Several weeks before Sgt. Richard Doty met with reporter Linda Moulton Howe, ufologist Bill Moore got a telephone call from one of his confidential military/intelligence sources, who offered a leak of classified material on UFOs. Per the caller’s instructions, Moore rented a motel room in upstate New York, where he met a mystery man bearing a sealed brown envelope.

Opening the envelope, Moore took out eleven pages of what appeared to be an uncensored TOP-SECRET Executive Briefing dated June 14, 1977 for then-President Jimmy Carter (click here to read Moore’s transcription in its entirety). The mystery man told Moore that he had exactly nineteen minutes to examine the document, and that he could photograph or read portions of it into a tape recorder. The first part dealt with a project codenamed AQUARIUS, something he had heard of the previous year from another anonymous intelligence source he referred to as SEAGULL. The first page read in part:

(TS/ORCON) (PROWORD: DANCE). Contains 16 volumes of documented information collected from the beginning of the United States Investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Identified Alien Crafts (IAC). The project was originally established in 1953, by order of President Eisenhower, under control of NSC and MJ12. In 1966, the Project’s name was changed from Project Gleem to Project Aquarius.

Throughout the 1980s, people representing some faction of the military and/or intelligence establishment made similar contacts with other UFO researchers. The number of people approached during this period is too large to go into detail here (see previous link). Nevertheless, the list of military contactees included Whitley Strieber, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, and veteran New York Times journalist Howard Blum.

In 1985, ufologist Len Stringfield met his military/intelligence/UFO contact, codenamed CONDOR, several times at Wright Patterson AFB (Dayton, OH). In an essay titled “UFO Crash/Retrievals: Is the Cover-Up Lid Lifting?” he described the content of these meetings:

Expressing interest in my research and sources, he [the intelligence contact] claimed to know a colonel with sensitive information relative to my work, but his proposal for me to meet with this source fell through and I heard no more. Later I learned that he confided with a member of the Fund for UFO Research and after that with Bill Moore.

A number of ufologists, among them Timothy Good and Robert Hastings, identified CONDOR as USAF Captain Robert Collins, a retired officer formerly assigned to the Sandia National Laboratories located at Sgt. Doty’s former stomping grounds, Kirtland AFB. CONDOR/Collins told other researchers that he broke off contact with Stringfield because he “found him too unreliable.”

We can only guess what that means. Maybe the Captain saw Stringfield as the kind of person who wouldn’t uncritically swallow classified leaks. Perhaps frustrated by Stringfield’s cynicism, CONDOR went in search of what seemed to him more cooperative researchers, hoping to could sow the seeds of a new UFO orthodoxy through them.

One thing is certain: FALCON and CONDOR helped formulate a certain brand of ufological dogma, either through proxies or on their own. In the 1988 television special UFO Cover-Up? Live, both men appeared in shadow (with voices altered) to state their bona fides and declare a cover-up.

Figure 1. UFO Cover-UP? Live segment with CONDOR and FALCON



A 2000 essay on Gunther Smith’s AlienZoo website reported on a chance encounter between the writer and UFO Cover-UP? Live host Mike Farrell. The author claimed that Farrell told him about the actor’s regrets concerning the special, in particular the cheesy telepromptered dialogue written for him. Although he felt that many of the witnesses impressed him as forthright and compelling, and that a government cover-up of UFO activities was a real possibility, Farrell apparently had severe misgivings about the CONDOR/FALCOLN segment:

However, when we got to the subject of Falcon and Condor, Mike Farrell stated what I already heard on the rumor mill -- that at least one of them was later shown up to be ‘not who he claimed to be’ and something of a fraud. Rumor has it that one of these two Aviary members was Richard Doty of Kirtland Air Force Base, who gained a reputation in the early 1990s as notorious for putting out false information about UFOs, as well as some bogus documents.

Sgt. Doty definitely fits Farrell’s description. If he in fact masqueraded as FALCON, then Doty misrepresented his identity, function and military status. Much of what he says seems not only untrue but humorous (do grey aliens really like strawberry ice cream?), and thus smacks of misinformation. And, of course, many of these documents seem to be beyond verification, and frankly beyond belief.

Of course what’s truly beyond belief is the alleged harassment of one UFO researcher who happened to cross the Kirtland Konnection.