Your Paracast Newsletter — March 18, 2018

[Gene Steinberg]

THE PARACAST NEWSLETTER
March 18, 2018
www.theparacast.com

The Paracast Explores the Amazing Journey of Intelligence Agent Richard Doty

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This Week's Episode: Gene, Chris and guest cohost J. Randall Murphy present an exclusive interview with former Air Force intelligence agent Rick Doty, long regarded as one of the more controversial figures in UFO research. What about the claims that he was a government disinformation agent, that he may have been responsible for forging such documents as MJ-12? What about his efforts to feed fake information about alleged alien visitors to one Paul Bennewitz in the 1980s? This will be a forthright interview that covers lots of topics and leaves you wanting more. Richard served his country in the US Air Force and was hired by the Air Force Office of Special Investigation after attending an intelligence course taught by the DIA and CIA. He served at Kirtland AFB as a counterintelligence officer snd also saw duty at Nevada Test Site, Air Force Test Center, Detachment 3 and Groom Lake, Nevada.

Chris O’Brien’s Blog: Our Strange Planet

After The Paracast -- Available exclusively for Paracast+ subscribers on March 18: Gene, Chris and guest cohost J. Randall Murphy discuss the aftermath of the long-awaited interview with former Air Force agent Richard Doty. What about his claims that there were two UFO crashes at Roswell and a UFO crash at Aztec, NM several years after one described in Frank Scully’s book? What about his purported involvement in feeding disinformation to Paul Bennewitz to convince him that there was a pending alien invasion? Our trio attempts to make heads, tales and basic sense about Doty’s fascinating stories of his adventures as a government agent. What about his claimed interactions with agents from other agencies, such as NSA? What does it all mean anyway?

Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. Check out our new YouTube channel at: The Official Paracast Channel

Government Dysfunction and the UFO Mystery
By Gene Steinberg

When you listen to our long-awaited interview with former government intelligence agent Rick Doty, you may have cause to wonder. If the military has recovered not one but several crashed spaceships and alien bodies, why is the subject of flying saucers greeted with benign neglect?

Consider Project Blue Book and the agencies that preceded it, which purported to examine UFO sightings. But if we already had evidence of alien visitation, what need would there be to have such a project in the first place? Was it all a matter of misdirection, fooling the public into believing that all the investigation was being done by Blue Book, when it was nothing more than an Air Force front?

Consider the Pentagon UFO study from the early 2000s, about yet another agency examining the subject. Although stories about it have appeared in such prestigious newspapers as The New York Times and Washington Post, there is little discussion of any previous investigation. Project Blue Book is usually forgotten, and it almost seems as if the government ignored UFOs for decades before news of the existence of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was revealed.

Even then, it supposedly went out of business in 2012.

Now I’ve often suggested that the project was formed as a favor to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who arranged to feed some $22 million in government funding to his pal, hotel and space magnate Robert Bigelow.

But why did it fold? Is it possible nothing useful, except for some blurry UFO photos, was discovered? Or maybe, once Senator Reid lost his power base when the Republicans took over the Senate, there was no reason to continue. But that occurred in 2014, so go figure.

Now it’s hard to say whether any other secret UFO projects might be taking place. On possibility, suggested by the Pentagon study, is that black funds were funneled to private industry to manage the UFO secret, making it far more difficult for regular people to discover what was actually occurring.

But when you listen to Doty and his ever-fascinating stories of his journey through the UFO field, you wonder about the impact of chronic agency dysfunction. In speaking of his experiences with Paul Bennewitz, who was purportedly fooled into believing in alien visitors to deflect him from his discovery of a top secret military project, Doty mentions a curious encounter with NSA agents at a nearby home.

He conveys images of a troubling inability of different agencies to work together. The interactions are often punctuated with infighting, turf wars, and efforts to keep rival agencies from knowing the facts about a typical investigation.

