Air Force Office of Special Investigations

Air Force Office of Special Investigations

Type	Organization
Also known as	AFOSI, OSI
On the Timeline	16 events, 1949–2022

The Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI or AFOSI) is a US federal law-enforcement agency and the US Air Force's criminal investigation and counterintelligence service. It reports directly to the Secretary of the Air Force and works outside the normal military chain of command, investigating serious crime, espionage and terrorism that threaten the Air Force, the Space Force and the Department of Defense.^[1] Founded in 1948 on the model of the FBI, it appears often in UFO history. Its agents handled sighting reports in the early Cold War, and it was the agency that told the FBI in 1988 that the "Majestic 12" committee had never existed.^[1][3][5] Above all, it is known for the early-1980s disinformation campaign in which its agent Richard Doty fed false UFO stories and forged documents to the Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz. That campaign is the subject of the 2013 documentary Mirage Men.^[2][4]

History

OSI was created in 1948, at the suggestion of Congress, to bring the new Air Force's investigative work under one roof. Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington modelled it on the FBI and appointed Joseph Francis Carroll, a senior FBI official and assistant to J. Edgar Hoover, as its first commander. Carroll later became the first director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.^[1]

• 2 January 1948. General Order No. 1 of the Chief of Staff, General Carl Spaatz, formally established OSI and named Carroll commander. A Spaatz letter of 9 April 1948 defined its job as a centrally directed investigations service for the whole Air Force, covering offences such as fraud, arson, black-market dealing, bribery, burglary, embezzlement, forgery, larceny, perjury, robbery and smuggling.^[1]
• 15 July 1948. General Order No. 29 of the new Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, gave OSI counterintelligence duties, from detecting espionage and sabotage to subversion and disloyalty, and transferred to it the work of the Air Force's Counterintelligence Corps.^[1]
• 1 August 1948. The date OSI regards as the start of its operations.^[1]

OSI agents usually work in civilian clothes to keep military rank separate from investigative authority. They carry federal badges and include civilians, officers and enlisted personnel.^[1] Recruits train at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia, in a 12-week federal criminal investigator course followed by eight weeks at the Air Force Special Investigations Academy.^[1] Former agents include Senator Arlen Specter and Representative Herb Bateman.^[1]

Organisation and role

Under Brigadier General Francis Dillon, OSI was reorganised between 1991 and 1992. On 1 October 1992 it replaced its 16 district offices with seven field investigations regions aligned with the Air Force's major commands. Region 7 was set up to handle counterintelligence and security for special access programmes under the Secretary of the Air Force. Region 8 is aligned with the Space Force, Global Strike Command and Northern Command.^[1] Its headquarters are at Quantico, Virginia, and it has more than 255 units worldwide. Its specialised branches include an Office of Special Projects, and it is the executive agency for the Defense Department's Cyber Crime Center, founded within OSI in 1998.^[1]

Its work covers criminal investigations such as murder, rape, assault, drug offences and arson; fraud in contracting and finance; counterintelligence against hostile intelligence services and terrorist groups; protection of senior leaders; cyber crime; and protection of Air Force technologies and programmes.^[1] Its agents deployed to Grenada in 1983 and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where OSI's Task Force Black protected Kandahar Airfield.^[1]

The earlier version of this article said OSI has about 2,000 special agents and 1,000 other staff. The Wikipedia account, the source read here, gives a total of 2,900 employees as of 2007. The earlier version also said OSI reports directly to the Secretary of the Air Force. That is correct, but the same account adds that it works under the administrative guidance of the Department of the Air Force's inspector general.^[1]

Early UFO work (1949–1970s)

In the early Cold War, UFO reports passed through many military channels, and OSI turns up in a number of them. The UAP timeline published with Michael Shellenberger's 2024 congressional testimony records several examples:

• Los Alamos, 1950. A summary of 25 May 1950 listed OSI personnel among the scientists, pilots, security inspectors and others who had repeatedly seen unexplained phenomena near Los Alamos, part of the background to Project Twinkle.^[5]
• Texas summary, 1950. On 30 March 1950, visiting OSI's 10th District at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas, OSI's commander, by then Brigadier General Carroll, ordered a summary of the "aerial phenomena" reported and investigated there. Completed by 12 April, it reviewed about forty cases, three-quarters reported by military personnel and many near Camp Hood. It noted that most sightings were at night and silent, and that witnesses estimated speeds of 800 to 2,000 miles per hour. Loren Gross contrasts it with the Air Force's dismissive Project Grudge report.^[6]
• A newsman's film, 1950. A memorandum of 6 July 1950 records Air Force officers trying to get a Louisville newsman's "flying disk" film without revealing the Air Force's interest. The local OSI district commander suggested the FBI might make the inquiries instead, and other officers advised against direct OSI involvement.^[6] This site covers it as the proposal to collect UFO home movies.
• Navy reporting, 1954. A Navy directive of 23 July 1954 told personnel to report sightings to, among others, the director of AFOSI.^[7]
• Hunter Air Force Base, 1958. A colonel wrote to AFOSI on 30 October 1958 about a reported crash near Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia. According to the timeline, the letter treated UFOs and Soviet satellites as separate categories of debris and was classified to protect Air Force interest in recovering UFOs.^[8] See Hunter AFB "UFO crash" letter.
• Missile bases, 1960s. Missile officers later said that OSI debriefed personnel after sightings over missile sites, including at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in 1965.^[9]
• Impostors, 1967. A memorandum of 1 March 1967 by Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless warned that people in uniform were approaching UFO witnesses and telling them not to talk. It asked that any such approaches be reported to AFOSI.^[10] See Wheless memo on UFO impostors.
• The "Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit". In a 1984 freedom-of-information reply, the Army said it had briefly had an informal group of that name in the 1950s. It later said the group's records had been transferred to AFOSI, which in 1997 told requesters that the material had been destroyed.^[11] See Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit.

These entries come from the timeline's summaries of documents and testimony. Several are first-hand claims rather than official records, and the sources read here do not independently confirm them.

Richard Doty and the Bennewitz affair

Richard Charles Doty, born in 1950, grew up in Pennsylvania and joined the Air Force, serving in Texas, Vietnam, Washington state, West Germany and South Dakota. By 1979 he was an OSI special agent at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. After retiring he worked as a police officer in New Mexico.^[2]

Paul Bennewitz, a physicist and the owner of a small Albuquerque firm, Thunder Scientific, belonged to the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). From 1979 he filmed lights and recorded radio signals over Kirtland, came to believe that aliens were behind cattle mutilations and controlled humans with electromagnetic devices, and eventually located an imagined alien base near Dulce. On 24 October 1980 he reported his findings to Kirtland, and on 10 November 1980 he briefed people at the base.^[4]

• The campaign. According to the timeline, Doty delivered a forged document to Bennewitz on 17 November 1980. Doty has said his superiors ordered him to confuse Bennewitz, who had observed a secret NSA laser project at Kirtland from his own property, by convincing him that what he saw was paranormal.^[12] In July 1980 Doty had also delivered a forged anonymous letter to APRO, the Weitzel letter, which he later described as a test of whether the group could be used.^[12]
• William Moore. The UFO researcher William Moore cooperated with Doty. On 1 July 1989 Moore said publicly that he had fed Bennewitz false information about aliens and tried to push him into a breakdown. A 1992 Monroe Institute article held in the CIA's library names Moore and Doty as responsible for the campaign.^[4] The Wikipedia account of Majestic 12 says Doty and others presenting themselves as Air Force intelligence officers approached Moore after he published The Roswell Incident. They recruited him with the never-fulfilled promise of proof of alien recoveries, and Moore then kept notes on other ufologists and spread misinformation among them.^[3]
• Outcome. By August 1988 Bennewitz believed his wife was controlled by the extraterrestrials. After he barricaded himself at home, his family had him admitted to a psychiatric unit, where he stayed for a month. He died in 2003.^[4] Doty later said that in the 1980s he had been tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers, including Bennewitz.^[4]
• Legacy. Bennewitz's stories, including the "Dulce base" and an alleged "Dulce war", were taken up by later conspiracy writers such as John Lear and Bill Cooper. Howard Blum's 1990 book Out There, Greg Bishop's Project Beta (2005) and Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men (2010) told the story of the campaign.^[4] See Bennewitz affair.

In 1983 Doty also told the journalist Linda Moulton Howe, at Kirtland, a story of a crashed craft with near-human occupants, which the timeline compares to the plot of the 1980 film Hangar 18.^[13] In 1989 Howe named Doty in her book An Alien Harvest.^[2]

Majestic 12

The "Majestic 12" papers first entered UFO culture in the early 1980s as part of the same deception campaign. The earliest known reference to "MJ Twelve" is in a 1981 document used against Bennewitz. Every person who later received the anonymous MJ-12 papers was connected to Moore. On 10 and 11 January 1983 Doty and Moore met the attorney Peter Gersten, and Doty told him about a top-level group called "MJ-12" that studied UFOs and recovered crashed craft.^[3] On 11 December 1984 Jaime Shandera received an anonymous package, postmarked in New Mexico, holding an undeveloped roll of film. It contained a supposed 1947 memorandum from President Truman to Defense Secretary James Forrestal and the "Eisenhower Briefing Document" of 1952.^[3]

On 15 September 1988 an OSI special agent contacted the FBI's Dallas office after receiving an MJ-12 document from someone at an unnamed school, who said it had come in the mail. Because the papers were marked Top Secret, the FBI opened its own inquiry and soon doubted them. On 30 November 1988 OSI told the Bureau that no such committee had ever been authorised or formed. The FBI declared the document "completely bogus", and its director told the Dallas office to close the case.^[3] See FBI MJ-12 espionage file. The earlier version of this article said the OSI agent "passed copies" to the FBI; the source says the agent contacted the Dallas office after receiving the document.

