Richard Doty — AFOSI and the Bennewitz Operation
Richard Doty was an AFOSI special agent stationed at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico in the early 1980s, during which time Albuquerque physicist Paul Bennewitz began reporting strange lights and intercepted signals near the base. Rather than simply tell him to stop pointing equipment at a facility with nuclear weapons storage, the counterintelligence answer was to give him something more interesting to think about.
Why it was classified
Bennewitz was picking up genuine emissions from a sensitive installation, and the concern was less that he would find aliens than that he would accidentally document real capabilities. Doty has said in numerous interviews, and on camera in the 2013 documentary 'Mirage Men', that he supplied Bennewitz with fabricated documents and encouraged his belief in an underground alien base — an operation that ran alongside his associate Bill Moore's role in circulating the Majestic-12 papers (see our MJ-12 entry). Moore publicly admitted his part in 1989 at the MUFON symposium.
Why it matters
The material worked far better than any operation has a right to. Bennewitz suffered a serious breakdown, and the underground-base narrative fed to one man in New Mexico is now permanent load-bearing structure in global UFO lore, repeated by people who have never heard of Kirtland. Doty's own account has shifted and contradicted itself over the years, which makes him an unreliable narrator about a job whose entire purpose was unreliable narration. He has never been criminally charged, and he still gives interviews — a retired disinformation officer being asked, sincerely, to explain what really happened.