‘Mirage Men’ documents U.S. government targeting of UFO researchers: synopsis-transcript-commentary-review

The main reason that we in the UFO field recognize the name of Richard Doty is that Paul Bennewitz, a self-made man, a very successful businessman, was systematically driven insane, wound up in an insane asylum under treatment for a long time, lost his business, and was destroyed by the efforts of Richard Doty… (US Air Force Special Agent) Richard Doty (is a) professional disinformer, trained to lie. By looking at him you are taking a glimpse into a whole machine that now has a life of its own.

Bob Durrant, Former airline pilot and UFO Researcher

2) We in the intelligence community planted the seed in Paul that what he was analyzing was probably UFOs. We told him, “You can’t tell anybody else about this.”

… I wasn’t in a position to write the operational plan. This comes from a supervisor, headquarters in Washington, the intelligence community. They decide how they are going to conduct these operations, how they are going to target people, and I’m the agent in the field doing this. …. Paul Bennewitz had a small portable microwave antennae on his roof and he told me he could hear the aliens talking.

Richard C. Doty, former Special Agent, Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), From: “Mirage Men” and Breaking: Richard Doty Surprise Call To Fade To Black (2018)

(Webmaster comment: Were the “voices of aliens” Paul heard produced by microwave hearing/synthetic telepathy, a standard component of organized stalking/electronic harassment? In the 2018 Fade to Black interview above, Doty admits that he was one of 123 US Air Force OSI (Office of Strategic Intelligence) officers that secretly infiltrated the UFO community wearing civilian clothes. Each spy would “recruit” and maintain four assets. (Thus, in the mid-80’s, when Doty was working on this single project, the Air Force would have had about 500 “assets” (informants) within the UFO community). Doty states Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), FBI (with much larger network), and probably the US Army (DIA) also infiltrated the UFO community to steer and mine the community for information. Doty admits to be being personal friends with former CIA Director, Richard Helms, intimately involved in early CIA mind control ops and the “original ‘Falcon’ in the ‘Aviary.’ Helms ordered the destruction of all documents related to CIA mind control ops in the mid-70s.)

3)  From the point Bennewitz gave a presentation of his scientific findings to Air Force officials, the government decided from that point on that all his perceptions would be directed in the exact direction that the intelligence agencies wanted.

Greg Bishop, author of “Project Beta” (the Paul Bennewitz story)

(Webmaster comment: I.e., Bennewitz became a “targeted individual.”)

(4) Related: …the Swedish military research (FOI) declares in their report of activities that their goal is to direct the cognitive functions of people for a lifetime.

From: Key Insights Into Global Organized Stalking-Mind Control System From Dr. Rauni Kilde (MD) book “Bright Light on Black Shadows” (2015)

5) Bennewitz was filming really highly strange craft.  Then counter-intelligence’s job is to come in and muddy the waters to make him look like a fool.  It’s been a cover story in the US for a long time.  Tell the media, tell anybody who will listen that they are using UFOs to cover up advanced technology.  When the truth is exactly the opposite of the words!

Doty and others would probably defend their counter-intelligence efforts as being patriotic.   They are carrying out work assigned by people who have decided that there must be a policy of denial in the interest of national security.   They are working for my government.   They are working in agencies of the government that is supposed to be protecting “of the people, by the people, for the people.” How did it all turn upside down?

A fractured hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor that nobody knows exactly what the truths are and everybody has found themselves completely suspicious of the motives of any human being because counter-intelligence in England and the United States and a lot of other countries have worked overtime to misinform and to tell the public and the media there’s nothing to the UFO phenomenon…. What is it that is considered so threatening that governments would kill people to keep it silent?

Linda Moulton Howe, journalist, author, and filmmaker (“A Strange Harvest Cattle Mutilation”)

6) (If we examine) the US-based mythos of the alien crashes, Roswell story, and human abductees, we find that the stories of the early abductees, such as George Adamski and Betty and Barney Hill, fall apart.   In fact, they are stories that were already written in science fiction stories that were already out.  Obviously, this was all made up nonsense. For example, the George Adamski story was actually fostered and protected by none other than Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.   Why would the head of the CIA threaten to sue anyone who tried to question or debunk the George Adamski story?…   A new mythos is being advanced (to replace traditional religions such as Christianity).

Jay Dyer: RED ALERT— UFO Alien Deception Plot Rolling Out Dec 13, 2024

(Webmaster comment: The UFO/alien abduction story has been used as a cover for top-secret government mind control operations since the 1940s and 1950s!)

7) In 1952, the Central Intelligence Agency, faced with a huge public interest in flying saucers (Webmaster comment: that they probably created), brought together a panel of senior scientists, the Robertson Panel.  They concluded that there was nothing to these flying saucer reports as objective devices of some kind, but that nevertheless the government had to exercise great care to debunk these stories and that individual civilians that expressed an interest in flying saucers ought to be carefully watched.    I believe this to be the founding document, that this has been the long-range strategy that has been followed by the US government.