Researchers have since noted that the papers use an idiosyncratic date format found in Moore's own notes but not in government documents of the period, and that some signatures appear to be photocopied from other documents. From 1989 people involved in the deception campaign admitted making up MJ-12 material to deceive UFO researchers.^[3] In 2022 the former Pentagon official Christopher Mellon said one of the explanations he had heard was that the documents were disinformation created by AFOSI.^[14]

Mirage Men

Mirage Men (2013), directed by John Lundberg, written by Mark Pilkington and co-directed by Roland Denning and Kypros Kyprianou, argues that the US military fabricated UFO folklore to draw attention away from classified projects. Doty is its central figure and appears as himself. It also features Howe, Gersten, the film-maker Robert Emenegger, the screenwriter Tracy Tormé and the authors Curtis Peebles and Richard Dolan.^[2] It premiered at Sheffield Doc/Fest on 13 June 2013 and was well reviewed. Part of it was used in Adam Curtis's documentary HyperNormalisation, and the novelist Ernest Cline credited it as an influence on Armada.^[2] The Wikipedia account of OSI describes the film as being about OSI's investigation of UFOs between 1952 and 1969. The account of the film itself centres on Doty, who was with OSI at Kirtland from 1979.^[1][2]

Later connections

• AAWSAP, 2010. According to the timeline, Defense Intelligence Agency contractors working on AAWSAP met officials of OSI's Office of Special Projects in December 2010. A former OSI colonel told one of them that OSI could not identify many of the 1975 overflights of nuclear bases and that many of its records on them had been destroyed.^[15] See AAWSAP denied access to legacy programs.
• Doty's later claims. In February 2020 the physicist Hal Puthoff said Doty had worked for him on a programme before AATIP. In 2022 Doty claimed to know of five UFO-related projects at Area 51. These are Doty's own claims, and the sources read here do not verify them.^[16]
• Nick Redfern. The author Nick Redfern says an AFOSI contact put him in touch with the "Collins Elite", an alleged group of officials who believed UFOs were demonic.^[17]

On the UAP Timeline

• Hebgen Lake disc report (1949) (17 August 1949) — An Air Force base reports an informant's account of seven discs and two crashed ones; a lake search finds nothing.
• Hill AFB landing claim (1958) (1958) — An anonymous military source claims a UAP deliberately landed at Hill AFB.
• Wheless memo on UFO impostors (1967) (1 March 1967) — An Air Force memo warns of men in uniform telling UAP witnesses to stay silent.
• Doty's psychological operations claim (1980s) — Doty says an Air Force unit ran psychological operations on people who saw secret aircraft.
• Weitzel letter (1980) (July 1980) — Air Force counterintelligence officer Richard Doty delivers a forged letter to a civilian UAP group.
• Bennewitz affair (17 November 1980) — Doty gives physicist Paul Bennewitz a forged document to confuse him.
• Vallée on the disinformation campaign (1989) (17 September 1989) — Vallée writes there is a large disinformation campaign around UAP.
• Vallée meets D'Amato on secret programs (1992) (22 May 1992) — Vallée writes he met Senate counsel Dick D'Amato about secret programs.
• FBI MJ-12 espionage file (22 July 1993) — The FBI says it has a closed 'Majestic-12' file labelled espionage.
• Jim Westwood's MJ-12 disinformation theory (1 January 1999) — A former CIA consultant suggests the MJ-12 briefing document was a fake to fool the KGB.
• Westwood on MJ-12 disinformation (2001) (5 May 2001) — A consultant tells Vallée the MJ-12 documents are disinformation.
• Project Serpo (1 November 2005) — A message board host receives an alleged 3,000-page report on a famous case.
• Doty on Serpo believers (2020) (2 February 2020) — Richard Doty allegedly says some DIA members believe parts of the SERPO 'exchange' rumor.
• Doty worked for Puthoff (8 February 2020) — Puthoff says Richard Doty worked for him on a program before AATIP.
• Doty's five Area 51 projects claim (13 June 2022) — Richard Doty claims five UAP-related projects at Area 51.
• Mellon on the Majestic documents (September 2022) — Mellon says the 'Majestic' documents are very controversial.

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Air Force Office of Special Investigations”, “Mirage Men”, “Majestic 12”, “Paul Bennewitz”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.