Rick Doty with George Knapp, part 1: AFOSI watched UFO researchers (Mystery Wire, 2019 interview)

0:01 So, Rick, I joke with you after you got off stage that at least you weren't faced with torches and pitchforks. The response was pretty good. It was warm. I was surprised, yeah. The response was quite warm compared to what I thought it would be. You have been the UFO boogeyman for at least 25 years, maybe longer. At least 25 years. Does part of you get a kick out of that a little bit? I don't let it bother me. I did initially. I don't really let it get to me. I went from having a concern about it to not really caring about it to what you just said and me getting a kick out of it now. Did you ever come to a UFO conference while working? Yes. As an assignment? Can you tell me? In the, I believe it was '83 or maybe '84. I don't remember the year, but we came here. There were four of us that came here. And all we did was mingle. We took some

1:02 photographs. We listened to some interviews. We made some contact with some people, but nothing real serious. Is there an, in that, when a situation like that, is there an assignment, something specific or just go and keep an eye on it, see what you find out? There's a, yeah, just a general collection assignment. Go and collect whatever information you can. Does it still happen? I'm sure it does. I saw, I've met two here. There were two here. One Air Force, Air Force OSI out of Nellis and the other man, female, out of Nellis. And the man, he wouldn't tell me where he was from, but he was Air Force Intelligence. So you can spot him. He readily admitted it to us. Where does that information go? What would they be doing with it now? They complete what they refer to as a domestic intelligence report, a collections report on attending a conference, a UFO conference. They might find something interesting to

2:02 write about, write in the report. They might hear something that might be of some interest to Air Force intelligence. And that's what they do. So you would see ufologists who would hear that information. Aha, the Air Force is spying on us. Is there a legitimate national security aspect to it? Something maybe like the exploitation of ufologists by a foreign power, something like that. That's very interesting. Yes, it has happened. And that's, there has been investigations on that. There was one particular UFO researcher that had been contacted by the Soviet Union. And that was, that researcher was Bill Moore. And that researcher wanted everything Bill Moore had or could obtain from UFO conferences. And so Bill Moore went to all of them and Bill Moore collected. But fortunately we were, we were onto that and he was one of our sources. So he was reporting back to us. So he's working with you, sharing that

3:04 information. The Russians contact and ask him to do the same thing? Exactly. Wow. Have you seen evidence of the Russians planting disinformation that would affect, you know, maybe national security policy in some way through the UFO issue? I haven't personally. I've seen reports of it and classified collection reports, but I haven't experienced myself. I've just read about it.