This is the sort of behavior you often see depicted on a TV procedural show. It’s all-too-common to observe a local police department fighting with FBI agents over who controls the investigation of a case, and the occasional tricks they foist upon each other to keep evidence close to the vest.

Fictional, yes, but this is the sort of thing that evidently plays out in the real world. Indeed, one reason we were caught flatfooted in the days before the 9/11 terror attack was the alleged inability of the authorities to share evidence of the danger of those pending attacks, the failure to connect the dots, assuming there were no deep-seated conspiracies involved.

Even after the Department of Homeland Security was established, it still appears that the disparate agencies aren’t always talking to one another.

So it may well be that the picture Doty paints of his interactions with fellow — or rival — agencies may be very close to the mark.

But is the failure of the U.S. government to learn anything significant about UFOs the result of not taking it seriously? Is it due to the inability of different agencies to compare notes, and the attempts to keep their own evidence close to the vest?

On the surface, it seems logical enough, until you consider the shortcomings of this theory. If there is solid evidence of alien visitations under deep cover, spread across multiple agencies in the government and perhaps private industry, wouldn’t some of that evidence leak? We’re talking about a secret that has been maintained since the late 1940s, the amazing truth that we are being visited by advanced beings from other planets. Can such secrets be totally maintained?

It is possible that the public UFO studies were all meant to spread disinformation, that some figures in the UFO field are placed there to help preserve the secret by pointing our attention in wrong directions.

When such people as Richard Doty talk of multiple Roswell crashes and other episodes where actual spaceships were recovered, maybe they are still serving the masters of the UFO secret? It is possible, I suppose, that they believe they are acting in the best interests of their country, and may not even know they aren’t telling the truth? By believing their spiel, it seems all the more credible, in the spirit of the best salesperson.

Or is it all a combination of mixing real evidence with fake evidence, thus making it all the more difficult to know what’s really going on?

Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Why was there a Pentagon UFO study even though genuine evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial flying saucers was already in the possession of the authorities?

This is one of the curious contradictions of the UFO phenomenon that makes it all the more difficult to get a handle on what is really going on. The mixture of myths and facts may continue to hide an incredible truth.

Or maybe it’s all what it seems. The government doesn’t know what’s really going on, and not seeing evidence of a threat to national security, their attention is focused elsewhere. UFO crashes? Maybe it’s still all about faulty test aircraft and applying the UFO legend as a means of deflecting the public’s attention from what really happened.

You can apply the disinformation story any way you wish.

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[Thomas R Morrison]

I would love to believe that for over 70 years our military has been capable of building aerial devices that can execute hairpin maneuvers at thousands of miles per hour and hover silently without propellant or lifting surfaces like turbines, but that just beggars the imagination, imo. We still don't even have a plausible theoretical model for producing such effects with anything resembling foreseeable human technology. So I have to conclude that these things aren't a product of our civilization. And I'm convinced that the whole subject has been intentionally confounded in the public perception by agencies within our own military and government who wish to conceal the very same conclusion that they reached many decades ago.

There are also some points that I'd like to straighten out:

- The AATIP began in 2007 and continued at least until Luis Elizondo left the program around Oct 2017. He presumes that it's still on-going.

- The contract that was awarded to Bigelow Aerospace was put up for bid like other government contracts are, and Bigelow won the bid because he was the lowest bidder. It wasn't a hand-out from Reid to Bigelow as many have suggested. And we don't know the actual contract figure. The $22M was the total initial funding for the AATIP. We don't know what fraction of that went to Bigelow Aerospace.

- One of the greatest problems with the excessive government secrecy that went off the rails in the Cold War and never self-corrected, is the glaring problem of stovepipes and silos: small groups and vertical command structures that jealously covet their data. This has been cited as a primary reason why 9/11 happened - different agencies had key facts and they never shared them, so nobody saw the pattern.