Bob Durant, former airline pilot and UFO researcher

II. Webmaster’s Introduction:   Mirage Men, a 2013 film by Perception Management Productions, directed by John Lundberg (British crop circle maker!), Mark Pilkington (British author of “Mirage Men”), Roland Denning, and Kypros Kyprianou, relates the true story of how at least two U.S. government agencies (U.S. Air Force and NSA) and possibly at least one British spy agency (MI5) clandestinely targeted and destroyed Paul F. Bennewitz, a UFO researcher whose independent scientific investigations threatened to expose government black operations.   In 1979, Bennewitz became one of several “targeted individuals” in the UFO community and was neutralized via government “counter-intelligence”/disinformation/“perception management” operations.

Upon studying the film, I believe it reveals a joint CIA/NSA/Air Force Phoenix Program-style operation directed against Bennewitz, other members of the UFO community, and indeed, the American people. The Phoenix Program was a CIA-DoD psychological warfare/torture/murder program carried out against the civilian population of Vietnam between 1967-1972. It became the model for Operation Condor/Pink Plan domestic terrorism ops in Latin America during the 1980s and in subsequent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The domestic American adaptation of the program was presaged by the CIA’s MHCHAOS program of the late 1960s and was/is designed to “turn” an “adversary”/enemy into an “asset” and/or destroy that enemy. Using espionage techniques, Bennewitz was successfully “turned” into a government asset and then destroyed. The UFO community also was/is the designated targeted enemy in this ongoing military-intelligence operation.

Psychological warfare/torture techniques of the CIA’s Phoenix Program and MHCHAOS deployed in the joint NSA-US Air Force operation against Bennewitz and others included labeling them as “high value targets,” as represented by playing cards, including the ace, king, queen, jack, etc. This technique, famously used against Saddam Hussein and members of his government during the 2003 Iraq War, was also used against American civilian (Vietnam War) protesters during the late 60’s and early 70’s in the CIA’s top-secret and highly criminal MHCHAOS domestic operations. See the below images of “high value targets” (HVT) in the UFO community whose image adorns CIA face cards (from “Mirage Men”):

UFO researcher and author “turned” government asset, Bill Moore, designated as Ace of Spades

UFO Researcher and scientist/engineer turned government asset, Paul F. Bennewitz, designated as King of Clubs

Journalist, author and cattle mutilation/ET/UFO researcher turned government asset, Linda Moulton Howe, designated as the Queen of Hearts

Air Force counter-intelligence Special Agent, Richard C. Doty as Jolly Joker in the Air Force/NSA/MI5 charade/“counter-intelligence” operation

The “hidden hand” human manipulators conducting operations against targeted civilian enemies as designated with different playing cards?

In addition to being a perception management op, this was/is a social and religious engineering operation that was/is no doubt part of larger social and religious engineering operations. More importantly, the film reveals that the same psychological, information, and cognitive warfare tactics and systems deployed against Cold War enemies have been and are being deployed against American civilian targets/“enemies.” These military-intelligence domestic “counter-intelligence” and “counter-insurgency” operations, of course, have now expanded under the banner of “counter-terrorism.”

Notably. the film clearly demonstrates the hidden operational structures and personnel behind the “targeted individual program.” The films’ fundamental revelation is that the US government is an organized crime syndicate controlled or at least steered by the military-intelligence-corporate complex whose goals and operational methods are completely antithetical to the interests and well-being of the American people. I.e., the post-WWII U.S. government has “gone rogue”/totalitarian much like the despotic dictatorships of the Soviet Union, China, East Germany, and Nazi Germany that genocided their own civilian populations.

III. *Partial Dialogue from Mirage Men:

Bob Durant, former Airline pilot and UFO researcher:  

“In 1952, the Central Intelligence Agency, faced with a huge public interest in flying saucers (Webmaster comment: that they probably created), brought together a panel of senior scientists, the Robertson Panel.  They concluded that there was nothing to these flying saucer reports as objective devices of some kind, but that nevertheless the government had to exercise great care to debunk these stories and that individual civilians that expressed an interest in flying saucers ought to be carefully watched.    I believe this to be the founding document, that this has been the long-range strategy that has been followed by the US government.”

(Webmaster comment: In this manner, the flying saucer phenomenon was established as a psychological operation against the public and particular scrutiny/surveillance/targeting was to be applied to activists in this area. Please note that in 1952, the CIA was also conducting Operation Artichoke and Bluebird mind control operations with the expressed goal of controlling people’s behavior. A CIA memo associated with Operation Bluebird stated:

“The aim is controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of human nature as self-preservation.”)

Bob Durant: The general feeling amongst people who have devoted a big chunk of their life to studying UFOs, I think is fear, that that they have been taken for a ride. That these are hoaxes, but sophisticated hoaxes, carried out by their own government.

Let’s take one step at a time. You are looking at (US Air Force “counter-intelligence officer”), Richard C. Doty, the professional disinformer, trained to lie.

Richard Doty: Back in the 1980s it was my job to confuse the UFO community.

Bob Durant:  The main reason that we in the UFO field recognize the name of Richard Doty is that Paul Bennewitz, a self-made man, a very successful businessman (Engineer and President of Thunder Scientific Corporation in Albuquerque, NM), was systematically driven insane, wound up in an insane asylum under treatment for a long time, lost his business, had to turn it over to his family, and was destroyed by the efforts of Richard Doty.

