover-up, Moore's associate Jaime Shandera received a roll
of 35mm film containing, it turned out what purported to be a briefing paper
dated November 18, 1952, and intended for president-elect Eisenhower.
The purported author, Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, reported that
an "Operation Majestic-12" consisting of a dozen top scientists, military
officers and intelligence specialists, had been set up by
presidential order on September 24, 1947, to study the Roswell
remains and the four humanoid bodies
that had been recovered nearby. The document report that the
team directed by MJ12 member and physiologist Detlev Bronk "has
suggested the term 'Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities', or
'EBEs', be adopted as the standard term of reference for these
creatures until such time as a more definitive designation can be agreed
upon." Brief mention is also made of a December 6, 1950, crash along the
Texas-Mexico border. Nothing is said, however, about
live aliens or communications with
them.
In July 1985 Moore and Shandera, acting on
tips from their sources, traveled to Washington and spent
a few days going through recently declassified
documents in Record Group 341, including Top Secret Air Force
intelligence files from USAF Headquarters. In the 126th box whose
contents they examined, they found a brief memo dated July 14, 1954,
from Robert Cutler, Special Assistant to the President, to Gen.
Nathan Twining. It says "The president has decided that
the MJ-12/SSP [Special Studies Project] briefing should take place
durin the already scheduled White House meeting of July 16 rather than
following it as previously intended. More precise
arrangements will be explained to you upon your arrival. Your concurrence
in the above change of arrangements is assumed" (Friedman,
1987).
The Cutler/Twining memo, as it would
be called in the controversies that erupted
after Moore released the MJ-12 document to the world in
the spring of 1987, is the only official document-not to be
confused with such disputed ones as the November 17, 1980, Aquarius
document-to mention MJ-12. (Several critics of the MJ-12 affair
have questioned the memo's authenticity as well, but so far
without unambiguous success.) The memo does not, of course, say
what the MJ12 Special Studies Project
was.
MJ-12 Goes Public: Just prior to Moore's release
of the MJ-12 briefing paper, another copy was leaked to British
ufologist Timothy Good, who took his copy to the press. The first newspaper
article on it appeared in the London Observer of May 31, 1987, and
soon it was the subject of pieces in the New York Times,
Washington Post and ABC-TV's Nightline. It was also denounced, not
altogether persuasively, both by professional debunkers and by many
ufologists. The dispute would rage without resolution well into 1989,
when critics discovered that President Truman's signature on the September 24,
1947, executive order (appended to the briefing paper) was exactly
like his signature on an undisputed, UFO-unrelated October 1, 1947,
letter to his science adviser (and supposed MJ-12 member)
Vannevar Bush. To all appearances a forger had appended a real
signature to a fake letter. The MJ-12 document
began to look like another disinformation
scheme.
Although acutely aware of the mass of disinformation
circulating throughout the UFO community, Moore remained convinced that at
least some of the information his own sources were giving him was authentic.
In 1988 he provided two of his sources, "Falcon" (Sgt. Doty according to some)
and "Condor" (later claimed to be former U.S. Air Force Capt. Robert Collins),
to a television production company. (Moore and Shandera had given
them avian names and called the sources collectively "the birds.")
UFO Cover-up... Live, a two-hour program, aired in October 1988, with
Falcon and Condor, their faces shaded, their voices
altered, relating the same tales with which they had regaled Moore
and Shandera. The show, almost universally judged a laughable
embarrassment, was most remembered for the informants' statements
that the aliens favored ancient Tibetan music and strawberry ice
cream. Critics found the latter allegation especially
hilarious.
Lear's Conspiracy Theory: Events on the UFO scene were
taking a yet more bizarre turn that same year as even wilder tales began
to circulate. The first to tell them was John Lear, a pilot with a background
in the CIA and the estranged son of aviation legend William P. Lear. Lear had
surfaced two or three years earlier, but aside from his
famous father there seemed little to
distinguish him from any of hundreds of other UFO buffs
who subscribe to the field's publications and show up at
its conferences. But then he started claiming that unnamed sources had
told him of extraordinary events which made those told by Doty and
the birds sound like bland and inconsequential
anecdotes.
According to Lear, not just a few but dozens of flying
saucers had crashed over the years. In 1962 the U.S.
government started Project Redlight to find a way to fly the recovered
craft, some relatively intact. A similar project exists even now
and is run out of supersecret military installation;
one is Area 51 (specifically at a facility called S-4) at the
Nevada Test Site and the other is set up near Dulce, New
Mexico. These areas, unfortunately, may no longer be under the control of the
government or even of the human race. In
the late 1960s an official agency so secret that not even the
President may know of it had made an agreement with the
aliens. In exchange for extraterrestrial technology the secret
government would permit (or at least not interfere with) a limited number
of abductions of human beings; the aliens, however, were to provide a
list of those they planned to kidnap.
