Doty worked for Puthoff

Doty worked for Puthoff

Speaker	Harold E. "Hal" Puthoff, physicist, EarthTech International and To The Stars Academy
Date	8 February 2020
Venue	John Petersen's "Transition Talk" forum, Berkeley Springs, West Virginia
Talk	"DOD Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: The Back Story, The Forward Story"
Statement	Richard Doty "did" work for him as a contractor, on a program before AATIP
Reported by	Keith Basterfield, from an audio recording supplied by an attendee
Topics	Government programs (topic)
People	Harold Puthoff, Richard Doty, Paul Bennewitz
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 195
Year	2020 in UFO history
Timeline	2020 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	16

In a talk on 8 February 2020, the physicist Hal Puthoff confirmed that Richard Doty had worked for him as a contractor on a program that predated AATIP.^[1] Doty is the former Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent known for feeding disinformation to UFO researchers in the 1980s.^[2] The answer was given during questions after the talk. The researcher Keith Basterfield reported it from an audio recording supplied by an anonymous attendee.^[1] It came a few days after Doty himself was reported to have said that he worked for Puthoff from 1994 to 2007.^[16]

The talk

Puthoff spoke at an event in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, part of the futurist John Petersen's "Transition Talk" forum. The talk was titled "DOD Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: The Back Story, The Forward Story".^[1] It closely followed a talk he had given at a joint Society for Scientific Exploration and International Remote Viewing Association conference in Las Vegas on 8 June 2018.^[1][9] Comparing the two, Basterfield noted these changes and additions in 2020:^[1]

• Start date. AATIP now began in June 2008, not June 2007. This fit better with the September 2008 start of the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP).
• The solicitation. The call for bids for the AAWSAP contract was now dated 2008 rather than 2007.
• Thread-3. He dated the Soviet "Thread-3" UAP document to 1991.
• New topics. These included the Navy pilot encounters of 2014–2015, the Navy's acknowledgement of the three videos, its new reporting guidelines, congressional briefings, TTSA's research agreement with the Army, and the History Channel series Unidentified.

The Doty answers

Two questions from the audience concerned Doty.^[1]

• "Richard Doty says he worked for you. Any comment?" Puthoff replied that "He did". There had been "a period where we were investigating all aspects of the phenomenon", and Doty "was a contractor for us, as were many other people". "Some of his data could be verified, some could not. I happened to like him as an individual."
• "When Richard Doty was hired, was that for AATIP?" "No, on another program before AATIP."

Basterfield cautioned that the questioners' voices were hard to hear on the recording and that his notes might contain errors.^[1] Puthoff did not name the earlier program or give dates.^[1] Puthoff had been a member of Robert Bigelow's National Institute for Discovery Science from 1995. He joined Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, the AAWSAP contractor, in 2008.^[9] In Doty's reported version, the work lasted from 1994 to 2007. That would place it before AAWSAP and overlapping Puthoff's NIDS years, but the dates come only from a social-media account of Doty's email.^[9][16]

Other remarks

Other answers in the same session:^[1]

• Reverse engineering. Asked whether anyone could have reverse-engineered UFOs, he said: "It's an option. It's possible. I brought up the idea in a paper."
• The Mg-Bi material. On the magnesium-bismuth samples held by To The Stars Academy, he said "We don't yet really know anything from it". He had examined a piece from Linda Moulton Howe ten years earlier and "Couldn't make anything of it."
• Free energy. His laboratory's "maverick inventor program" had examined many devices with "No positive evidence in the end".
• Warp drive. It was perhaps a century away.
• Remote viewing. He described his remote-viewing work with Ingo Swann, and said Pat Price had "located four UAP bases on Earth" through it.
• Elizondo. Pentagon statements that Luis Elizondo had not worked for AATIP were "Not right".
• The DIRDs. He referred several times to the 38 Defense Intelligence Reference Documents produced under the program.

On the disputed Wilson–Davis notes, the summary first had him say that "Wilson was interviewed by my colleague Eric Davis". On 20 February 2020 Puthoff sent Basterfield a clarification. He said that because of poor sound he had repeated the question aloud before answering. His actual answer was his standard one: since the notes discussed "potentially ongoing programs", he would not comment. It had not been his intention "to verify the interview and associated notes".^[1]

Doty

In the early 1980s Doty, then an AFOSI special agent at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, took part in a deception operation against the Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz. Bennewitz believed he was intercepting alien communications.^[2][7] How the operation worked:^[2][4][8]

• The method. Doty gained Bennewitz's trust and encouraged his fears with false documents and rigged decoding software.
• Moore. The researcher William Moore worked alongside him. At a MUFON conference on 1 July 1989, Moore admitted helping feed Bennewitz false information.
• The outcome. Bennewitz was hospitalized in 1988, and his beliefs seeded the "Dulce Base" legend.

Doty later said he had been tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers.^[2] The affair was told in Greg Bishop's Project Beta (2005) and in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, a 2010 book and a 2013 documentary.^[5][6][10] Doty has also been linked to the Majestic 12 documents. The story spread through Moore, and Doty later said he had given fabricated information to ufologists while at Kirtland.^[3] Many researchers have also blamed him for the "Project Serpo" story, which he denies writing.^[16] A short summary of the Bennewitz affair by Michael Heiser is also listed as a source, but the site was unavailable when checked.^[11]

Puthoff

Puthoff started his career in laser physics. In the 1970s and 1980s he directed the remote-viewing research at the Stanford Research Institute that became part of the Stargate Project. Critics including David Marks and Richard Kammann found that the experiments' transcripts contained cues that explained their success.^[9] In 1985 he founded the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, later part of EarthTech International. In 2017 he co-founded To The Stars with Tom DeLonge.^[9] In the book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon he is called a "central player" in the 1970s Uri Geller tests and an AAWSAP consultant and contractor.^[13] The book's own prepublication review by the Pentagon took more than a year.^[12]

Reaction

The revelation troubled many researchers, given Doty's history. It raised questions about why someone with his record would be involved in later research.^[1][2] Some saw it as evidence of continuing intelligence involvement in UFO research circles. Others suggested Puthoff may have wanted to learn from Doty's knowledge of past events.^[1][8] One commenter on Basterfield's post asked why no one had pressed Puthoff about any role in the Serpo hoax. No evidence was offered for that suggestion.^[1]

In 2024 the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office reported finding no evidence that any government program had reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology. It attributed such claims largely to "circular reporting" among a small group of believers.^[14][15]

People and topics

• Harold Puthoff — Physicist who co-founded the SRI remote-viewing research and later worked on AAWSAP and To The Stars Academy.
• Richard Doty — Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who fed disinformation to UFO researchers in the 1980s.
• AATIP — The Pentagon UAP effort associated with Luis Elizondo, revealed in December 2017.
• Arlington Institute — The futurist think tank founded by John Petersen in 1989.
• Air Force Office of Special Investigations — The Air Force's criminal investigation and counterintelligence agency.
• Disinformation — False information spread deliberately to mislead.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Paul Bennewitz — Albuquerque physicist targeted by Air Force disinformation in the Bennewitz affair.

On the Timeline

• Puthoff denies threats (2020) (8 February 2020) — Hal Puthoff denies rumors his family was threatened over antigravity information.
• SBIRS UAP detections claim (20 February 2020) — Christopher Mellon says a missile-warning satellite system has recorded unidentified objects.

See every 2020 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Paul Bennewitz”, “Majestic 12”, “Harold E. Puthoff”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.