- It's almost impossible to overstate the effectiveness of the classification and compartmentalization systems employed by our military and intelligence agencies. Of course they could keep a secret of this scale. The NSA's PRISM program remained a complete secret - a multi-billion dollar program that employed hundreds if not thousands of people - until Snowden leaked the documents to prove its existence. And that was just a data-collection program. Imagine how much more well-insulated a program that had possession of alien technology would be - only the most demonstrably loyal and high-ranking officials would even be read into a program like that, and everyone who knows about it would be under 24/7 surveillance to assure that no leak ever happened. I keep trying to explain to people just how terrifying the security apparatus of this country is at these higher levels, but it never seems to sink in. One of the only times we've even been given a glimpse of the draconian powers of the military industrial security apparatus came to light when Nick Cook interviewed famed aircraft designer Bob Widmer, in Billion Dollar Secret - watch this brief segment and then let us know if you think that the US military complex can't keep a secret.

- On a related note, I sometimes ask people to share one example of a document from a special access program. Because it doesn't exist. No documents from projects at that level or higher have ever been leaked to the public. In fact, unacknowledged special access programs are legally barred from having any records at all - because if there aren't any records, they can always deny that the program ever existed - it would be their word against the whistleblower's word, and they've got entire divisions of psychological operatives poised to discredit anyone who speaks up - and they're effing good at their jobs. Going up against those people with nothing more than a good story would be like going up against the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron with a kitchen spatula; nobody in their right mind would even consider it.

- Because of this highly compartmentalized and viciously protective security apparatus, it's probable that many different programs within the military and government have entirely independent investigations going on with regard to the subject of UFOs, and they wouldn't even know that the others exist. This whole crazy idea that Blue Book was a lone and totally public investigative effort is just that - a crazy idea. A phenomenon that clearly holds the key to vastly superior technology with endless potential military capabilities - and which represents a very clear threat to our national security: you're damn right that many organizations within the labyrinth of the national security and military apparatuses have been looking into it for many decades. Each completely oblivious to the existence of the others. The AATIP wasn't even classified. Which is probably why they were so grossly underfunded - why would the DoD want to dedicate significant research funds to a program that they didn't have complete control over, when they could have several such programs buried so deep in the classification system that nobody would ever even learn of their existence? The only reason the AATIP even happened in the first place was through the direct intervention of Sen. Reid and a couple of others. If there are programs that actually have crashed ufo technology - and god forbid, alien bodies - that stuff would be buried so deeply that I seriously doubt that any public official including the President would have access to even the knowledge of such a program's existence, because "need to know" is at the sole discretion of the DoD, and some joker who's going to be out in the public sector in 4 to 8 years just doesn't need to know our most sensitive defense intelligence.

Neverthless, it'll be interesting to see if I can discern any truth in what Richard Doty has to say. I can't imagine that he'd tell us anything true about any of this. Honestly I can't imagine anyone telling us anything true about any of this and living for very long, frankly. And he would know that better than most of us.

It's a minor miracle that Luis Elizondo has been able to tell us as much as he has - because he's been given clearance to actually say everything that he's said. But consider how little that actually is: ten years of intelligence research and analysis, and all he's been permitted to say is that they determined that these devices aren't in the inventory of any terrestrial military organization. Let's have a show of hands: how many of us already knew that?

 

[Gene Steinberg]

The original published reports of the UFO program indicated it petered out in 2012. Any date, however, is more of a claim than something that carries evidence.

It is not difficult to let a contract with specifications that would make it easy for a single company or selected companies to win the bid.

 

[O'Rilly]

One of the only times we've even been given a glimpse of the draconian powers of the military industrial security apparatus came to light when Nick Cook interviewed famed aircraft designer Bob Widmer, in Billion Dollar Secret - watch this brief segment and then let us know if you think that the US military complex can't keep a secret.

So wouldn't Steve Justice be in the same boat?

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

The original published reports of the UFO program indicated it petered out in 2012. Any date, however, is more of a claim than something that carries evidence.

