Linda Moulton Howe

Linda Moulton Howe

Type	Person
Also known as	Howe
On the Timeline	23 events, 1948–2021

Linda Moulton Howe (born 20 January 1942) is an American documentary maker and investigative journalist, and one of the best-known figures in American ufology.^[1] Her 1980 television documentary A Strange Harvest argued that cattle mutilations were the work of extraterrestrials, with the US government complicit. It won a regional Emmy award.^[1][11] In 1983 she was drawn into the Air Force disinformation campaign around Paul Bennewitz. An Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent, Richard Doty, showed her fabricated documents at Kirtland Air Force Base and promised film that never appeared, and her HBO documentary collapsed.^[1][8] She went on to report on UFOs, crop circles, animal mutilations and insider testimony through her website Earthfiles, and for nearly three decades on the radio programme Coast to Coast AM.^[1][12] The skeptic Joe Nickell has called her a "credulous journalist".^[1]

Early life and education

• Family. She was born Linda Ann Moulton in Boise, Idaho. Her father, Chet Moulton, was Idaho's director of aeronautics from 1946 to 1971 and received many aviation honours.^[1]
• Miss Idaho. She entered the 1963 Miss Boise pageant for college scholarships, then won the 1963 Miss Idaho title and competed in the Miss America 1964 pageant in Atlantic City.^[1]
• Colorado and Stanford. She graduated cum laude in English literature from the University of Colorado in 1965. With a Stanley Baubaire Scholarship she took a master's degree in communication at Stanford in 1968. While there she made a documentary for the Stanford Medical Center and wrote a thesis, "A Picture Calculus", at the Stanford Linear Accelerator.^[1]

Environmental television

• WCVB. She was on the staff of WCVB-TV when the station won an institutional Peabody Award in 1975.^[1]
• KMGH Denver. From 1978 to 1983 she was director of special projects at KMGH-TV, Channel 7, in Denver. Her documentaries included Poison in the Wind and A Sun Kissed Poison, comparing smog in Los Angeles and Denver. Others were Fire in the Water, on hydrogen as an alternative to fossil fuels, and A Radioactive Water, on uranium in a Denver suburb's drinking water.^[1]
• Florence Sabin Award. In 1982 she received Colorado's Florence Sabin Award for "outstanding contribution to public health".^[1]

A Strange Harvest (1980)

In 1980 Howe wrote, produced and directed A Strange Harvest, about the wave of livestock deaths with unusual wounds reported across the western United States in the 1970s.^[1][3] The film suggested that extraterrestrials were taking body parts for their survival or research, and that the government knew.^[1]

• The Emmy. It won a regional Emmy award. A photograph on Wikimedia Commons, and TheTVDB, record it as a 1981 Emmy for audio achievement.^[1][11]
• A "staunch advocate". The film made her a prominent advocate of these ideas. She began to explore connections between mutilations, UFOs and government conspiracy, saying she was convinced "one or more alien intelligences are affecting this planet".^[1]
• The official view. The same year, Kenneth Rommel's 297-page report, released in June 1980, concluded that the mutilations were mainly the result of natural predation and scavenging, though some cases had anomalies.^[3]
• An Alien Harvest. Her 1989 book An Alien Harvest argued for links between animal mutilations, human abductions and alien life forms. It named Doty.^[1][5] An expanded second edition in 2014 carried forewords by Jacques Vallée and Jim Marrs. It received a New Mexico–Arizona Southwest Book Award in 2015.^[1]

Doty and the Kirtland documents (1983)

• The approach. On 20 March 1983 the lawyer Peter Gersten passed on to Howe what Doty had told him about a secret "MJ-12" group. Doty had claimed that the government had recovered crashed alien craft and bodies, and had made a deal with aliens allowing mutilations and abductions.^[7] Doty then offered her Air Force records for her HBO documentary, which Lenny Flatley gives as UFOs: The E.T. Factor.^[1][8]
• Kirtland, 9 April 1983. She met Doty in Albuquerque on 9 April 1983, and he took her onto Kirtland Air Force Base.^[7][8] He told her the MJ-12 story was true. He showed her documents about small grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli, including what Flatley describes as a briefing paper for President Eisenhower on crashed spacecraft, and a "Project Aquarius".^[7][8][10]
• Promises. Doty promised film of a UFO landing at an Air Force base, interviews with colonels who had met aliens, and even a meeting with a living alien. None of it materialised, and HBO dropped the project.^[7][8]
• MJ-12. In 1984 the producer Jaime Shandera received film of supposed "Majestic-12" briefing papers like those Doty had shown Howe. These became the MJ-12 documents.^[8]
• Denial and admission. According to Mark Pilkington, Doty later denied the meeting. Howe answered with a sworn statement and documents of her dealings with Doty and HBO.^[1] According to Pilkington, about 24 years later Doty admitted that the exchange had taken place much as she described, and that it was connected to AFOSI's disinformation against Bennewitz. "We gave Linda some good information, and some bad information. She chose the bad information," he said.^[1]
• Mirage Men. Doty repeated his account in Pilkington's 2013 documentary Mirage Men, in which Howe also appears.^[1][5] Flatley argues that the point of the operation was to kill her documentary, and that it worked.^[8] In a later interview with The Debrief, Doty was asked whether reparations should be paid to Bennewitz's family and to Howe.^[10] See Spread of the Bennewitz disinformation.