All went relatively well
for a few years. Then in 1973 the government discovered that thousands of
persons who were not on the alien's list were being abducted. The resulting
tensions led to an itercation in 1978 or 1979. The aliens held
and then killed 44 top scientists as well as a
number of Delta force troops who had tried to free them. Ever
since, frantic efforts, of which the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star
Wars") is the most visible manifestation, have been made to develop
a defense against the extraterrestrials, who are busy putting implants
into abductees (as many as one in 10 Americans) to control their
behavior. At some time in the near future these people will be used for
some unknown, apparently sinister, alien purpose. Even worse than all this,
though, is the aliens' interest in Human flesh. Sex and other organs are
taken from both human beings and cattle and used to create androids
in giant vats located in underground laboratories at Area 51
and Dulce. The extraterrestrials, from an ancient race near the
end of its evolution, also use materials from human body parts as a
method of biological rejuvenation. ("In order to sustain themselves," he said,
"they use an enzyme or hormonal secretion obtained from the tissue that they
extract from humans and animals. The secretions are then mixed with
hydrogen peroxide and applied on the skin by spreading or dipping parts
of their bodies in the solution. The body absorbs the solution, then excretes
the waste back through the skin" [Berk and Renzi, 1988].)
One of
Lear's major sources was Bennewitz, who had first heard these scary stories
from "AFOSI" personnel at Kirtland in the early 1980s. By this time Bennewitz
had become something of a guru to a small group of UFO enthusiasts,
Linda Howe among them, who believed extraterrestrials were
mutilating cattle and had no trouble believing they might do the
same thing to people. Also Lear, whose political views are far to the right of
center, was linking his UFO
beliefs with conspiracy theories about a malevolent secret
American government which was attempting to use the aliens for its
own purposes, including enslavement of the world's people through
drug addiction. A considerable body of rightwing conspiracy
literature, some with barely-concealed anti-Semitic overtones, was making
similar charges. Lear himself was not anti-Semitic, but he did share
conspiracy beliefs with those who were.
Another of his
claimed sources was an unnamed physicist who, Lear claimed, had
actually worked at S-4. To the many ufologists who rejected Lear's
stories as paranoid, lunatic or fabricated (though not by the
patently-sincere Lear), there was widespread skepticism about this
physicist's existence. It turned out that he did indeed exist. His name is
Robert Lazar, who, according to a story broken by reporter George Knapp on
KLAS-TV, the ABC affiliate in Las Vegas, on November 11 and 13,
1989, claims to have worked on alien technology projects at Area 51.
Lazar, whose story is being investigated by both ufologists and mainstream
journalists, has not endorsed Lear's claims about human-alien
treaties, man-eating ETs or any of the rest and has distanced himself
from Lear and his associates. His claims, while fantastic by most standards,
are modest next to Lears.
Cooper's Conspiracy Theory: Soon Lear
was joined by someone with an even bigger supply of fabulous
yarns: one Milton William Cooper. Cooper surfaced on December 18, 1988,
when his account of the fantastic secrets he learned while a Naval petty
officer appeared on a computer network subscribed to by
ufologists and others interested in anomalous phenomena. Cooper said that
while working as a quartermaster with an intelligence team for Adm.
Bernard Clarey, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Meet, in the
early 1970s he saw two documents, Project Grudge Special Report 13 and a
Majority briefing. (In conventional UFO history, Grudge was the second
public Air Force UFO project, superceding the original Sign,
in early 1949 and lasting until late 1951, when it was renamed Blue Book.
Whereas Sign investigators at one time concluded UFOs were of
extraterrestrial origin--a conclusion the Air force leadership found
unacceptable--Grudge, as its name suggests coincidentally or otherwise,
was known for its hostility to the idea of UFOs and for its eagerness to
assign conventional explanations, warranted or otherwise, to the
sighting reports that came its way.) Cooper's account of what was in
these reports is much like the by-now familiar story
of crashes, bodies, contacts and projects, with some elaborations.
Moreover, he said the aliens were called "ALFs" (which as
any television viewer knows, stands for Alien Life forms) and
the "M" in MJ-12 is for Majority not Majestic. Later he would say he had
seen photographs of aliens, including a type he called the "big-nosed
grays"-like those that supposedly landed at Holloman in 1964 or
1971. The U.S. government was in contact with them
and alien-technology projects were going on at Area 51.