The DoD spokesman who responded by email to the NYT's inquiry, Thomas Crosson, thought that the program was shut down when the AATIP's funding got pilfered by another program in 2012. But it kept going. It was in the original article:

"But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition."
Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program

Luis Elizondo has subsequently added further clarification in his various interviews, explaining that they used "dual purposing" and other creative expense techniques to keep the program going. And he's the source of the story, and the former director of the program, so unless you have some evidence that he's lying, I'll just assume that he's telling the truth.

It is not difficult to let a contract with specifications that would make it easy for a single company or selected companies to win the bid.

He's talked about this too, because he saw that people were jumping to conclusions about "in-state nepotism" or whatnot. He said that the contract went through the same independent bidding process as all of the other DoD projects. There were other bidders, he said, and Bigelow won because his bid was the lowest. Frankly I don't find that surprising - we all know that Bigelow has the vested interest, the capability, and the money to afford to bid low on a project like this to make sure that he got it. But I wouldn't be surprised if Sen. Reid tipped him off about the contract in the first place so he could bid on it. If that's nefarious, then 99% of all business conducted in the US is nefarious.

So wouldn't Steve Justice be in the same boat?

As you can hear with Widmer's answers in that clip, the most oppressive security measures apparently come into play only when you're working on a highly classified black budget project. I'm sure they keep a pretty close eye on those people afterwards too, but that seems to be limited to just electronic surveillance. Maybe that's why we haven't heard from Steve Justice since the TTSA announcement in October of last year - I hope that he does start giving some interviews, though; he's clearly very intelligent and I really want to hear what he has to say.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

Yes, I saw the contradictory dates, but if funding dried up in 2012, any ongoing work would, one presumes, be informal and not official. This is one of the matters he has to clarify. So the original date probably makes sense.

You clearly agree with me that, with Bigelow's contract, the fix was in and that Sen. Reid pushed it in his direction.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

Yes, I saw the contradictory dates, but if funding dried up in 2012, any ongoing work would, one presumes, be informal and not official. This is one of the matters he has to clarify. So the original date probably makes sense.

He’s talked about this in some detail in his interviews, which uforadio has kindly compiled at this webpage for anyone who wants to see them:
Pentagon UFO Study

I think it makes much more sense to take Mr. Elizondo’s word on it since he was after all the director of the program for many years, rather than taking the word of a Pentagon spokesman who probably didn’t even know of the program’s existence until it made the front page headline of the New York Times. Because that would be like taking sides with Sarah Huckabee Sanders over General Mattis on a question regarding the operations at the DoD.

You clearly agree with me that, with Bigelow's contract, the fix was in and that Sen. Reid pushed it in his direction.

I’d call that a radical interpretation of the text.

It would be like a friend of yours on the City Council letting you know that the city would be putting out a contract for a brochure about UFO sightings in your area. You could then place a low bid because you know the subject well and you want to do it, and then you win the bid as a result. That’s just how business works.

Now if you’re saying that Sen. Reid contacted the Defense Procurement agency and told them to pick Bob Bigelow’s bid, then that’s a different story. Is that what you’re saying? I would assume that there are laws against that kind of corruption, so if anyone has seen any evidence of that then they should report it.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I do not have all the specifics about the bidding process. You don't either except in general.

 

[Thomas R Morrison]

I do not have all the specifics about the bidding process. You don't either except in general.

