Article for Rochester’s City Newspaper, Volume 30, Number 15 • January 3-9, 2001
by Th. Metzger / photo by Kurt Brownell

Richard Dolan has never seen a UFO. He hasn't been abducted. He doesn't read Science Fiction. Dolan is a historian who has spent years carefully examining national security documents.

"I'm not an evangelist," he says. "It's not my temperament, It's not my style. It's not my desire. I try to be cautious. I try to be as low-key as I can in drawing conclusions. So what I've tried to do is simply lay out the human side of this equation. What have our national security betters thought and done about this phenomenon?"

His recent book, UFOs and the National Security State, is thick and thoroughly researched. What he examines in these 500 heavily footnoted pages is the response of America's power elite to numerous inexplicable events.

"A lot of pieces to this puzzle are not only missing, they've been taken out of circulation. All I've tried to do is put together as many pieces of the puzzle as I could."

His book is a methodical analysis of the activities of America's National Security apparatus relating to UFOs. He examines nearly 300 documented military encounters and the activities of over 50 American military bases.

"I've written this book so it should be taken seriously by historians. I've documented this book as any historian would. What I've done is provide a vision of how an academic treatment of this subject should be done."

Dolan came to the University of Rochester in 1985 as a grad student in history. His specialty was German and Soviet studies, and he did a great deal of research on Bismarck's spy chief before switching his focus to American Cold War policies. While writing his dissertation on Truman and the National Security Council, he decided to get out of academia.

"Leaving was the hardest thing for me," Dolan says. "I'd studied at Oxford. I was a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. I knew that leaving academia was leaving something that was an important part of me. Up to that point it was the defining element of who I was. But I am so glad I did. It was the most liberating experience I've ever had. Without leaving academia I could never have gotten to this topic."

The scholarly study of history is based on fact, but those facts must be interpreted to make meaning. And our cultural norms have had a great impact on how we read the record of the past. Dolan compares the mediocrity of historical analysis of the UFO phenomenon to the biased histories written about Reconstruction. Look at older works on this period and you find highly skewed interpretations full of references to "scalawags" and "carpet baggers." America's deep uneasiness with racial questions colors how we see the post-Civil War period.

"The study of history has a long 'history of being buffeted by political events," Dolan says. "This is more the rule than an exception. Historical interpretations follow our social beliefs and social patterns."

Dolan calls himself an "independent scholar" now, and sees great value in doing serious historical research without academic affiliation.

"I could never have written a book on UFOs. They would have laughed me out of the field. Even after you get tenure, then you have to worry about your reputation.

"No academicians take UFOs seriously," he says. "Historians know nothing about UFOs. They don't write about them. They're a joke. On the other hand, if you consider the possibility that senior military personnel in the 1940s did take them seriously, regardless of what UFOs were (whether they're aliens or balloons or psychological phenomena), if there were generals and admirals and intelligence directors who took them seriously, they would for no other reason deserve some mention in history books. And yet they've been ignored completely. That was my first motivation for getting into this."

Dolan's book, published by Keyhole Publishing, has received good reviews and has generated some interesting communication with scientists and former intelligence people. But the mainstream media are very shy of giving credence to independent scholarship, especially on such a topic. If his research had stayed in a more socially acceptable field, the book would likely have been published by a university press.

"I used two fundamental sources in putting this book together. One was the out-of-print books by researchers in the '50s and '60s. And they had a great deal of value to say about this. They were not wacko cranks. There were a number of very smart and serious researchers in this field and their books are now almost impossible to find. So I was fortunate in that I got access to a vast majority of those.

"The other primary source of info that I went through – and you could find these in five minutes on the Internet – are hundreds and hundreds of Freedom of Information documents that were released in the 10- to 12-year period in which the F.O.I. Act had any real value," he says. "After the late '80s F.O.I.A. had not been overturned, but it had been somewhat gutted. Agencies· are not as likely to respond to a UFO request as they used to be. Or it would be very expensive.

