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10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Richard Doty.md
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@ -44,8 +44,13 @@ relations:
with: "[[Federal Bureau of Investigation]]"
role: "said in 2005 that the FBI investigated him in 1988 or 1989 over the MJ-12 documents"
fn: 5
- type: member_of
with: "[[The Aviary]]"
start: 1986
role: "as alleged by Robert M. Collins in Exempt from Disclosure, 'the surrogate Falcon'; Doty denied in 1989 that he was the Falcon of the 1988 television program"
fn: 23
created: 2026-10-01
updated: 2026-10-01
updated: 2026-10-03
---
Richard Charles Doty served in the [[U.S. Air Force]] from September 17, 1968 to September 30, 1988, retiring as a master sergeant at [[Kirtland Air Force Base]], and was commissioned an officer of the [[New Mexico State Police]] on December 1, 1988.[^1][^2] From May 29, 1979 his recorded assignments were with units of the [[Air Force Office of Special Investigations]] (AFOSI) at Kirtland, where he was the special agent named in the October 1980 reports on [[Paul Bennewitz]].[^3][^4] In 2005 he told the radio host [[Art Bell]] that he had given Bennewitz disinformation on orders.[^5] [[Robert Hastings]] and [[Philip J. Klass]] have named him as "Falcon," the intelligence source whom [[William L. Moore]] described as the origin of material on [[Project Aquarius]] and the [[Majestic-12]] papers; Doty and Moore have both denied it.[^6][^7]
@ -100,9 +105,27 @@ On September 15, 1988 a special agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investi
On November 30, 1988 the chief of the New Mexico State Police told Officer Richard C. Doty that he was commissioned effective December 1, 1988 as a junior patrolman at an annual salary of $19,279, assigned to [[Grants, New Mexico|Grants]].[^2] The personnel file released in 2021 under the state Inspection of Public Records Act, 321 pages, records a Hazardous Materials Safety Board Level I certificate issued in June 1989, a notice that he was not selected for the explosive ordnance disposal team in May 1991, his appointment as a team member on December 1, 1994, and his appointment as temporary commander of the unit on December 27, 1999. On April 25, 2000 the chief assigned four other officers to report to Sergeant Doty in Albuquerque on April 28 for explosive ordnance disposal support to the [[Secret Service]] during Vice President [[Al Gore]]'s visit. He was removed from the team effective July 2, 2005, per correspondence submitted by his lieutenant and himself. A benefits record dated February 9, 2015 gives December 1, 1988 as his date of hire, February 13, 2015 as the end of coverage, and "Employee retired" as the reason. The state withheld his military discharge, disciplinary records and performance appraisals. The requester's description of the file as beginning "circa August of 1988 as a Staff Sergeant" does not match the commission letter.[^2]
### Letters and statements of 1988 and 1989
On March 5, 1988 Doty wrote to [[Larry W. Bryant]], who had sought his service record under the [[Freedom of Information Act]] and had written to the *[[Alexandria Journal]]* about Doty and [[Linda Moulton Howe]], that "a total of sixteen writers, journalists and newspaper reporters have tried to obtain information about me through the FOIA channels over the past seven years" and none had succeeded; that Howe had telephoned him in early 1983 about the 1980 Kirtland incident and that he met her in April 1983 in the offices of AFOSI District 17 after receiving permission from his supervisor, the meeting lasting about an hour and being "monitored by two of my supervisors"; that her questions "were centered around MJ-12, extraterrestrial beings, Project Aquarius and some other subject matter about the history of UFOs," on which he told her he had no knowledge; that "I can say, without a doubt, I never showed her any such document"; that she herself raised "a so-called 'Project Aquarius' briefing paper for [[Jimmy Carter|President Carter]]"; that the government investigated him over it and "I was totally cleared"; that he made only a "Memo for Record" of the April 1983 meeting, filed in his safe for a year and destroyed; that he had telephone conversations or short meetings with her over eighteen months and none after August 1984; and that "I know of no Government operation past or present that involved Ms. Howe or her research about UFOs." The letter ends with the sentences "I know of no secret Government investigation of UFOs. I have never heard of MJ-12 or any secret Government agency that investigates UFOs."[^20]
Howe's own account differs: she wrote that in the April 9, 1983 meeting Doty showed her a "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America," said he would call her using the code name "Falcon," followed by calls from others including a "Tom," and in June 1983 said he was officially out of the project; she responded to the denial with a sworn statement and her correspondence.[^20] The statement Hastings attributed to her, that Doty identified himself as Falcon and said Moore gave him the name, is not in her book. See Linda Moulton Howe.