Walter Bosely, Former Special Agent, U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations:   You hear about the failures. It was unfortunate what happened to Mr. Bennewitz.  But they were supposed to protect something and they did their job.

Richard C. Doty (Former Special Agent, Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI): I began a dialogue with Paul, trying to find out everything he had. Bennewitz had sophisticated, sensitive scientific equipment and he was collecting (EMF frequency) emissions coming from (Kirkland Air Force) base.   And he was filming an object that was part of an experimental classified project of the government.  This sent up a flag.   We (U.S. Air Force) had to decide what we would do then.   Would we allow this to happen or would we try to convince him otherwise? We planted the idea in Paul that maybe what he was hearing and picking up on his equipment was maybe from UFOs.

(Webmaster’s comment: The nature and purpose of the (radio frequency) emissions coming from Kirkland Air Force Base is not clarified. My speculation is that they may have been running mind control experiments on the local population.)

Greg Bishop:

Bob Durant:  Doty was feeding this man (Bennewitz) all kinds of lies about UFOs and aliens being kept underneath a mountain nearby… and Bennewitz was believing all of this. 

Greg Bishop, author of “Project Beta” (the Paul Bennewitz story):  From the point Bennewitz gave a presentation of his scientific findings to Air Force officials, the government decided from that point on that all his perceptions would be directed in the exact direction that the intelligence agencies wanted.  

(Webmaster comment: I.e., he became a “targeted individual!?” and the target of psychological warfare waged against him by more than one US government agency, the U.S. Air Force and the NSA.) 

Richard Doty:  Paul asked the Air Force for a grant to investigate UFOs on the base and a grant to continue the contact he claimed he had with some of these aliens.  At one point, another agency (the NSA) was conducting an investigation and they set up a surveillance across the street from Paul’s residence.  And Paul’s son contacted me and said, “Leave my father alone. You guys are across the street and you’re bothering my father. He’s getting paranoid.”   Well, I knew it wasn’t us.

Greg Bishop:  He said he saw people coming in and out of the house and looking out from the curtains.   As it turns out, the NSA had some people in this house.  They were watching him and they were beaming messages from across the street into his antennae setup.   He’d started picking up these signals and the NSA was scared that anybody could figure that out.   They decided to just take complete control of what he was seeing and give him exactly what he thought he should be getting…  They replaced his computer with their own computer.   The computer had software that would decode the messages he was getting in the way they wanted him to see them.   

If you look at the transcripts of what he got…. They (aliens) said they were from a planet with no water and they were trying to find a new place to live and they want to take over the earth.    And they could only trust Paul.  They would have some kind of agreement with him. And Paul said you can’t trust these aliens.   Thse aliens are evil.  This served to make him look silly, which was exactly what they were trying to do.

Greg Bishop on Archuleta Mesa… It’s very remote here. Supposedly, it’s the site of an underground alien base. That rumor got started in the early 1980s because of what was told to Paul Bennewitz by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

Richard Doty:  Paul thought they’s aliens had to be coming from some other place. Paul was a pilot and he flew up to Archuleta Mesa near Dulce, New Mexico to see if the saucers and aliens were coming from that area.   He filmed things up there that again presented a problem for us, because he was actually filming a secretive military installation that was training commandos.    So then we had to convince Paul that what he was seeing up there was UFOs.

Greg Bishop: The Air Force actually put Bennewitz in a helicopter with Richard Doty the first time and flew him up to a place above Dulce called Archuleta Mesa. And before they took him there, they flew a bunch of props up there. And they said, “you’re right Paul, there’s stuff up here, there’s some evidence of what’s going on. Why don’t you check it out.”

Richard Doty: I went up to the Mesa with Paul and we camped together a few nights.   We saw some strange lights coming out of the ground in a pulsed manner that looked like they were saucers flying out of the ground. I actually saw this. I was somewhat concerned that maybe Paul had stumbled onto something.

Ron Regher, retired Aerospace Engineer, Voyager Program: Paul would fly what he called his missions up around Archuleta Mesa. He would send back fascinating letters, 5-8 pages long, hand-written, with pencil sketches of what he saw. Finally he started sending large format 8×10 photos he took with his Hasselblad.. And he’d say here’s the black atomic powered ship that crashed last week. And I couldn’t see anything.

Greg Bishop:  Something actually did crash near Dulce on the Mesa in the late 1980s.  Bennewitz just happened to be flying over and took some high quality pictures of it and so the disinformation campaign had to be ratcheted up even more.   The Air Force knew it was something they were testing in this area that had gone off course and crashed.   Of course, they (Doty and Air Force special agents) told Paul Bennewitz that it was some sort of alien craft that had been given to the humans to use and that they had shot it out of the sky as some sort of a lesson.  

Greg Bishop:  Agents would break into his house to see what he had.   At one point, he had these pictures of whatever crashed up there.  The agents were very interested in getting these pictures of the crash.  So they did.  What probably crashed there was some sort of unmanned aerial vehicle.   Now they are over in the Middle East… remote controlled, killing people in cars as they drove across the desert.  In 1985, they didn’t want anybody to have any knowledge of this kind of thing.   They took great pains to explain to him that it was this atomic-powered aircraft that the aliens had helped us with.   To bring down that laughter curtain again so people wouldn’t pay attention.   They’d think it was another UFO nut.