"But for about 10 years it was actually possible to petition the government for a variety of documents pertaining to UFOs and get them," Dolan says. "Thousands of pages of documentation have come out and are pan of the public domain now. So classified documents that seem to attest to fairly high levels of credence in UFOs exist."

Dolan has endured his share of "tin-foil hat" jokes and skeptical scorn. But grounding his work on the standard operating procedure of an academic historian, he's managed to steer clear of the lunatic fringe.

"There are a lot of people in the UFO field who are crazy," he says. "I am amazed by the loony characters of some of the people who write about this. I have just as little patience for UFO believers who don't know what they're talking about, or people who fixate on the inter-dimensional spiritual aspects of this, as I do for UFO skeptics who don't know what they're talking about. Fundamentalist Christians believe in UFOs too; they look on them as demonic entities."

"We're dealing with something here that's beyond our paradigm of understanding, beyond our worldview of what's possible," Dolan says. "UFOs exhibit some of those characteristics which appear to be spiritual or psychic in nature."

Still, the presence of crackpots does not automatically make a field worthy of contempt. For instance, looking at the history of eugenics and psycho surgery in the US would make a scholar highly suspicious of their later manifestations.

"The UFO cover-up is one secret among many within the American security state. Like other areas within its domain, the UFO problem has been handled secretly, with great deception, and significant resources. The secrecy stems from a pervasive and fundamental element of life in our world: that those who are at the top of the heap will always take whatever steps necessary to maintain the status quo.

"To divorce the UFO phenomenon from a social, human context is a poor strategy," Dolan says. He believes that if others have come here, they'd have to interact with the power structure that already exists. "What is the nature of that power structure? In other words, who owns what? Who's got the goods? Who's got the power and who doesn't? Every society has those who rule and those who don't.

"I've become convinced that this phenomenon is indeed something that has really interested people on very high levels in our national security apparatus," he says. "The military and intelligence community has exhibited extreme levels of interest in the UFO phenomenon, and high levels of classification have enveloped the subject.

"There are always ways in which ruling elites -- in Noam Chomsky's words -- 'manufacture consent' among a population," Dolan says. "When you have wealth hoarded by very few, which is what we have in our society, you've got to have de facto manipulation of the institutions of society to keep it going. That's an old story. It's not something we discuss openly and honestly in our society, but it doesn't make it any less true. So it's in that context that the UFO problem appears. UFO cover-up is not unique. It's one cover-up among dozens, hundreds, that occur every day. To talk about this makes you sound like a conspiracy theorist, but that's as if no one does anything in secret in our society, which is ludicrous. It happens all the time."

Dolan argues that the nature of corporate culture is by its very essence conspiratorial. "It's hierarchical," he says. "Major decisions are made in secret. They lie and obfuscate about their actual designs because they have to compete. Of course it's conspiratorial. But we just don't use that word for it. You take that to the military and intelligence world and magnify it by 100 and you get a sense of what we're dealing with. If you accept that UFOs may indeed be something more than a pop culture joke, there are consequences well beyond the realm of astronomy."

For Dolan, one of the most important questions is how this would affect our social order, how would the people at the top of our social hierarchy respond?. In other words, "Who or what is muscling in on their turf? What could such entities want? At bottom is the question of how the presence of others would affect preexisting social and power relationships.

"All elites have a way of manipulating official culture," Dolan says. "That doesn't mean that control is always in a totalitarian way. My favorite analogy is riding a horse compared to driving a car. The public is more like a horse. It has a will. It's not always predictable. You have to appease it sometimes. And you may not always get it to do what you want. But if you're a good rider you can probably get the job done. Compare that to sticking the key in the ignition and making the car go. One way to ride the horse of culture is by manipulating the parameters of what is permissible to discuss."

And UFOs are a parade example of what cannot be discussed in a rational and factual way in our culture. Because of the unstable fringe people this phenomenon attracts, and because our mass. media have used UFOs as cheap pop-culture fodder, the historical record regarding UFOs seems irrelevant to most Americans. Still, Dolan has found that numerous people; in private, are quite willing to discuss their experiences. He runs a resume business out of his home on Thurston Road and has interviewed thousands of people in the course of his work.