If this
sounded like a rehash of Moore and Lear, that was only because Cooper had
yet to pull out all the stops. On May 23 1989, Cooper produced a
25-page document titled The Secret Government: The
Origin, Identity And Purpose of MJ-12. He presented
it as a lecture in Las Vegas a few weeks later. In Cooper's version of
the evolving legend, the "secret government," an unscrupulous group of
covert CIA and other intelligence operatives who keep many of their
activities sealed from even the President's knowledge, runs the country.
One of its first acts was to murder one-time Secretary of Defense (and
alleged early MJ-12 member) James Forrestal the death was made to look
like suicide-because he threatened to expose the UFO cover-up.
Nonetheless, President Truman, fearing an invasion from outer
space, kept other nations, including the Soviet Union, abreast of
developments. But keeping all this secret was a real problem, so an
international secret society known as the Bilderbergers,
headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, was formed. Soon it became a secret
world government and "now controls everything" Cooper said.
All
the while flying saucers were dropping like flies out of the
heavens. In 1953 there were 10 crashes in the
United States alone. Also that year, astronomers observed
huge spaceships heading toward the earth and in time entering into
orbit around the equator. Project Plato was established to
effect communication with these new aliens. One of the ships landed and a
face-to-face meeting took place, and plans for diplomatic
relations were laid. Meanwhile a race of human-looking aliens
warned the U.S. government that the new visitors were not to be
trusted and that if the government got rid of its
nuclear weapons, the human aliens would help us in our
spiritual development, which would keep us from
destroying ourselves through wars and environmental pollution. The
government rejected these overtures.
The big-nosed grays, the ones who
had been orbiting the equator, landed again, this time at Holloman AFB, in
1954 and reached an agreement with the U.S. government. These beings stated
that they were from a dying planet that orbits Betelguese. At some point in
the not too distant future, they said, they would have to leave there for
good. A second meeting took place not long afterwards at Edwards AFB in
California. This time President Eisenhower was there to sign
a formal treaty and to meet the first alien
ambassador, "His Omnipotent Highness Krlll" pronounced Krill. He, in
common with his fellow space travelers, wore a trilateral insignia on his
uniform; the same design appears on all Betelguese
spacecraft.
According to Cooper's account, the treaty's
provisions were these: Neither side would interfere in the affairs of
the other. The aliens would abduct humans from time to time and would
return them unharmed, with no memory of the event. It would
provide a list of names of those it was going to take. The U.S.
government would keep the aliens' presence a secret and
it would receive advanced technology from them. The two sides
would exchange 16 individuals each for the purpose of learning
from and teaching each other. The aliens would stay on earth and the
humans would go to the other planet, then return after a specified period
of time. The two sides would jointly occupy huge underground bases which
would be constructed at hidden locations in the Southwest.
(It should
be noted that the people listed as members of MJ-12 are largely
from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral
Commission. These organizations play a prominent role in conspiracy
theories of the far right. In a book on the subject George Johnson
writes, "After the Holocaust of World War II, anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories became repugnant to all but the fringe of the
American right. Populist fears of the power of the rich
became focused instead on organizations that promote
international capitalism, such as the Trilateral Commission, the
Council on Foreign Relations, and the Bilderbergers, a group of
world leaders and business people who held one of their early
conferences on international relations at the Bilderberg Hotel in the
Netherlands" [Johnson, 1983]. According to Cooper, the
trilateral emblem is taken directly from the alien flag. He adds
that under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter MJ-12 became known as the
50 Committee. Under Reagan it was renamed the PI-40
Committee.)
By 1955, during the Eisenhower years, Cooper charged,
officials learned for certain what they had already begun to suspect a year
earlier: that the aliens had broken the treaty before the ink on it had time
to dry. They were killing and mutilating both human beings and
animals, failing to supply a complete list of
abductees, and not returning some of those they had taken. On top of
that, they were conspiring with the Soviets, manipulating
society through occultism, witchcraft, religion and secret
organizations. Eisenhower prepared a secret executive memo, NSC
5411, ordering a study group of 35 top
members (the "Jason Society") associated with the Council on Foreign
Relations to "examine aIl the
facts, evidence, lies, and deception and discover the
truth of the alien question" (Cooper, 1989). Because the resulting meetings
were held at Quantico Marine Base, they were called the
Quantico meetings. Those participating included Edward Teller, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Nelson
Rockefeller.
The group decided that the danger
to established social, economic, religious and political
institutions was so grave that no one must know about the aliens, not even
Congress. That meant that alternative sources of funding would have to
be found. It also concluded that the aliens were using human organs
and tissue to replenish their deteriorating genetic structure.
Further,
according to Cooper, overtures were made to the Soviet Union and other nations
so that all the earth could join together to deal with the alien menace.
Research into sophisticated new weapons systems commenced.