Gabe Valdez, Highway Patrol, Dulce, New Mexico: Somebody gave him a satellite picture of a landing area. In 1983, he went up there with me and the Chief of Police of the Apache Tribe, and they had made a landing pad and he took us right to the spot. They were giving him this disinformation, some of it was true, some of it wasn’t. I think that was the biggest problem he had coping with why this why not the other.

Greg Bishop: He thought that this was the place where the aliens were gathering together to take over the world.   And he wanted to trap them all there, kill them all in one fell swoop and save the earth. By the mid-1980’s, he’d written to all these Congressmen, Senators, TV stations, and even President Reagan, and he’d get answers back saying we are not interested in this sort of thing. There was this sort of cognitive dissonance. Nobody seemed to care what he was talking about except the Air Force.
This looked like a saucer aircraft… you could see blinking lights.

Greg Bishop: By 1988, things are so bad that his family decided to take him to a psychiatric facility and see if they could try and save his life.    He said that aliens would come at night through his wall and inject him with something that would make him get in his car and drive out into the desert. And he didn’t remember what he was doing or why he went.   The scary thing was there actually were injection marks on his arm.  

(Webmaster comment: This suggests that he was drugged and/or abducted, probably by “counter-intelligence” agents.)

Gabe Valdez: He (Bennewitz) was caught right in the middle of it. And then he was used. If it wasn’t for Paul Bennowitz, I wouldn’t have ever known 70% of the stuff that was going on. I saw an entrance to an underground base.

Well, the first case of the cattle mutilation in Dulce, NM, was June 14, 1974. People do kill animals and steal the meat. But this was different. Why did they just take the utter, the tongue at the base of the throat, and the lymph nodes? We were finding the evidence of the mutilations… gas masks that were made by the military, tranquilizers, atropine, they were injecting them with atropine.

Linda Moulton Howe, journalist, author of “A Strange Harvest”:

Gabe Valdez:

Dr. Christopher Green, former CIA science analyst: I was an analyst in the agency responsible for chemical weapons analysis. A special forces guy came and I said, “Hey what do you know about these crazy about these helicopters and mutilated cattle? He said, “I’m in a special group in New Mexico. We got these helicopters I’m flying, they are all fixed up, first, they got no markings on them, second, they are really fast, third they are really quiet, we got red lights, we got strobe lights. We pretend we’re UFOs.

Gabe Valdez, Highway Patrol, Dulce, New Mexico:
The first case of the cattle mutilation in Dulce, NM, was June 14, 1974. People do kill animals and steal the meat. But this was different. Why did they just take the utter, the tongue at the base of the thoat, and the lymph nodes. We were finding the evidence of the mutilations… gas masks, the tranquilizers, atropine, they were injecting them with atropine.

Senator Harrison Smith had a conference here (Dulce, NM) in 1980. Because the ranchers were asking for help. And I met Paul Bennewitz there. He was taking a bunch of pictures of the aircraft coming out of the Kirland (Air Force Base) area. And we’re watching the same aircraft flying into the Dulce area. Everyone is looking at this sophisticated aircraft and they’re saying well, they’re the ones who are mutilating the cattle. One agency was doing the cattle mutilations. But the people who were doing the research on the aircraft used the cattle mutilations to test their aircraft so that people would think it was a UFO. And it helped the cattle mutilation thing. It’s a wonder they didn’t crash into each other.

Walter Bosely, Former Special Agent, U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (USOSI):   Would we use perception to help shroud what we are trying to protect? Absolutely. If you’ve got an aerial platform that is highly advanced and the public, who happens to get a glimpse of it from time to time, if they’re convinced that it’s from Venus and there’s no way it could our military, that’s awesome. If I’m the agent running the protection for that particular program and that’s helping me protect the program for years, I might even feed the fire.

Linda Moulton Howe, filmmaker of “A Strange Harvest Cattle Mutilations:”  (Air Force Special Agent Richard) Doty and others would probably defend their counter-intelligence efforts as being patriotic.   They are carrying out work assigned by people who have decided that there must be a policy of denial in the interest of national security.   They are working for my government.   They are working in agencies of the government that is supposed to be protecting “of the people, by the people, for the people.” How did it all turn upside down?

Unidentified voice: At the core there is something that they want to keep people away from.   A real truth.

Greg Bishop: Disinformation is designed to appeal to the person that it’s operating on. The more dramatic you can be appealing to that prejudice, the better you can get your hooks into the person you are trying to get.   In Paul Bennowitz’s case, he was talking about UFOs and so if the Air Force wanted to get his undivided attention, they would talk UFOs with him.  Which is exactly what they did.

Linda Moulton Howe:  Bennewitz was filming really highly strange craft.  Then counter-intel’s job is to come in and muddy the waters to make him look like a fool.  It’s been a cover story in the US for a long time.  Tell the media, tell anybody who will listen, that they are using UFOs to cover up advanced technology.  When the truth is exactly the opposite of the words!

