Richard Doty

Richard Doty is a former special agent of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) at Kirtland Air Force Base, and the documented human face of UFO disinformation. His operations against Paul Bennewitz and engagements with researchers in the early 1980s seeded much of modern lore.

Doty served with AFOSI in the late 1970s and 1980s. His assignments included counterintelligence work around Kirtland's sensitive programs, the context in which the Bennewitz operation ran.

Doty engaged Bennewitz while, by participants' accounts and his own partial admissions, supplying fabricated confirmations of alien activity; showed Linda Moulton Howe an alleged presidential briefing document in 1983 while promising film that never came; and worked with researcher William Moore, who confessed in 1989 to relaying disinformation in exchange for access. Doty's name attaches to the era's manufactured mythology: Dulce, treaties, and MJ-12-adjacent papers. After leaving the Air Force he became a New Mexico state trooper. In later decades he gave interviews (Mirage Men, 2013; podcasts since) mixing admissions of deception with claims that real programs and real beings stood behind the curtain, including detailed stories he declines to document.

His documented contribution is evidence that official deception operated inside ufology. His ongoing claims are, definitionally, the testimony of an admitted deceiver, which every interviewer notes and airs anyway.

Researchers divide over whether Doty was a rogue operator, a cog in an authorized program, or an embellisher of his own legend; no official accounting has ever been released, and AARO's historical review gestures at the era without naming operations. Ethicists in the field regard the Bennewitz damage (a man's mental collapse) as the story's moral center. Doty has expressed measured regret while continuing to feed the mystery he salted.

Retired in New Mexico, Doty remains a podcast-circuit regular, the field's living paradox: the source you cannot trust about the deception you cannot ignore.