Richard Doty is a former employee of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) who acknowledged feeding disinformation — faking documents and staging UFO sightings — to UFO researchers in the 1980s.
Bennewitz Affair
Doty’s most documented operation targeted Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque electronics entrepreneur who was monitoring electromagnetic signals from Kirtland Air Force Base. According to src-uap-reddit-disclosure-conspiracy-2026-05 (citing Pilkington 2010), Doty and AFOSI fed Bennewitz fabricated stories of alien bases and hostile extraterrestrial activity, ultimately contributing to Bennewitz’s psychological breakdown.
Legacy
Doty later reinvented himself as a self-described expert on UFOs and government disinformation on the subject. His case is cited by Bastos & Duarte (2026) as a prime example of how U.S. intelligence agencies weaponized UFO narratives to protect classified programs — a practice that constitutes a confirmed-conspiracy-theory. His activities are connected to the broader majestic-12 document forgeries and the robertson-panel’s legacy of uap-stigma.