Richard Dolan, UFO historian: It became seen as necerssary to create an active disinformation program in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And the reason was: 1) the American Freedom of Information Act. Thousands of pages of documents released from the CIA, FBI, all the military agencies, proved that these agencies were interested in and were tracking the UFO phenomenon. During the late 1970s, a number of leaks occurred. There were many of them and they seemed to have a coherence about them. Researchers were hopeful that they might be able to smash the (government’s) wall of the secrecy. Then… we get (the government agents) entering the fray and leaking documents of dubious origin that cause 25 years worth of dissension in the UFO field. And the media moved the topic into the realm of entertainment. So the movies are used to inoculate the public against these truths. So these demonstrably false stories become a kind of inoculation.

Voice: One of the keys to a disinformation campaign is to have a feedback loop.   And you need people on the inside to feed back to you the results of the operation.

Bob Durant: Probably Doty’s first success in rounding up a useful asset as they say in the intelligence field or a useful idiot as they also say in the intelligence field was his recruitment of William Moore who was co-author of the first book about Roswell.

Richard Doty:  I was given the task of making contact with Bill Moore and basically finding out what he knew and who he knew.   Bill was a little reluctant to disclose everything to me, for obvious reasons, here I am a government agent introducing myself and wanting to know what he knew.   But there are techniques we are trained to use in gaining that person’s confidence and I used those techniques against Bill Moore and they worked and Bill Moore took me into his confidence and we had a professional relationship as far as him providing us information about the UFO community and agreeing to say things that we wanted said regarding the UFO community or within the UFO community.

(Webmaster comment: The government has now successfully infiltrated the UFO community through Bill Moore.)

Bob Durant: Remember, it’s the politicians and the journalists that are the ultimate target of all this disinformation…. Bill Moore, later, was part of the series of break-ins into the Bennewitz house and the psychological warfare program.  Again, self-admitted by Moore.  Moore was not working alone.  Others, I’m convinced, went for the same deal.  The deal was very simple.  You cooperate with us and we will give you the information that the US government has deep down in those vaults.   This is the Faustian bargain that William Moore went for.   And he came up short on it.  

Ron Regher:   Bill’s admission to working with government agents was the first acknowledgement of the degree to which our government will go to keep the cover-up going.  It’s scary to think that somebody I trusted might be playing me for the fool. 

People whose job it was to make the subject look ridiculous over the last 50 to 60 years have done a very good job. 

Richard Doty:  I was selected to participate in a Special Access Program within the counter-intelligence community; my supervisor said you are going to be briefed into a program and you are going to be responsible for investigating everything associated with this program.   The first part of the briefing dealt with how the US Air Force were countering unauthorized disclosure of technology to the public by using the UFO phenomenon as a cover.  And the second part of the briefing was where we were actually shown and briefed about the United States government’s involvement with extra-terrestrials since the late 1940s, which was obviously the most interesting part of the briefing.   They showed us a film, which was a late 40’s or early 50s film, of a recovery operation they said was in Roswell.  They showed crash debris, they showed extra-terrestrial bodies.  And there was also a briefing showing a live alien sitting in a room talking to people.  And the narrator of this film talked about the continuation of a connection between the U.S. government and extra-terrestrial civilizations.  After viewing this, I was not sure if it was real or perhaps some kind of psychological conditioning.   I don’t think I initially believed any of it.   But after the film, a US Colonel started talking about how they, the U.S. government (and it was always the United States government, it wasn’t the Air Force it was the United States government), how they had progressed from the debris recovery phase in the late 40s to now, the late 70s.  The more he spoke, the more I realized that what I saw was real.  

Linda Moulton Howe:   A fractured hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor that nobody knows exactly what the truths are and everybody has found themselves completely suspicious of the motives of any human being because counter-intelligence in England and the United States and a lot of other countries have worked overtime to misinform and to tell the public and the media there’s nothing to the UFO phenomenon.   It’s a lie. I have no question about it.  And my work is to try to shed some light on what could be so threatening out of some other intelligence out of some other part of the universe or it’s been here for 2 billion years and it’s not extra-terrestrial, we’re the new ones on the block   What is it that is considered so threatening that governments would kill people to keep it silent?

Bob Durant:  You’re looking at a picture of Richard Doty. And by looking at him you are taking a glimpse into a whole machine that now has a life of its own.

IV. Afterward: In a subsequent interview, Richard Doty explained his role in this operation:

“I wasn’t in a position to write the operational plan. This comes from a supervisor, headquarters in Washington, the intelligence community. They decide how they are going to conduct these operations, how they are going to target people and I’m the agent in the field doing this.”

From: Breaking: Richard Doty Surprise Call To Fade To Black (2018)

V. Elements of Story That Demonstrate That Paul Bennewitz Was a “Targeted Individual”

According the Richard C. Doty, Paul Bennewitz’s activities threatened to expose a number of U.S. Air Force “black projects” at the Kirkland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, NM. These include:

1) capturing and interpreting radio signals (emissions) from the base itself.
2) photographing a crashed vehicle on Archuleta Mesa, NM
3) photographing a secret military base on Archuleta Mesa, NM that was training commandos.

