Richard Doty, is well known for having, as an agent for the Airforce Office of Special Investigations, spent years in the 1980s befriending and passing bogus UFO information on to an earnest UFO researcher named Paul Bennewitz. The increasingly bizarre narrative that Doty parceled out to Bennewitz led him into a state of paranoia so severe that he ended up in a psychiatric hospital. This story is very well known.
What is also known but less so, is that former CIA scientist Christopher “Kit” Green, is a very good friend of Doty’s who has vouched for him on multiple occasions despite this well known history. Green works with Robert Bigelow, and may actually have been one of the early figures who recruited Tom DeLonge into his role as a conduit for getting certain information into public awareness. DeLonge does not name names, but describes a moment in this this pivotal meeting this way (from a George Knapp interview transcribed at The Drive):
Well, two weeks later, I get this email and it says, “I want you to be next to the Pentagon, at this date, and this time, you’re gonna be meeting somebody from the CIA,” basically. It said it in a different way, but I can’t say what it said. And so I was like, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It’s working.” So I get on a plane and I fly out to DC. And this is where it gets pretty sketchy, but it was insane. So I go to my meeting. I had to go to a very specific location that was within a rock’s throw of the Pentagon. And I go to the back of a room at a certain location, and there’s two guys in suits, waiting at a table for me….
And I finished my speech, and the person is just staring at me. These squinting eyes, the beard, the suit, looks exactly straight out of a movie, an espionage movie. Takes a breath and goes, “Things like this don’t happen at the White House. They don’t happen at the Hill. They happen in places like this, at tables like this, where a few men get together and decide to push the ball down the field.” And then the meeting was done. I mean done, like a movie done.
The description fits, and Green is certainly the most well known UFO booster from the CIA. Green is a very long time associate of fringe physicist Harold Puthoff, going all the way back to their time in the military’s “remote viewing” program in the 70s. Puthoff, along with Green, is on the board of the “Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies”. Both Puthoff and Green have been listed as members of the “Aviary,” a group of government insiders supposedly working to get the word out about the truth of the alien presence on earth.
(Also on the Bigelow board is Leslie Kean, who co-authored the NYT story that launched this UFO frenzy. That should raise an eyebrow or two as well. )
If you are sincerely interested in the truth of UFOs, whatever that truth may be, this should bother you. A lot. Yet no one is talking about all this, and it is making me really nervous.
Let’s back up just a bit. Doty has not officially worked for AFOSI in decades. How odd, then, to find him leading a disinformation campaign in 2005 very similar to, and utilizing a lot of the same narrative elements as, the information he was passing along to Bennewitz years before. In this case, it was about Project “Serpo,” in which a dozen earth astronauts were sent off to a planet around Zeta Reticuli in a sort of exchange program. And yes, that is exactly how Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind ends.
How much odder to note that Kit Green and Harold Puthoff also were involved in this disinfo campaign albeit behind the scenes. Doty was “confirming” this story under his own name, but also working under several pseudonyms and fake email accounts, but his alleged hacking skills had not included the basic knowledge that the same IP address was on all the emails. Doty was busted.
The story gets very convoluted but the same little group who busted Doty also managed to obtain a bunch of email exchanges going on behind the scenes, and Kit Green was very much in the thick of things with Puthoff CC’ed an almost all of those emails. If you want to really dive into all of this to untangle for yourself, the emails are archived here and the whole story is recounted here though it is very hard to follow because it is meant for those who were following the story from the beginning on the Above Top Secret discussion forum.
Whoah, you say. Hang on, you cry! If Doty was so well known as a destructive disinformation operative, why did anyone believe anything he was vouching for? A good question, and while I could write a lot about the continuing lack of rigor and credulity of UFO “researchers,” the one answer I will focus on is that Kit Green vouched for the guy.
What Doty does is acknowledge he was passing on disinformation to men like Bennewitz but to claim that in his role at AFOSI he was made privy to a lot of real information about UFOs and the military’s interest in them. Plus, he doesn’t work for them anymore. He is now just a private citizen seeking the truth like everyone else. Then he will proceed to tell you the exact same stories as if they are true.
Green explains his willingness to support Doty in this tantalizing way. (This is from Mirage Men, though I am grabbing the quote from this site. I have an ebook edition, and I don’t know if the page numbers are correct (281 – 283) but I have confirmed the quotes are in the book. )
“If something really strange in the area of UFOs is true, then what do we do about conveying that information to the public? First we concede what may be the basic facts: maybe there are civilized lifeforms elsewhere in the universe; maybe they visited us in their spaceships a couple of times, and then went back home…And there may be people in the Government who believe that this did happen, and believe that the information needs to be public knowledge…But then there’s another group of people in power who say, ‘No, it will make them sick to know all this, we can’t let the story out, it’s too dangerous.
Kit continued the hypothesis. “The way to do it is to construct a framework whereby they can parse out the things they’ve heard that are not true, and you whittle it down to a manageable story. A story like this. ‘ There were three spaceships that came here over thirty years, and we’ve got one of them. We can’t figure out how it works, we’ve crashed it because…”
The hypothesis continues, that you feed stories out “Over ten or twenty years. You put out a bunch of movies, a bunch of books…Then one day you say, “Hey, all that stuff is nonsense, relax, it’s not that bad…the reality is this…”
“Here was a very suave, very intelligent man, a man who had been close to the secret machinations of government than anyone we were ever likely to meet. And he appeared to be telling us that the aliens were real…”
So, in other words, just because a government insider gives you a lot of disinformation, you should still keep working with them because somewhere in there is the truth. This, it is safe to say, is not very good research practice, and can even be damaging to your mental health. Needless to say, if this is the “core story” that Green feels is true, he must have known the Serpo story was b.s.
What to make of all this? While Green, at least publicly, is not even involved in this current “disclosure” process, the most public face has primarily been Lue Elizondo, whose background is counterintelligence. And counterintelligence is exactly the agenda (or likely, ONE of the agendas) of the disinformation Doty (and many others) put out into the UFO community. The disinformation is used as a cover to obscure sightings and other information about actual secret military aircraft, and also to ferret out leaks of information. And UFO stories have been used for this purpose since at least the 1950s.
Some true believers will say that the disinformation is ALSO being used to discredit real information, by tainting it with ridiculous details. Fair enough. But sadly, those “ridiculous details” are now so ingrained in the UFO community that they are often simply taken for granted as true.
In fact, it is hard to overstate how much of current UFO lore has either been created by or at least distributed by Richard Doty.
The fact that Kit Green is anywhere near this new round of alleged impending disclosure should be a huge red flag. And his long time, close working relationship with Harold Puthoff, who does have a public role in all this, should be a second red flag.
As noted above, sure, it’s possible that all this disinformation hides some real truth about aliens and UFOs that the government knows. But one thing that is very clear is that the involvement of these men creates so much smoke, and wastes the research time of so many, while often leading to divisive arguments and fights in the UFO community, that any actual “disclosure” is unlikely to see the light of day.