Intelligence sources penetrated the Vatican hoping to learn the
Fatima prophecy which had been kept secret ever since 1917. It was
suspected that the Fatima, Portugal, "miracle" was an episode of alien
manipulation. As it turned out, the prophecy stated that in 1992 a child
would unite the world under the banner of a false religion.
By 1995 people would figure out that he was the
Anti-Christ. That same year World War III would begin when
an alliance of Arab nations invaded Israel. This would lead to
nuclear war in 1999. The next four years would see horrible death and
suffering all over the planet. Christ would return in
2011.
When confronted about this, claimed Cooper, the
aliens candidly acknowledged it was true. They knew it because they
had traveled into the future via time machine and observed it with
their own eyes. They added that they created us
through genetic manipulation. Later the Americans and the Soviets
also developed time travel and confirmed the Fatima/ET vision of the
future.
In 1957 the Jason group met again, by order of
Eisenhower, to decide what to do. It came up with three
alternatives:
(1) Use nuclear bombs to blow holes in the stratosphere
so that pollution could escape into space.
(2) Build a huge network
of tunnels under the earth and save enough human beings of varying
cultures, occupations and talents so that the race could re-emerge after the
nuclear and environmental catastrophes to come. Everybody else- i.e.,
the rest of humanity--would be left on the surface
presumably to die.
(3) Employ alien and terrestrial technology to
leave earth and colonize the moon (code name "Adam") and Mars
("Eve"). The first alternative was deemed impractical, so the Americans
and the Soviets started working on the other two.
Meanwhile
they decided that the population would have to be
controlled, which could be done most easily by killing off as many
"undesirables" as possible. Thus AIDS and other deadly
diseases were introduced into the population. Another idea to
raise needed funds was quickly acted on: sell drugs on a massive scale.
An ambitious young member of the Council on Foreign Relations,
a Texas oil-company president named George Bush, was put in charge of the
project, with the aid of the CIA. "The plan worked better than anyone
had thought " Cooper said. "The CIA now controls all the worlds [sic]
illegal drug markets" (Cooper, 1989).
Unknown to just
about everybody, a secret American/Soviet/alien space base existed
on the dark side of the moon. By the early 1960s human colonies were thriving
on the surface of Mars. All the while the naive people of the earth
were led to believe the Soviets and the Americans were something other than
the closest allies. But Cooper's story got even more bizarre and
byzantine.
He claimed that in 1963, when President Kennedy
found out some of what was going on, he gave an ultimatum to MJ-12: get
out of the drug business. He also declared that in 1964 he
would tell the American people about the alien visitation. Agents
of MJ-12 orderedhis assassination. Kennedy was murdered in full
view of many hundreds of onlookers, none of whom apparently noticed, by
the Secret Service agent driving the President's car
in the motorcade.
In 1969, reported
Cooper, a confrontation between human scientists
and aliens at the Dulce laboratory resulted in the former's
being taken hostage by the latter. Soldiers who tried to free the scientists
were killed, unable to overcome the superior
alien weapons. The incident
led to a two-year rupture in relations. The alliance
was resumed in 1971 and continues to this day, even as a vast invisible
financial empire run by the CIA, the NSA and the Council on Foreign
Relations runs drugs, launders money and encourages massive street crime so
that Americans will be susceptible to gun-control legislation. The CIA
has gone so far as to employ drugs and hypnosis to cause
mentally-unstable individuals to commit mass murder of
schoolchildren and other innocents, the point being to encourage
anti-gun hysteria. All of this is part of the plot, aided and abetted by
the mass media (also under the secret government's
control), to so scare Americans that they will soon accept the
declaration of martial law when that happens, people will be rounded
up and put in concentration camps already in place. From
there they will be flown to the moon and Mars to work as slave labor
in the space colonies.
The conspirators already run the
world. As Cooper put it, "Even a cursory investigation by the most
inexperienced researcher will show that the members of the Council on Foreign
Relations and the Trilateral commission control the major foundations, all
of the major media and publishing interests, the largest banks,
all the major corporations, the - upper echelons of the
government, and many other vital interests."
Reaction to
Lear and Cooper: Whereas Lear had felt some
obligation to name a source or two, or at least to mutter
something about "unnamed sources," Cooper told his lurid and
outlandish tale as if it were so self-evidently true that sources or
supporting data were irrelevant. And to the enthusiastic
audiences flocking to Cooper's lectures, no evidence was
necessary. By the fall of the year Cooper was telling his
stories--whose sources were, in fact, flying-saucer folklore,
AFOSI disinformation unleashed during the Bennewitz
episode, conspiracy literature, and outright fiction--to large crowds of
Californians willing to pay $l0 or $15 apiece for the thrill of
being scared silly.