In order to discredit, disrupt, and destroy Bennewitz’s work, the Air Force Special Agent planted the idea in Paul Bennewitz that he was really detecting alien activity in all three instances.

1) NSA set up surveillance in house across street from Bennowitz’s house.
2) NSA stole Bennewitz’s computer and substituted their own computer in order to monitor and indeed, sabotage all communications.
3) Bennewitz reports hearing “voices of aliens”- was this due to the microwave hearing (Frey Effect), V2K, synthetic telepathy phenomenon?
3) Air Force Special Agent, Richard Doty, provided disinformation to Bennewitz in order to confuse and mislead him and make him look foolish.
4) Someone or someones broke into Bennewitz’s home and injected him with drugs but left him with impression that aliens did it. Under the influence of these drugs, Bennewitz drove into the desert.
4) Intelligence operatives (supervisors) in Washington, DC, designated Bennewitz as a target, assigned him the role of King of Spades in disruption operations, and supervised Air Force Special Agent, Richard Doty’s “counter-intelligence” operations in a Special Access Program (SAP).
5) William Moore, a prominent member of UFO community and author of. , was “turned” into a government asset and participated in a series of break-ins of Bennewitz’s home as well as the psychological warfare program waged against Bennewitz. According to the film, Moore was designated as the Ace of Spades in the operation.
6) Air Force Special Agent Richard C. Doty admitted that:
a) he was an agent in the field that carried out orders from a supervisor in Washington DC to target designated citizens (UFO researchers)
b) he used deception techniques in which he was specially trained to confuse the UFO community in general and specific individuals within the UFO community
c) he recruited UFO researcher/author, William Moore, to spy on and discredit Bennewitz (Richard Doty: “I used those techniques against Bill Moore and they worked and Bill Moore took me into his confidence and we had a professional relationship as far as him providing us information about the UFO community and agreeing to say things that we wanted said regarding the UFO community or within the UFO community.”)
As part of the deception mission, Special Operations forces flew helicopters intended to be misidentified as UFOs.
Greg Bishop (author of Project Beta): “From the point Bennewitz gave a presentation of his scientific findings to Air Force officials, the government decided from that point on that all his perceptions would be directed in the exact direction that the intelligence agencies wanted.”

VI. Domestic (American) Groups Systematically Targeted by US Intel Community (aka “Targeted Groups”)

1. Communist party (infiltrated by FBI)
2. Black Panthers (by FBI’s Cointelpro, late 60s/early 70s, killing 28 Black Panthers)
3. Civil rights groups and civil rights workers
4. Anti-Vietnam War Protesters (CIA’s MHCHAOS had at least 300,000 student protesters tracked and targeted by CIA and DoD, late 60s/early 70s)
* 5. Rock-n-roll scene in late 60s/70s with rock stars as mind-control (Multiple personality) MKULTRA puppets
* 6. Hippie Counterculture (created by CIA), late 60s/early 70s
* 7. Feminist groups
* 8. UFO Community (initially created by CIA)
9. Media (CIA’s Operation Mockingbird)
10. New Religious Movements (Religious Engineering)
* 11. UFO and Other Religious cults (created by CIA: Jonestown, Heaven’s Gate, Branch-Davidians, Family of God, etc.)
12. Groups Opposing Nuclear War (Beyond War of the 1980s)
13. Animal-rights groups
14. Environmental groups
15. Individuals and groups involved in giving sanctuary to Latin American refugees and torture victims
16. 9/11 Truth Movement (2002 and beyond)
17. Climate Science Community (1980s onward)
18. Medical establishment (Navy/CIA/DoDs Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTA, 1940s onward)
19. Neuroscience community (Navy/CIA/DoD’s Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA, 1940s onward)
20. Domestic terrorist stalking groups organized and maintained by Public-Private-Partneships (govt., corporations, NGOs) and organized crime.

* groups/movements created by American intelligence community

VII. Other Reviews of Mirage Men

Mirage Men is a 2013 documentary film directed by John Lundberg (British), written by Mark Pilkington (British) and co-directed by Roland Denning and Kypros Kyprianou. Mirage Men suggests there was conspiracy by the U.S. military to fabricate UFO folklore in order to deflect attention from classified military projects. It prominently features Richard Doty (born October 11, 1944), a retired Special Agent who worked for AFOSI, the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigation.

The film had its world premiere at the 2013 Sheffield Doc/Fest[1] in the UK on 13 June 2013, its North American premiere at the 2013 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas on 22 September 2013, its Australian premiere at the Canberra International Film Festival on 31 October 2013 and its Nordic premiere at the Stockholm Film Festival in Sweden on 10 November 2013.

Mark Pilkington’s book about the project, also called Mirage Men, was published in 2010 by Constable & Robinson.

