MP: At the time we were talking to Doty he worked with the New Mexico Department of Public Safety and I presume that he still does. Was there anything that made you think Doty still has some clout in military circles? W: Doty insisted that he was acting as a 'private citizen' when you met him at a UFO conference. All I can say for sure is that Rick isn't crazy, and he has an incredible ability to generate UFO stories, seemingly spontaneously. If they feed them UFO material, then if they do blab nobody gets hurt. Perhaps in testing or training its intelligence officers the Air Force at one point presented them with bizarre material, maybe to assess their responses to unknown factors, or even to test their ability to keep secrets. MP: Well that's the $50 billion question! Is Doty telling porkies? Was he really shown something, or does he really believe that he's been shown something? Any of these eventualities are possible and that's what makes Doty, and his story, so fascinating. My sense is that Bennewitz was deliberately targetted to distribute nonsense into the UFO community. During this entire time Bennewitz was quite influential in the UFO field, and many of the ideas he promoted, and was encouraged to believe by AFOSI - that there's an ET base next to Dulce, New Mexico, that the ETs have traded their technology with the US government - are still central to the UFO lore. After being encouraged in his delusions for some years by Doty and others working out of Kirtland, Bennewitz developed serious paranoid psychosis and had to be institutionalised for a month. Bennewitz believed that he was eavesdropping on the communications of ETs flying in and out of the base, these were apparently emissions from an NSA project which he was 'decoding' to find alien messages in. This was given to Paul Bennewitz, a civilian engineer who worked alongside Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuqerque New Mexico. One was the 'Aquarius' memo that hinted at a US government UFO research programme called Aquarius, and mentioned a group called 'MJ-Twelve'. MP: There were two sets of inter-related documents that really inflamed the UFO myth during the 1980s. How influential were these - and did they really drive someone mad? W: In the book you get to know Rick Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who admits to having passed on fake documents to UFO researchers. That's why it's so difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle the facts from the folklore and deception. So the short answer is that everyone - from UFO investigators to alphabet soupers - has been behind the UFO story at some point or another.

In the 1960s prankster UFO researchers would freak out other ufologists by dressing and behaving like the mysterious Men in Black - a concept a key part of UFO lore. I also wouldn't be surprised to find that civilian UFO investigators had pretended to be from the military or intelligence agencies in the past. There's a bizarre internal Air Force memo from March 1967 that describes someone in an Air Force uniform assembling UFO witnesses in a school room and telling them that they didn't see anything, while someone claiming to be from NORAD pinched UFO photos from Rex Heflin in California in 1965. MP: Yes, it was apparently not uncommon for CIA or NSA Contact Officers to dress as armed services personnel when contacting UFO witnesses, and I expect that it worked the other way around.

Mirage men