Lear and Cooper soon were joined by two other
tellers of tales of UFO horrors and Trilateral conspiracies, William
English and John Grace (who goes under the pseudonym "Val Valarian" and
heads the Nevada Aerial Research Group in Las Vegas).
Few if any
mainstream ufologists took these stories seriously and at first treated
them as something of a bad joke. But when it
became clear that Lear, Cooper and company were
commanding significant media attention and finding a
following among the larger public interested in ufology's fringes,
where a claim's inherent improbability had never been
seen as an obstacle to believe in it, the leaders of the UFO
community grew ever more alarmed.
One leader who was not
immediately alarmed was Walter H. Andrus, Jr., director of the Mutual UFO
Network (MUFON), one of the two largest UFO organizations in the United
States (the other being the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO
Studies [CUFOS]). In 1987, before Lear had proposed what some
wags would call the Dark Side Hypothesis, he had offered to host the
1989 MUFON conference in Las Vegas. Andrus agreed. But as
Lear's true beliefs became known, leading figures
within MUFON expressed concern about Lear's role in the
conference. When Andrus failed to respond quickly, MUFON officials
were infuriated. Facing a possible palace revolt, Andrus
informed Lear that Cooper, whom Lear had invited to speak at the
conference, was not an acceptable choice. But to the critics on the MUFON
board and elsewhere in the organization, this was hardly enough.
One of them, longtime ufologist Richard Hall, said
this was "like putting a Band-Aid on a hemorrhage" (Hall,
1989). In a heated telephone exchange Andrus called Hall's
objections to Lear "just one man's opinion" and claimed support, which
turned out not to exist, from other MUFON notables. In
a widely-distributed open letter to Andrus, Hall wrote, "Having
Lear run the symposium and be a major speaker at it is comparable to
NICAP in the 1960's having George Adamski run a NICAP
conference! "(NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial
Phenomena, of which Hall was executive secretary in the late 1950s and
much of the 1960s, was a conservative
UFO-research organization which attacked as fraudulent the claims of
Adamski, who wrote books about his meetings with Venusians and
distributed photographs of what he said were their spaceships.) Hall went
on, "You seem to be going for the colorful and the spectacular rather than for
the critical-minded approach of science; you even expressed the view-in
effect-that having a panel to question Lear critically would be good show biz
and the 'highlight' of the symposium. Maybe so, but it obviously would
dominate the entire program, grab off all major news media
attention, and put UFO research in the worst possible light." Hall
declared, "I am hereby resigning from the MUFON Board and I request that
my name be removed from all MUFON publications or papers that indicate me
to be a Board Member."
Fearing more resignations, Andrus moved to make
Lear barely more than a guest at his own conference. He was not to lecture
there, as previously planned, and hosting duties would be handled, for
the most part, by others. Lear ended up arranging an "alternative conference"
at which he, Cooper, English and Don Ecker presented the latest
elaborations on the Dark Side Hypothesis. Meanwhile another storm was
brewing. On March 1, 1989, an Albuquerque
ufologist, Robert Hastings, issued a 13-page
statement, with 37 pages of appended documents, and mailed it to
many of ufology's most prominent individuals. Hastings opened
with these remarks:
"First, it has been established that 'Falcon,'
one of the principle [sic] sources of the MJ-12
material, is Richard C. Doty, formerly attached to
District 17 Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) at
Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Sgt. Doty retired from the U.S. Air Force on October 1, 1988.
"How
do I know that Doty is 'Falcon?' During a recent telephone
conversation, Linda Moulton Howe told me that when Sgt. Doty invited
her to his office at Kirtland AFB in early April 1983, and showed her a
purportedly authentic U.S. government document on UFOs, he identified
himself as code-name 'Falcon' and stated that it was Bill Moore who had
given him that name.
"Also, in early
December 1988, a ranking member of the production
team responsible for the 'UFO Cover Up?-Live' television
documentary confirmed that Doty is 'Falcon.' This same individual also
identified the second MJ-12 source who appeared on the program,
'Condor' as Robert Collins who was, until
recently, a Captain in the U.S. Air Force. Like Doty, he was
stationed at KAFB when he left the service late
last year." (Collins, a scientist, was assigned to the plasma
physics group at Sandia National Laboratories on the Kirtland Air Force
Base. Following his retirement he moved to Indiana and remains actively interested in UFOs.)
Hastings reviewed
evidence of Doty's involvement in the concoction of
various questionable documents and stories,
including the Ellsworth tale and the Weitzel affair.