"Whenever I find out that I have clients who have top-secret clearance or are military, I broach this topic," Dolan says. "I want to find out what they think."

"Every population sample indicates belief in about three-fourths of those sampled. What I find is a lot of people are afraid to admit they believe in this. What I find privately is that a lot of people take it very seriously. I have clients who are CIA or military. And a few of them have given me X-Files-style warnings. I had a woman who was in military intelligence for 20 years tell me, ‘You should expect interference and obstruction in what you're trying to do.' And then she left. That was the last rime I saw her. She was a very serious-minded person.

"I've been told about some phenomenal things by military people, including UFO sightings," Dolan says. "One Navy acquaintance said to me 'If I were to tell you everything I know on this topic, I could easily go to prison.' He also implied that this was a real, valid topic." According to Dolan, the secrecy and obfuscation surrounding the UFO phenomenon is not unique.

"It goes back to the phenomenon of official versus unofficial culture," he says. "From the 1960s onward, I think Americans have sensed a great rift between what is officially given to them and what they experience. What is officially true and what is unofficially true." Writers who use the word "conspiracy" without irony are often relegated to the crackpot bin. Still, many Americans are convinced that they are consistently kept in the dark about matters of great importance.

"If something is very classified," Dolan says, "you're not going to find out anything of value about it in the public domain until it is deemed that the public is ready to deal with it." "I look at the UFO phenomenon as one of those. This topic gives us a great opportunity to crack open the lid of official culture.

"Reality races far ahead of the assumptions we grow up with," he says. "One of those assumptions is that science is an independent search for the truth. But that's not how science works. People don't have independence; they don't have latitude as scientists. They have funding. They have to work for grants. And who funds them? Since the Second World War, the military has been by far the biggest sponsor of scientific work. Science is an expensive business and you need sponsorship. I laughed out loud when a sincere and interested reader of my book asked me who sponsored my research. But he is a scientist, for whom such a thing is absolutely necessary."

Early on in the phenomenon, a number of well-regarded scientists took UFOs very seriously. "They looked into the problem in a classified setting. My hypothesis is that there's very likely some classified. work being done now about UFOs.

"It would seem logical that the military has sponsored classified -- that is, secret -- scientific work on this problem for years," Dolan says. "In public, however, mainstream scientists offer nothing more than ridicule or scorn upon the topic."

The development of the A-bomb is a prime example of secrecy on a vast scale. "The Manhattan Project was the most monumental scientific research ever done up to that time," Dolan says." "And it was successfully hidden from Congress for years. Congress spent over $2 billion on it. And not a single congressman knew until 1944 when Senator Harry Truman stumbled on what he called an 'impenetrable maze of secrecy.' He talked to the Secretary of War and Stimson told him to 'call off your dogs; you're on to something important here.' And Truman backed off. When they detonated the bomb at Los Alamos in 1945, no one in this country knew a thing. So secrecy is certainly something the scientific and military world can keep.

The Manhattan Project is historically significant for a number of reasons, one of the most crucial being that it has served as a model ever since for conducting expensive and covert operations. "If it's important," Dolan says, "it's probably secret. This was true during the development of the atomic bomb; it is almost certainly true regarding the UFO."

Dolan is not optimistic about finding definitive answers. And even the question of proof and compelling evidence is murky here. In a field rife with cranks and disinformation, perhaps it will be impossible to come to any final conclusions.

"I don't even know where the answers to this would lie. Are they in the Pentagon? Are they in the CIA's Langley Headquarters? Are they in the National Security Agency at Fort Meade? I don't think anyone truly knows. This is a fundamentally covert event of awesome proportions. But we should not fool ourselves into thinking we can get to the bottom of this. That is, as mere citizens of what some would call an oligarchic empire that masquerades as a democracy, we are unlikely to get official confirmation regarding something as important as an alien presence. And even if we did get such confirmation, could we truly depend on the accuracy and completeness of the information? I think you know the answer."

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