In a letter of March 3, 1989 to a correspondent whose name is deleted, Doty wrote that he had spent eight years with AFOSI at Kirtland and had been assigned in West [[Germany]]; that "my last two years of service was in the Services career field, but not as a cook"; that while assigned to AFOSI District 70 at Wiesbaden he "performed duties as a counterespionage specialist" and in 1986 "was involved in a sensitive operation" that supervisors "seen ... as being unauthorized," so that "I was asked to leave AFOSI, which I did voluntarily"; that "I never lost my top secret security clearance"; that "If I should base my decision on information that I had access to during my Government Service, I would have to say, yes, Earth has been visited. However, I am not 100 percent certain that the information I had access to was entirely accurate"; that his father was never a Blue Book investigator but an uncle was; and that "the story that I am the Falcon mentioned in the Television program last October" was untrue, "I have been exonerated by Government Investigative Agencies regarding that matter."[^21] He also wrote that a book due out that fall would discuss "inaccurate statements made by CAUS regarding me" and that "this matter involving CAUS will come to an end soon after legal action has been taken." The 1984 chronology on this page shows no 1986 entry; Klass had written in 1997 that Doty was dismissed from AFOSI within two years of a 1985 transfer for turning in bogus claims about his activities.[^7]
### Moore's statements about Doty, 1989
William L. Moore said on July 1, 1989 that the liaison who contacted him after Falcon's approach of September 1980 was "AFOSI agent Richard Doty, a man who has since become quite controversial in his own right and who many people have mistakenly assumed is the Falcon himself"; that the name Falcon was coined by himself and Jaime Shandera in 1984 and Doty was "the Sparrow" in their usage; that in mid-1987, at Falcon's suggestion and with Doty's concurrence, they began hinting that Falcon might be Doty; that Doty was "much better at following orders and implementing the schemes of others than he is at coming up with ideas of his own"; that Doty, stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base at the time, was involved in the 1977 humanoid episode there, which Moore called "a special counterintelligence training exercise in the creation and dissemination of this information," though "not in any capacity where he would have been responsible for creating the documents"; and that Doty wrote the Weitzel letter of July 1980.[^22]
### Chapter in Exempt from Disclosure
In a chapter of *[[Exempt from Disclosure]]* credited to him and headed as "taken from a set of four interviews done by Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera in the 1980s and later updated," Doty stated that he was born February 15, 1950 in New York State and "retired from the United States Air Force in November 1988 as a Master Sergeant" (the personnel record on this page gives September 30, 1988); that in July 1969 at a top secret facility 15 miles southeast of [[Indian Springs|Indian Springs Air Force Base]], where he was a security policeman, a civilian who gave his name as Mr. Blake spoke to him after a saucer-shaped object was towed from a hangar and said "someday you'll know the true story about that object"; that after arriving at AFOSI District 17 at Kirtland in May 1979 he was briefed in his first year into three special programs, the second on collecting information about UFOs, the briefing for which Mr. Blake attended, and the third on safeguarding Air Force technology by methods that included "disinformation"; that a UFO incident at Ellsworth Air Force Base "turned out to be a hoax and the sergeant involved in faking the DD 1569 was punished and dismissed from the Air Force"; that he read an official document that "mentioned a 'Project Aquarius,' which contained 16 volumes of information"; and that [[Kit Green]] related that [[Richard Helms]] told him "Always believe what Richard Doty tells you about UFOs."[^23] In a statement of February 21, 2005 quoted in the same book Doty said Moore "had several sources within the U.S. Government," that he met Moore "with an NSA investigator" on one occasion, and that "during the Bennewitz affair, I met Moore with FBI agents."[^23]
[[Mark Pilkington]] wrote that in late 1981 Doty and Moore, with Bob Pratt, planned a book to which Doty would contribute as "Ronald L. Davis," titled first "Majik 12" and then "The Aquarius Project," a source Pilkington attributes to Brad Sparks and Greenwood's 2007 paper (not obtained).[^24]