He also noted important discrepancies between the paper Howe saw
and the MJ-12 briefing document. For example, while the first mentioned the alleged Aztec crash, the second said nothing about it at all. Hastings wondered, "If the briefing paper that Sgt. Doty showed to
Linda Howe was genuine, what does that say about the accuracy (and
authenticity) of the Eisenhower document? If, on the other hand, the
former was bogus and was meant to mislead Howe for some reason,
what does that say about Richard 'Falcon' Doty's
reliability as a source for MJ-12 material as a whole?"
(Hastings, 1989). Hastings also had much critical to say about
Moore, especially about an incident in which Moore had flashed a badge in
front of ufologist/cover-up investigator Lee Graham and indicated
he was working with the government on a project to
release UFO information. (Moore would characterize this as a misguided
practical joke.)
Both Moore and Doty denied that the latter
was Falcon. They claimed Doty had been given that pseudonym long
after the 1983 meeting with Howe. Howe, however, stuck by her account.
Moore and Doty said the real Falcon, an older man than Doty had been in the studio audience as the video of his interview was being broadcast on UFO Cover-up... Live. Doty himself was in New Mexico training with the state
police.
Moore's Confession: By mid-1989 the two most
controversial figures in ufology were Moore and Lear. Moore's MUFON
lecture on July 1st did nothing to quiet his legion of critics. On his
arrival in Las Vegas, Moore checked into a different hotel from
the one at which the conference was being held. He already had refused
to submit his paper for publication in the symposium proceedings, so
no one knew what he would say. He had also stipulated that he
would accept no questions from the floor.
Moore's speech stunned and
angered much of the audience. At one point the shouts
and jeers of Lear's partisans brought proceedings to
a halt until order was restored. Moore finished and exited
immediately. He left Las Vegas not long afterwards.
In his lecture
Moore spoke candidly, for the first time, of his part in the counterintelligence operation against Bennewitz. "My role in the affair," he said, "was largely that of a freelancer providing information on
Paul's current thinking and activities." Doty, "faithfully carrying out orders
which he personally found distasteful," was one of those involved in the
effort to confuse and discredit Bennewitz. Because of his success at this
effort, Moore suggested, Doty was chosen by the real "Falcon" as "liaison person, although I really don't know. Frankly, I don't believe that Doty does either. In my opinion he was simply a pawn in a much larger game, just as I was."
From disinformation passed on by AFOSI sources, and his own observations and guesses, according to Moore, "by mid-1982" Bennewitz had put together a story that "contained virtually all of the elements
found in the current crop of rumors being circulated
around the UFO community." Moore was referring to the outlandish tales Lear
and Cooper were telling. Moore said that "when I first ran into the
disinformation operation ... being run on Bennewitz ... it seemed to me
... I was in a rather unique position. There I was with my foot ... in the
door of a secret counterintelligence game that gave every
appearance of being somehow directly connected to a high-level
government UFO project, and, judging by the positions of the people I knew to
be directly involved with it, definitely had something to do with national
security! There was no way I was going to allow the opportunity
to pass me by without learning at least something about what
was going on... I would play the disinformation game, get my hands
dirty just often enough to lead those
directing the process into believing that I was doing exactly
what they wanted me to do, and all the while continue to burrow my
way into the matrix so as to learn as much as possible about who was
directing it and why." Some of the same people who were passing alleged UFO
secrets on to Moore were also involved in the operation against Bennewitz.
Moore knew that some of the material he was getting--essentially a
mild version of the Bennewitz scenario, without the horror,
paranoia and conspiracy--was false, but he (along with Jaime Shandera and
Stanton Friedman, to whom he confided the cover-up story in June 1982;
Friedman, however, would not learn of Moore's role in the
Bennewitz episode until seven years later) felt that some of it was
probably true, since an invariable
characteristic of disinformation is that it contains some
facts. Moore also said that Linda Howe had been the victim of one of Doty's
disinformation operations.
Before he stopped cooperating with such
schemes in 1984, Moore said, he had given "routine information" to
AFOSI about certain other individuals in the UFO community. Subsequently
he claimed that during this period this emphasis) "three other
members of the UFO community... were actively doing the same thing.
I have since learned of a fourth.... All
four are prominent individuals whose identities,
if disclosed, would cause considerable controversy in the UFO
community and bring serious embarrassment to two of its major
organizations. To the best of my knowledge, at least two of these
people are still actively involved" (Moore, 1989b).
Although he
would not reveal the identities of the government informants
within ufology, Moore gave the names of several persons
"who were the subject of intelligence community interest between 1980 and
1984.
" They were:
(1) Len Stringfield, a ufologist
known for his interest in crashed-disc stories; in 1980
he had been set up by a counterintelligence operative who gave
him phony pictures of what purported to be humanoids in cold
storage.