But I have listened to all of the interviews and press reports about this story, which seems to be more than the myriad vociferous detractors of this story can say. So I can actually cite specific information from specific sources to back up my positions. For example, here's a time-stamped link to Luis Elizondo's only long-form (1-hour) interview, where he talks about this specific point, which I've transcribed below for easy reference:

"So the program was established as a bipartisan effort. It was then sent to one of the defense agencies within the Department of Defense. There was an open bid - anybody could bid for the contract, and it turned out that Bigelow Aerospace won the contract. Keep in mind - this wasn't selected by Reid - this was an independent internal process by the Defense Intelligence Agency for this contract: it was DIA who chose who had this contract - not Sen. Reid. So I think that's an important detail that gets lost." [emphasis his]
(14:39 - 15:15)

Sure, the aspiring debunkers all over the internet can go around calling people liars until they're blue in the face, and they do - but that's not evidence. So until somebody shows me evidence of deceit or crimes or whatever, then I have no empirical/rational reason to question this information, and neither do you.

I'm totally open to it though: if someone can show me evidence that Luis Elizondo is a liar, or a disinformation agent secretly working for the DoD, or that the AATIP closed down in 2012 even though he's repeatedly stated (including in the interview above) that he appointed a successor to the AATIP when he left the program in October 2017, or that Sen. Reid tampered with the DIA's independent internal bidding process, and on and on...then I'm going to stick with the facts at hand, because that's all we have right now. Once we start arbitrarily discarding facts that don't favor our viewpoints, then we're no better than the unconscionable propagandists of the world like Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, in my view.

The proper technique of skepticism is very simple: follow the data. So that's what I do. Otherwise you slide down a rabbit hole of wild accusations and baseless suspicions and unwarranted paranoia and all the rest of it, which is a bottomless pit of confusion and discord that many of the most vocal members here at the forums have fallen into, evidently never to return to see the clear and liberating light of reason.

 

[Michael Allen]

This is one of the curious contradictions of the UFO phenomenon that makes it all the more difficult to get a handle on what is really going on. The mixture of myths and facts may continue to hide an incredible truth.

Or maybe it’s all what it seems. The government doesn’t know what’s really going on, and not seeing evidence of a threat to national security, their attention is focused elsewhere. UFO crashes? Maybe it’s still all about faulty test aircraft and applying the UFO legend as a means of deflecting the public’s attention from what really happened.

I still go back to the apparent idiocy of encouraging UFOs (i.e. as alien space craft) as a disinformation/deflection tactic. I--for one--cannot see any reason why (according to Doty) AFOSI would have asked him to encourage or reinforce Bennewitz's as a means to keep him "off the trail" -- on the surface it sounds like a stupid chess strategy invented by someone who has only read a few opening books on chess. Knapp has indicated (paraphrasing), if the Lazar incident was crafted to prevent or disuade individuals from snooping around Area 51 it was a dismal failure.

So if the NSA experiements conducted near Kirkland AFB were truly mundane (at least from a paranormal perspective) why on earth would AFOSI (or any other group) send out people to encourage continued monitoring of these signals? Perhaps that's why the NSA got involved...someone screwed up bad and they had to send their own people to clean up the mess. It all just sounds like junk from a screenplay...*ahem*

 

[Randall]

I still go back to the apparent idiocy of encouraging UFOs (i.e. as alien space craft) as a disinformation/deflection tactic ... It all just sounds like junk from a screenplay...*ahem*

The situation was that Bennewitz was picking up signals from a classified system on the base. So do they tell Bennewitz about the classified system? That doesn't sound like a good plan. There's no question he was picking up signals, so they couldn't simply tell him he was imagining things. Bennewitz already had a theory the signals were alien. So telling Doty to just let Bennewitz believe he was picking up alien signals doesn't seem all that unreasonable. What better plan would you have suggested?

 

[ALPHA ROMEO UNIFORM]

The situation was that Bennewitz was picking up signals from a classified system on the base. So do they tell Bennewitz about the classified system? That doesn't sound like a good plan. There's no question he was picking up signals, so they couldn't simply tell him he was imagining things. Bennewitz already had a theory the signals were alien. So telling Doty to just let Bennewitz believe he was picking up alien signals doesn't seem all that unreasonable. What better plan would you have suggested?