Television and radio

• Television. She produced the two-hour special Earth Mysteries: Alien Life Forms with WATL-Fox in Atlanta. She was supervising producer and creator of the concept for UFO Report: Sightings, financed by Paramount and Fox. It was first broadcast in October 1991 and became the Fox series Sightings.^[1]
• Interviews. She has appeared on Larry King Live, The O'Reilly Factor, Strange Universe, NBC's The Other Side and Mysterious Origins of Man, and the BBC and ITN. She has also appeared in the Discovery Channel's Evidence on Earth and the History Channel's Ancient Aliens.^[1]
• Coast to Coast AM. She was a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM from 1991 with Art Bell, and from 2003 with George Noory. She ended her monthly appearances in 2019.^[1][6] She has hosted a weekly YouTube broadcast since 2007.^[1][12]
• The National Press Club. At a 2013 UFO disclosure event at the National Press Club, she said she believed alien technology was so advanced that space and time could be bent, allowing extraterrestrials to visit Earth.^[1]

Earthfiles and later reporting

• The site. Howe is editor and host of Earthfiles, which publishes much of its reporting to subscribers only.^[12] It carries interviews with people claiming knowledge of government UFO secrets, as well as reports on mutilations, crop formations and environmental science.^[1][12]
• Crop circles. Her book Mysterious Lights and Crop Circles (2002) proposed that some photographs of crop circles show "visible light phenomena". In a 2002 Skeptical Inquirer article, Nickell argued that the effects were photographic accidents, such as a camera strap reflecting the flash or floating dust.^[1] Her two-volume Glimpses of Other Realities appeared in 1993 and 1998.^[1]
• Aztec. In 1998 she said she had government documents proving the Aztec crash story. The Skeptic's Dictionary says what she had was a rumour eight times removed from the con man Silas Newton, which ended up in a memo to J. Edgar Hoover.^[9] See Hottel memo.
• Stringfield's reports. In 2004 and 2005 Earthfiles republished Leonard Stringfield's crash-retrieval status reports in parts.^[13] At the 2004 Crash Retrieval Conference she presented a paper on the government's "policy of denial". It drew on the unpublished manuscript of the former New Mexico legislator Andrew Kissner.^[14] See Andrew Kissner and the 1947 crashes.
• Single-source claims. Much of her later work rests on anonymous insiders. Examples include an alleged 1953 crash and burial near Garrison, Utah (2005), and a disc crash at a Cedar Breaks radar site (2006).^[15][16] There was also a retired Army officer's story of a pyramid beneath Alaska (2012), which the writer Jason Colavito found inconsistent.^[17] See Garrison, Utah, Cedar Breaks and Alaska pyramid claim.
• Interviews. She has interviewed the Rendlesham witness John Burroughs about his 2015 disability award. He told her the award confirmed the UFO phenomenon was real.^[18] See John Burroughs's medical records.
• The DeLonge fragments. Tom DeLonge's To the Stars Academy at first implied that metal fragments it acquired had come from Howe. A 2019 SEC filing said DeLonge had sold them to the company himself.^[19]

Reception

• Admirers. One Idaho state director of MUFON called her "the most preeminent UFO investigator in the world", and she has been named as one of "the gurus of American ufology". Howe describes herself as a television producer and investigative reporter.^[1]
• Critics. The author John Greer wrote that she offered no evidence for her claims of secret documents beyond "the very ambiguous evidence provided by rotting cow carcasses".^[1] Nickell called her "credulous".^[1] Tim Swartz noted that Doty, who promised her evidence and then backed out, later helped spread other stories such as Project Serpo.^[20]
• Disinformation target. Her experience is examined in Mark Pilkington's book Mirage Men (2010) and the 2013 film made from it.^[4][5]