(2) The late Pete Mazzola, whose knowledge of film
footage from a never-publicized Florida UFO case was
of great interest to counterintelligence types. Moore was
directed to urge Mazzola to send the footage to ufologist Kal Korff (who knew
nothing of the scheme) for analysis; then Moore would make a copy and pass it
on to Doty. But Mazzola never got the film, despite promises, and
the incident came to nothing. "I was left with the impression," Moore
wrote, "that the file had been intercepted and the witnesses
somehow persuaded to cease communication with
Mazzola."
(3) Peter Gersten, legal counsel
for Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), who had
spearheaded a (largely unsuccessful) legal suit against the
NSA seeking UFO information.
(4) Larry Fawcett, an official of CAUS and
coauthor of a book on the cover-up, Clear Intent
(1984).
(5) James and Coral Lorenzen, the directors
of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) periodically
"subjects of on-again, off again interest... mostly passive monitoring
rather than active meddling," according to Moore. Between 1980 and
1982 APRO employed a "cooperative" secretary who passed on
confidential material to counterintelligence personnel.
(6)
Larry W. Bryant, who was battling without success in the
courts to have UFO secrets revealed. Moore said, "His name came up often in
discussions but I never had any direct involvement in whatever activities
revolved around him."
These revelations sent shock waves through the UFO
community. In September CAUS devoted virtually all of an issue of its magazine
Just Cause to a harshly critical review of Moore's
activities. Barry Greenwood declared that the
"outrageousness" of Moore's conduct "cannot be described. Moore,
one of the major critics of government secrecy on UFOs, had covertly
informed on people who thought he was their friend and colleague. Knowing full
well that the government people with whom he was dealing
were active disinformants, Moore pursued a relationship with them and observed the deterioration of Paul
Bennewitz's physical and mental health.... Moore reported the
effects of the false information regularly to some of the very same
people who were 'doing it' to Paul. And Moore boasted in his speech
as to how effective it was" (Greenwood, 1989). Greenwood complained
further about Moore's admission that on the disastrous Cover-up ...
Live show Falcon and Condor had said things that they knew were untrue.
"In the rare situation where two hours of prime time television are given
over to a favorable presentation of UFOs, here we have a fair portion of the
last hour wasted in presenting what Moore admits to be false data.... Yet
he saw fit to go ahead and carry on a charade, making UFO research look
ridiculous in the process. Remarks by Falcon and Condor
about the aliens' lifestyle and preference for Tibetan
music and strawberry ice cream were laughable." So far as Greenwood and
CAUS, skeptical of the MJ-12 briefing document from the first, were concerned,
"July 1, 1989, may well be remembered in the history of UFO research as the
day when the 'Majestic 12' story came crashing to Earth in a heap of rubble.
Cause of death: Suicide!"
Nonetheless it seemed unlikely that
MJ-12, EBEs, and other cover-up matters would pass away
soon. The Dark Siders appeared well on their way to starting a new occult
movement in America and elsewhere.
Amongmovie conservative ufologists many legitimate questions about
conceivably more substantive matters
remained to be answered. A
re-investigation of the Roswell incident by Don Schmitt and Kevin D.
Randle of CUFOS produced what appeared to be solid new evidence of a UFO
crash and cover up. The emergence of Robert
Lazar, who even a mainstream journalist such as television
reporter George Knapp concluded is telling the truth as he knows it
possibly suggested a degree of substance to recurrent rumors about
developments in Area 51 and S-4. Even Moore's critics were
puzzled by the extraordinary interest of intelligence operatives in
ufologists and the UFO phenomenon, going back in time long
before Bennewitz's interception of low-frequency signals at Kirtland and
ahead to the present. Why go to all this trouble and expense, with so
many persons over such a period of time, if there
are no real UFO secrets to protect?
Moore says he
is still working with the "birds," who are as active as ever. The
birds tell him, he says, that disinformation is used not only
against ufologists but even against those insiders like themselves who
are privy to the cover-up. Those in charge are "going to great lengths
to mislead their own people." At one point the birds were told that there
is no substance to abduction reports, only to learn later, by accident,
that a major high-level study had been done. "Even people with a need
to know didn't know about it," he says. "The abduction mess caused
a lot of trouble. There may have been an official admission
of the cover-up by now if the abductions had not come into prominence in
the 1980s." As for the stories of
ongoing contact between the U.S.
government and extraterrestrial biological entities,
he says there is, in his observation, a "pretty good possibility,
better than three to one," that such a thing is happening. "But I don't
think we can communicate with them. Perhaps we only
intercept their communications. Or maybe they communicate with us."