****

It is the view of this contributor — Tintin — that this film, although quite well balanced, may in fact actually be a clever attempt to discredit the UFO research community and may itself be a disinfo piece. One could also point to the production company name: “Perception Management Productions” as a clue, perhaps. Engineer and researcher Richard D. Hall suspects that Lundberg (and Pilkington) is on the payroll of MI-5, and has this to say:

“Lundberg was probably recruited by MI5 in 1992. Since then he has been paid by British Intelligence continually. We believe that due to the anomalies about the property where he lives, MI5 have also been providing him with free lodgings in London since around 1995.
 
As many people know, Lundberg’s activities have been in making crop circles throughout the UK, and sometimes travel to foreign countries such as Italy, to trample down fields there too. We believe MI5 has funded these activities for almost 2 decades and have been giving him money to pay the rest of the crop circle team. There would typically be 5 or 6 in a team.
 
We believe MI5 made a big mistake in 2004 by paying for Lundberg to re-train as a film maker. This we believe was a gross miscalculation on their part and provides even more evidence that MI5 disinformation is what Lundberg is part of. If Lundberg was a true “artist” as he claims, why would he be interested in the “UFO” subject for his film making? His latest film “Mirage Men”, promises to be a superb piece of disinformation. He has managed to interview some of the top names in Ufology; namely Bill Ryan and Richard Dolan. These individuals may well regret taking part in this programme as MI5 and Lundberg seem to have set out to debunk them.”
 
Whatever the real case may be it is an excellent film all the same. Greg Taylor’s review below takes a more skeptical approach but does find a neat balance. Regarding comments about SERPO, and as Bill Ryan has openly stated before: not so much a hoax but, and I quote:

“As I stated in my July 26 American Antigravity interview, I believe the Serpo story is a mixture of disinformation (i.e. truth mixed with added fictional elements) and naturally occurring compounded errors (such as uncorrected audiotape transcripts of the team commander’s logs)… surrounding a core of extraordinary truth.” 
 
So not strictly a ‘deception’ or ‘hoax’, and most certainly extraordinary.

(See this link for more on SERPO: https://archive.org/details/the-serpo-releases-1-21-2-november-2005-to-30-august-2006-with-commentary-from-bill-ryan/Anon%20-%20Project%20Serpo-Consistencies/)

****

Review, written by Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail – July 2013

A FRACTURED HALL OF MIRRORS
Link: http://dailygrail.com/Reviews/2013/6/Fractured-Hall-Mirrors

Half-way through watching Mirage Men, a new documentary on how U.S. Intelligence agencies have deliberately sabotaged research into the UFO topic, I literally shook my head, saying to myself with a laugh “it’s a hall of mirrors”. By the end of the documentary, my statement had been echoed and expanded upon by one of the interviewees, Linda Moulton Howe, who described the entire story as “a fractured hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor”. Howe should know: in 1983, while researching a documentary on the subject of UFOs for HBO, she was engaged by Richard ‘Rick’ Doty, an agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), initially with the promise of helping her investigate an alleged UFO landing near Ellsworth Air Force Base. But Howe’s meeting with Doty took an unexpected turn when the AFOSI agent suddenly produced a manila folder, saying she could take a look at it but, not remove it from the office or make notes. Within it was a document titled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America on the Subject of Unidentified Aerial Vehicles”, which listed a number of alleged UFO crash retrievals by the government, as well as paragraphs that became “emblazoned” on Howe’s mind concerning how they had discovered that Homo sapiens was a species created by extraterrestrials through genetic manipulation of primates.

Amazed by the information fed to her by the government agency at the time, in Mirage Men Howe looks back with three decades of perspective and wonders at the amount of effort that must have gone into the deception: “they must have had meetings about ‘how do we stop a persistent and dogged reporter who has already demonstrated that she’s going to go after a really difficult subject?’.” The question that comes to mind, and which runs throughout this entire film, is ‘WHY?’.

This was not the first time that AFOSI agent Doty had willingly mislead investigators of the UFO subject, and it would not be the last. As such, he serves as the focal character in the documentary; it begins with the deception he helped orchestrate on Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz, goes on to discuss the Linda Moulton Howe case, the infamous Majestic-12 documents (described in the film by another AFOSI agent, Walter Bosley, as the “perfect Perception Management Device”, though Doty denies any involvement with it) and extends forward to the more recent controversy over the ‘Project Serpo’ hoax.

And Doty is no doubt a worthy candidate for the film to revolve around. Coming to the documentary with a fair amount of knowledge about Doty’s deceptions over the years – with consequences (direct and otherwise) ranging from the wasting of UFO investigators’ time through to the mental disintegration, eventual hospitalisation and death of Paul Bennewitz – I already had a dislike for the man, and was ready to truly despise him. But one of the things that catches you off guard is how harmless and genial he seems – the man is sitting before the camera, telling you how he has deceived people, and yet you feel that he seems to be a nice guy that you’d happily chat with at a neighbourhood barbeque. Though as Bill Ryan, who was initially taken in by the Serpo deception, points out, that’s what makes him so effective: “Rick’s great strength is he’s a wonderful story-teller”, says Ryan. “He’s a very friendly guy [and] builds relationships easily”.

The jarring inconsistency between Doty’s disarming personality and his deceptive deeds, and the “fractured hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor” that is the subject matter, contribute to the overall feel of the film – one of unreality, with the viewer wondering exactly where the truth lies and even how many Inception-like ‘levels’ away that destination might be from them (are the ‘visible’ lies meant to make you follow the breadcrumbs to the real lie they want to sell to you?).