Notes on the earlier version

• Doty's admission. The earlier version said Doty acknowledged in the 2013 documentary Mirage Men that he had misled her. According to Pilkington, as quoted in the Wikipedia account, Doty had admitted it around 24 years after the event. The film repeated the admission.^[1][4]
• A Strange Harvest and Doty. The Wikipedia account of cattle mutilation says Howe based A Strange Harvest on information from Doty.^[3] That conflicts with the other sources, which date Doty's approach to 1983, three years after the film.^[1][7]
• Earthfiles in 1999. The earlier version said she founded Earthfiles in 1999. That date is not covered in the sources read here.
• "Fill-in host". The earlier version called her a fill-in host on Coast to Coast AM. The sources read here describe her as a frequent guest with monthly appearances.^[1]
• Supporters. The earlier version said supporters value her long record of interviews with people who say they worked on secret projects. The sources record praise from MUFON figures, but not that specific point.^[1]
• Barkun. The earlier version cited Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy (2006) for its description of Howe as one of the best-known targets of Air Force disinformation. The text of Barkun's book could not be read for this revision; only its catalogue page was available.^[2]

On the UAP Timeline

• White Sands blown-window crash claim (1948) (1948) — An anonymous source claims a disc crashed at White Sands with its occupants dead from a blown-out window.
• Fort Polk crash claim (1953) (1953) — An Army source says he saw an egg-shaped craft crash-land at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
• Garrison, Utah crash and burial claim (1953) (20 May 1953) — An anonymous Air Force official claims a craft crashed and was buried near Garrison, Utah.
• Roswell-area helicopter crash claim (1954) (12 April 1954) — An Air Force helicopter trainee says he was sent to a desert crash near Roswell in 1954.
• Hill AFB landing claim (1958) (1958) — An anonymous military source claims a UAP deliberately landed at Hill AFB.
• Navy reserve pilot's Wright-Patterson saucer claim (1962) (1962) — A Navy reserve pilot says he saw a saucer at Wright-Patterson in 1962.
• Cedar Breaks radar site crash claim (1966) — A radar technician reportedly saw a disc crash at a Utah radar site linked to Area 51.
• Camp Pendleton Marine's crash-site claim (1967) (3 July 1967) — A Marine says he flew to a crash retrieval site in the desert in 1967.
• Great Lakes shoot-down claim (1973) (June 1973) — A Navy instructor claims a UAP was shot down by a missile and secretly moved by rail to Great Lakes.
• Spread of the Bennewitz disinformation (1980s Undefined) — Doty's fake document spreads to the public and into books and media.
• GE contractor taken underground claim (1982) — A man's daughter says he was blindfolded and taken underground at Wright-Patterson.
• Fort Hood hidden opening claim (1982) — An Air Force captain describes a pilot seeing a hidden opening in the ground at a Texas airfield.
• John Lear's source Mike (1989) (January 1989) — John Lear says a source was flown to an underground site to photograph a saucer and autopsy.
• Bill English and Grudge/Blue Book Report 13 (January 1989) — Bill English claims he saw a memo saying Blue Book officials knew of crash recoveries.
• Project Blue Heaven claim (1990) — A physicist claims he worked on Project Blue Heaven at Edwards AFB.
• White Sands tracking-camera saucer claim (July 1991) — A retired sergeant says tracking cameras recorded a saucer resting on the White Sands range.
• Navy linguist and the Soviet crash report (July 1991) — A Navy linguist says he decoded a Soviet report of a crash split between England and Germany.
• Dan Morris testimony (30 August 1996) — Air Force Sgt. Dan Morris says he was part of a group gathering UAP information.
• Hill AFB glowing disc (2010) (15 December 2010) — Two alleged Hill AFB workers report a glowing disc above the flight line.
• Antarctic Navy flight engineer's account (30 January 2015) — A Navy flight engineer says he saw an entrance to an underground site near the South Pole.
• Area 29 and Omega operations claim (30 May 2018) — A remote viewer claims targets were linked to 'Omega' operations involving advanced propulsion.
• A.D.A.M. project (July 2018) — To The Stars Academy launches the A.D.A.M. project to study claimed exotic materials.
• Alaska pyramid claim (28 September 2021) — DeLonge says he was told of a large pyramid beneath Alaska.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Linda Moulton Howe”, “Cattle mutilation”, “Mirage Men”, “Majestic 12”, “Project Serpo”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.