### Statements in 2000
In June 2000 the publisher [[James W. Moseley]] reported in Saucer Smear, after telephone interviews, that Doty told him he had visited [[Area 51]] and had been told alien technology was kept there, though his clearance was not high enough to see it, and that Doty said he told Bennewitz years afterward that he had been hoaxed.[^20] In a letter to the July 2000 issue Doty wrote that Moore "was a coded source for OSI," "was paid for his information" and "was used to provide disinformation to Ufologists"; that "two alien spacecrafts crashed in the desert of New Mexico in the summer of 1947" and the government recovered five bodies and one live alien that lived until 1952; that "we don't have any UFOs at Area 51"; and that "during my OSI days, I did perform disinformation operations against many different targets, but everything I did was sanctioned by our Government." Moore wrote in the same issue that he could confirm Doty's comments about Bennewitz and the "energy balls," one of which he had seen briefly in Bennewitz's home.[^8]
In June 2000 the publisher [[James W. Moseley]] reported in Saucer Smear, after telephone interviews, that Doty told him he had visited [[Area 51]] and had been told alien technology was kept there, though his clearance was not high enough to see it, and that Doty said he told Bennewitz years afterward that he had been hoaxed.[^25] In a letter to the July 2000 issue Doty wrote that Moore "was a coded source for OSI," "was paid for his information" and "was used to provide disinformation to Ufologists"; that "two alien spacecrafts crashed in the desert of New Mexico in the summer of 1947" and the government recovered five bodies and one live alien that lived until 1952; that "we don't have any UFOs at Area 51"; and that "during my OSI days, I did perform disinformation operations against many different targets, but everything I did was sanctioned by our Government." Moore wrote in the same issue that he could confirm Doty's comments about Bennewitz and the "energy balls," one of which he had seen briefly in Bennewitz's home.[^8]
### Statements in 2005
@ -110,7 +133,7 @@ On [[Coast to Coast AM]] on February 27, 2005 Doty, with the author [[Greg Bisho
On the same broadcast Doty said he was briefed in a room at the Air Force special security office on a recovery at Roswell by a colonel and a civilian, with a classified 16mm film, and that his 1979 briefing included the statement that in the early 1950s the government had placed Air Force intelligence personnel as advisers to motion picture companies, beginning with a film he named as The Day the Earth Stood Still, to condition the public for a release. He also said that he learned after leaving OSI, in a room with six or seven retired intelligence officers, that a government operation from 1977 or 1978 until 1982 had taken organs from cattle, horses, elk and deer for a biological agent prevention system, and that it had been arranged so that the public would attribute the mutilations to aliens; he said he had no official knowledge of it at the time.[^5]
On July 11, 2013 Rojas wrote to the Air Force asking whether Doty had acted under orders when, as Doty has said according to Rojas, he lied to two senators, broke into a civilian's home and distributed forged documents. AFOSI released records on Rojas's [[Freedom of Information Act]] request on August 2, 2013; Rojas wrote that its public affairs office then stopped speaking with him and that he had received no answer. Rojas wrote that Gabe Valdez of the New Mexico State Police told him he was present when Doty flew Bennewitz over Dulce, that Doty told Bishop and retired Army Colonel [[John B. Alexander]] of the break-in, and that Doty says he was demoted at one point, which the military records Rojas obtained do not show.[^21]
On July 11, 2013 Rojas wrote to the Air Force asking whether Doty had acted under orders when, as Doty has said according to Rojas, he lied to two senators, broke into a civilian's home and distributed forged documents. AFOSI released records on Rojas's Freedom of Information Act request on August 2, 2013; Rojas wrote that its public affairs office then stopped speaking with him and that he had received no answer. Rojas wrote that Gabe Valdez of the New Mexico State Police told him he was present when Doty flew Bennewitz over Dulce, that Doty told Bishop and retired Army Colonel [[John B. Alexander]] of the break-in, and that Doty says he was demoted at one point, which the military records Rojas obtained do not show.[^26]
### Footnotes
@ -133,5 +156,10 @@ On July 11, 2013 Rojas wrote to the Air Force asking whether Doty had acted unde
[^17]: Susan Cooksey, Freedom of Information Manager, Air Force Intelligence Service, letter to Peter L. Clarke, KOB Television, December 5, 1983 (reply to request of November 18, 1983), printout of a reproduction at http://www.openminds.tv/wp-content/uploads/KOB-TV-Bennewitz-FOIA.pdf
[^18]: Moore and Shandera, MJ-12 Documents, "The Aquarius Document (Feb. 1981)" and "The Aquarius Teletype," pp. 7 to 9, quoting Moore in FOCUS, June 30, 1989, p. 13, and September 30, 1989, p. 8.