Using black and white public domain and Creative Commons footage as ‘filler’ helps maintain that feeling of unreality and deception, such as the cuts from the 1958 BBC television series Invisible Man – Secret Experiment showing objects moving without any visible cause, and the B-roll continues that mood with shots of empty conference chairs and long hotel hallways (always bound to transmit a lonely and alienated feel). The audio too, from the droning strings/synths almost subliminally set behind interviewees words, to the various ambient audio noises accompanying footage and the off-kilter soundtrack, will leave the viewer feeling on edge throughout. Each of these elements suggest that the film-makers were influenced rather heavily by the style of British documentarian Adam Curtis (The Century of the Self, The Power of Nightmares, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace).

Interviewees include the tricksters (AFOSI agents Doty and Walter Bosley), their marks (Linda Moulton Howe, Bill Ryan, Victor Martinez), UFO and paranormal investigators (Richard Dolan, Bob Durant, Greg Bishop, George Hansen, Gabe Valdez and more) as well as the author of the book on which the documentary is based, Mark Pilkington (read my 2010 interview with Mark about the book and film here).

All offer their own insights into the hall of mirrors, from their own particular point of view. For instance, Bob Durant begins the film by admitting that “the general feeling amongst people who have devoted a big chunk of their life to studying UFOs I think is fear; that they have been taken for a ride, that these cases are hoaxes, but sophisticated hoaxes carried out by their own government”. This range of interviewees helps bring balance to the documentary, and also will hopefully give viewers a wider perspective on the topic: ‘true believers’ in the UFO phenomenon should be chastened by some of the testimony, while self-labeled skeptics might have their eyes opened to some degree (‘skeptic’ Brian Dunning once told me that I had “clinically crossed the line to a diagnosable, treatable mental illness” if I thought there were psy-ops being conducted in the UFO field) and even perhaps have some sympathy for what some UFO researchers have been put through over the years.

Even the general viewer might take heed of some of the nuggets buried in Mirage Men, such as Doty’s aside that Paul Bennewitz was easily convinced by the AFOSI deception: “Paul was a World War II veteran, very patriotic, he always flew his flag – those type of people you can convince”. And, on a topical note, once you’ve seen an entire documentary about intentional leaks designed to mislead investigators, you might be a little bit more skeptical about some of the leaks that have hit the news in recent times, and wonder whether there was any government involvement or intent behind them.

Those looking for simple, obvious answers to either the UFO mystery, or government deceptions in a number of the cases, will walk away disappointed from Mirage Men, but I don’t think it should be a factor in judging the film. The film-makers do ponder the latter question, but trying to answer it just ends up taking the viewer further down the rabbit hole. Was the disinformation meant to distract investigators from secret government projects. If so, as Pilkington points out, why did they encourage Bennewitz when they could have just told him (as the patriotic citizen that he was) to cease and desist for the good of the country? Was it intended to discredit the investigators for some reason? Or perhaps it was a psychological study in how people react to certain information and events, perhaps it was intended originally for ‘real’ enemies like the Soviets during the Cold War, or maybe it was all an exercise in how supposedly secret information is transmitted and by whom.

Mirage Men doesn’t break any new ground in discussing many of these topics: readers will find discussion of them in books ranging from Jacques Vallee’s Messengers of Deception through to Greg Bishop’s book on the deception aimed at Paul Bennewitz, Project Beta (Bishop himself appears extensively in the documentary). What it does do though is gets Richard Doty, a notoriously slippery man to corner, in front of the camera discussing the things he has done, along with a number of the other significant players. The intelligent viewer will however ask why Rick Doty came forward willingly to be an interview subject for this documentary, given every move he has made on the UFO topic seems to have been precisely calculated to have a certain effect.

He seemingly has no reason to offer all this information. So why is he doing it? And why does he admit to so much, but then deny involvement with Serpo when investigators seem to have caught him red-handed (via email IP addresses)?

By the end of the film you’ll be second guessing everything more than feeling as if your ideas have been confirmed, and perhaps that was exactly Doty’s intent. And, if you want to get truly paranoid, you might start to worry that the documentary’s creators go under the name ‘Perception Management Productions’ (echoing Bosley’s description of the MJ-12 documents), and has within its ranks individuals who for many years have created crop circles as a type of art, and then sat back and observed as those ‘anonymous’ deceptions have engendered their own belief system and followers. Fractured mirrors and rabbit holes indeed…

Mirage Men is necessary viewing for anybody with an interest in either the topic of UFOs, or the role of government agencies in spying on and/or deceiving their own citizens. The former may be a specialised group, but the latter should include everyone. A highly recommended documentary – if your eyes weren’t already open, they will be after watching this film.

****

Post-script comment:

For an extraordinary conversation that took place when Richard Doty cold-called the Fade-to-Black radio show in February 2018 do see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cj_hhQ63lo&ab_channel=FADETOBLACKRadio

I’ll likely provide a landing page here on the Internet Archive of that very programme.