He thinks he has found MJ-12. "It's not in
a place anybody looked," he says. "Not an agency one
would have expected. But when you think about it, it fits there"
(Moore, 1990). Doty, now a New Mexico State Police officer, was
decertified as an AFOSI agent on July 15, 1986, for "misconduct"
related to an incident (not concerned with UFOs) that
occurred while he was stationed in West Germany. In August
Doty requested a discharge from the Air Force and was sent
to New Jersey to be separated from the service.
But then, Doty says, the Senior Enlisted Advisor for
AFOSI made a trip to the Military Personnel Center at Randolph
AFB, Texas, and asked that Doty be
reassigned to Kirtland, where his son lived. In September
Col. Richard Law, Commander of AFOSI District 70, rescinded
Doty's decertification and assigned him to Kirtland as
a services career specialist (i.e., an Air Force
recruiter). When he left the Air Force in October
1988, he was superintendent of the
1606 Services Squadron. Doty remains close to Moore
and uncommunicative with nearly everyone else. All he will say is
that one day a book will tell his side of the story
and back it up with "Official Government
Documents" (Doty, 1989). Sources: Berk, Lynn, and David
Renzi. "Former CIA Pilot, Others Say Aliens Are Among Us." Las
Vegas Sun (May 22, 1988). Cannon, Martin.
"Earth Versus the Flying Saucers: THe Amazing Story of John Lear."
UFO Universe 9 (MarcH 1990): 8-12. Clark, Jerome. "Editorial:
Flying Saucer Fascism." International UFO Reporter 14, 4 (July/August 1989):
3, 22-23. Cooper, Milton William. The
Secret Government: The Origin, Identity, and Purpose
of MJ-12. Fullerton, CA: The Author, May 23, 1989.
Doty, RicHard. Letter to Philip J. Klass (May 24, 1989).
Emenegger, Robert. UFO's Past, Present and Future.
New York: Ballantine Books, 1974. Friedman, Stanton T.
"MJ-12: THe Evidence So Far." International UFO Reporter 12, 5
(September/October 1987): 13-20. Govt. -Alien Liaison?
Top-Secret Documents. New Brunswick, NJ: UFO Investigators League, D.d.
Greenwood, Barry. "A Majestic
Deception." Just Cause 20 (September 1989): 1-14.
Greenwood, Barry. "Notes on Peter Gersten's
Meeting witH SA RicHard Doty, 1/83." Just Cause 16 (June 1988): 7.
Hall, RicHard H. Letter to Walter H. Andrus,
Jr. (MarcH 18, 1989). Hastings, Robert. The MJ-12
Affair: Facts, Questions, Comments. Albuquerque: THe Author, March 1,
1989. Howe, Linda Moulton. An Alien Harvest: Further
Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions
to Alien Life Forms. Littleton, CO: Linda Moulton Howe
Productions, 1989. Information Originally Intended for
Those in the Intelligence Community Who Have a "Need to
Know" Clearance Status. Canadian U.F.O. Research Network: Toronto,
n.d. Johnson, George. Architects of Fear:
Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. Los
Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1983.
Maccabee, Bruce, ed. Documents and
Supporting Information Related to Crashed Flying Saucers and
Operation Majestic Twelve. Mount Rainer, MD: Fund for UFO Research,
1987. Moore, William L. "Crashed Saucers:
Evidence in Search of Proof." In Walter H. Andrus, Jr., and
Richard H. Hall, eds. MUFON 1985 UFO Symposium Proceedings, 130-79.
Seguin, TX: Mutual UfO Network, Inc., 1985. Rept.: Burbank: The
Author, 1985. Moore, William L. Interview with Jerome Clark
(January 5, 1990). Moore, William L.
The Roswell Investigation: Update and
Conclusions 1981. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1981. Rev. ed.: The
Roswell Investigation: New Evidence in the Search for a crashed
UFO. Prescott, AZ: The Author, 1982. Moore, William L.
"UfOs and the U S Government, Part 1." Focus 4, 4-5-6 (June 30
1989a): 1-18. ' Moore, William L. "UfOs and the U S
Government, part 11." Focus 4, 7-8-9 (September 30, 1989b): 1-3.
Pratt, Bob. "The Truth About the 'Ellsworth Case.'"
MUFON UFO Journal 191 (January 1984) 6-9. ' Scully, Frank.
Behind the Flying Saucers. New York: Henry Holt, 1950,
Scully, Frank. "What I've Learned Since Writing
'Behind the Flying Saucers.'" Pageant 6 (February 1951): 76-81.
Steinman, William S., with Wendelle C. Stevens. UFO
Crash at Aztec: A Well Kept Secret. Tucson, AZ: UFO Photo Archives,
1986. Stringfield, Leonard H. "Status Report on Alleged
Alien Cadaver Photos." MUFON UFO Journal 154 (December 1980): 11-16.
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1990): 17-20. 