If it was from a unknown source more likely be near and around a highly sensitive location . Pure speculation UFO (unknown) on a recce and would not be ignored as any other preceded threat. Remember the late Larry Fawcett , and Barry J. Greenwood book "Clear Intent : UFO Cover Up" (1985) amd Tim Goods " Above Top Secret" ( 1988) and James Bamford 'Body of Secrets" (2002) and Stanton T.Friedman .MSc .'Flying Saucers and Science (2008) link to observations and possible threats. Science is growing and changing as society in its thinking on how the universe was created Stephen Hawking's 'breathtaking' final multiverse theory completed two weeks before he died

 

[Michael Allen]

The situation was that Bennewitz was picking up signals from a classified system on the base. So do they tell Bennewitz about the classified system? That doesn't sound like a good plan. There's no question he was picking up signals, so they couldn't simply tell him he was imagining things. Bennewitz already had a theory the signals were alien. So telling Doty to just let Bennewitz believe he was picking up alien signals doesn't seem all that unreasonable. What better plan would you have suggested?

A few ideas: invent another "classified system" with bugs, send some stuff (stop the transmissions for awhile) to show what he "found" thank him for finding the issue in their mundane test equipment (anything really) -- then fix their own transmission issues...if possible. I know there are lots of assumptions here -- but I cannot think that any of them are worse off thn encouraging the crazy guy to continue pursuing "aliens" while the NSA is doing something classified nearby--i.e. sounds like NSA engaging in classified transmissions on AFB near residences was a bad plan in general, wouldn't you think?

 

[Randall]

A few ideas: invent another "classified system" with bugs, send some stuff (stop the transmissions for awhile) to show what he "found" thank him for finding the issue in their mundane test equipment (anything really) -- then fix their own transmission issues...if possible. I know there are lots of assumptions here -- but I cannot think that any of them are worse off thn encouraging the crazy guy to continue pursuing "aliens" while the NSA is doing something classified nearby--i.e. sounds like NSA engaging in classified transmissions on AFB near residences was a bad plan in general, wouldn't you think?

Yes, a lot of assumptions there, but still reasonable suggestions. Ideally the thing to do would have been to move the transmitter to a more secluded location, and or add some sort of shielding, but that assumes that doing that would have been easy to do, and Bennewitz had also already recorded signals, so some sort of investigation of what he had in his possession seems understandable. Something I wonder, is if the claim about the nature of the transmitter is true. I don't imagine it's all that simple to track an enemy satellite in space and blind it with a laser. Today it's probably not much of a problem. But back then I imagine it was more of a challenge.

 

[Michael Allen]

Yes, a lot of assumptions there, but still reasonable suggestions. Ideally the thing to do would have been to move the transmitter to a more secluded location, and or add some sort of shielding, but that assumes that doing that would have been easy to do, and Bennewitz had also already recorded signals, so some sort of investigation of what he had in his possession seems understandable. Something I wonder, is if the claim about the nature of the transmitter is true. I don't imagine it's all that simple to track an enemy satellite in space and blind it with a laser. Today it's probably not much of a problem. But back then I imagine it was more of a challenge.

I think you hit the nail on the head there--several things need to be verified

(1) NSA project to "track" satellites and blind them with lasers @ Kirkland AFB
(2) That such a project would have resulted in spuriously "leaked" transmissions that sounded (at least to Bennewitz) like voices speaking
(3) That Doty, working for AFOSI would have had any knowledge of this whatsoever even if true

I think that the devil is in the details here...and nothing explains the organizational "coyness" (or even their anomalous interest!) around the things that he picked up on his reciever...either the AFOSI (and subsequently the NSA) is lying and further perpetrating a serious hoax (for whatever reason...I can already hear Alexander's voice in my head on this...so whatever) or Doty is telling a "nice story."

Actually...could be both. Right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing...etc The problem with this entire story is in the ridiculous way it was handled by the NSA, FBI and AFOSI...if anything it shows culpable rats rather than incompetant boobs.