[^19]: FBI, "Majestic 12," file 65-81170, Part 01, 24 pages: SAC Dallas airtel to Director, October 25, 1988; Director to FBI Dallas, teletype, December 2, 1988; https://vault.fbi.gov/Majestic%2012/Majestic%2012%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29/at_download/file
[^20]: James W. Moseley, "The Paul Bennewitz Case Revisited," Saucer Smear, vol. 47, June 15, 2000, http://www.martiansgohome.com/smear/v47/ss000615.htm (printout of June 7, 2013), pp. 1 to 3.
[^21]: Alejandro Rojas, "Open letter to the U.S. Air Force regarding allegations of UFO disinformation," Open Minds, May 6, 2014 (letter sent July 11, 2013; AFOSI FOIA case 2013-03291-F), https://openminds.tv/open-letter-u-s-air-force-allegations-ufo-disinformation/ ; Rojas, "Ex-Air Force Law Enforcement Agent Says He Hoaxed Major UFO Mythologies," HuffPost, May 13, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650
[^20]: Linda Moulton Howe, *An Alien Harvest*, 2nd ed. (2014), pp. 159 to 162 and Appendix 4 (Doty letter of March 5, 1988 to Larry W. Bryant, pp. 261 to 263), https://archive.org/details/howe-l.-m.-an-alien-harvest-2nd-ed-2014 (OCR text read)
[^21]: Richard C. Doty, letter of March 3, 1989 to an unnamed correspondent (reply to a letter of January 9, 1989; address Grants, New Mexico), http://textfiles.com/ufo/doty.ufo. Quotations are as in the file, which has "Weisbaden" and "seen" for "saw."
[^22]: William L. Moore, "UFOs and the U.S. Government, Part I," address to the MUFON International UFO Symposium, Las Vegas, July 1, 1989, video recorded by Ron Regehr (Internet Archive item bill-moore-1989-mufon), read in the caption transcript of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUfimKiS-po; captions mis-render names ("Dodie") and are corrected here.
[^23]: Robert Collins and Richard Doty, *Exempt from Disclosure: The Black World of UFOs* (copyright notice 2010), Section 2, Chapter 4, "Richard Doty: AFOSI Counter-Intelligence and Raven Addendum, the Wilderness of Mirrors," and reference 4 to the introduction, https://archive.org/details/exempt-from-disclosure (OCR text read).
[^24]: Mark Pilkington, *Mirage Men* (2010), chapter "Aviary" (Doty), https://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Mark%20Pilkington%20-%20Mirage%20Men%20-%20A%20Journey%20into%20Disinformation,%20Paranoia%20and%20UFOs.pdf
[^25]: James W. Moseley, "The Paul Bennewitz Case Revisited," Saucer Smear, vol. 47, June 15, 2000, http://www.martiansgohome.com/smear/v47/ss000615.htm (printout of June 7, 2013), pp. 1 to 3.
[^26]: Alejandro Rojas, "Open letter to the U.S. Air Force regarding allegations of UFO disinformation," Open Minds, May 6, 2014 (letter sent July 11, 2013; AFOSI FOIA case 2013-03291-F), https://openminds.tv/open-letter-u-s-air-force-allegations-ufo-disinformation/ ; Rojas, "Ex-Air Force Law Enforcement Agent Says He Hoaxed Major UFO Mythologies," HuffPost, May 13, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exair-force-law-enforceme_b_5312650