Paul Bennewitz case re-opened: X Descending (a mini book review)

I just read X Descending, a new ebook written by Christian P. Lambright. It's pretty interesting material, but it definitely helps if you have some familiarity with the events he discusses. He covers two instances where UFO researchers filmed something remarkable, and then follows the repercussions of each. The first case is the story of Paul Bennewitz, and the second is the story of a UFO filmed by Ray Stanford.
Some background on Paul Bennewitz. Some background on Ray Stanford.

Bennewitz is the UFO researcher allegedly targeted by the Air Force in a disinformation campaign carried out by Richard Doty and William Moore. Supposedly some of the wildest alien concepts can be traced back to this episode. Stanford's story takes a different path- he filmed a UFO and a scientist viewed the tape and "reverse-engineered" it into a new aeronautical propulsion system, but all without disclosing the source of the concept.

I didn't quite know quite what to expect going in. It's mainly about the aftermath of UFO investigations and the trials and intrigue of Stanford and Bennewitz. Most UFO books are about sightings and the search for the truth. This books gives some insight into the personal consequences of such a quest. What raises this book to a higher level is that Lambright became friends with each of the men and was involved in the events that followed to some extent. As far as I know, it is only currently available from xdesk publishing.

interesting stuff ,

thanks for sharing

reply to post by thesearchfortruth

Thanks! I have a correction- I listened to an interview with the author and he mentions the book is also available from some other sources including Amazon.
The show also featured Ray Stanford and provided some additional background on his case, most interesting of which was the other witnesses to the sighting he filmed.

I'm still confused about the Bennewitz episode. So much of what we know about it was from liars claiming they lied. What Lambright has tried to do is go back to the origin of the episode and examine the evidence before it was contaminated.

I am currently half way through a book by Timothy Good, need to know, It absolutely shocks me to think, governments have been getting away with this for as long as they have...

Thank you CardDown, I will be listening to the interview. Your choice for Saucer Smear as background link was a good one, I would like to share a quote from their site -

"In my opinion, Paul's 'delusions' had less to do with his observations of ETs/UFOs, and more to do with his belief that officials should take seriously his observations." - Leo Sprinkle

Leo sat down with Paul at a time when not many people knew of the findings (mid 1980), and he now relates in an interview it was a fascinating experience. This quote suggests that Leo knew of Paul's findings, but he was told not to reveal anything at the time. I know the Bennewitz episode is tough to understand without looking into it. One reason is not because higher ups took over the situation but because Paul was a researcher and scientist who was very private and did not believe in disclosing his findings to the general public, he showed the aliens to a select few and went to Washington about it with the Air Force backing him. You will hear people talk about UFOs over Kirkland, but the reality of the story is not about that.

reply to post by greyer

That quote from Dr. Sprinkle is interesting. The new book insists that the initial sighting by Bennewitz was of something unusual that genuinely interesting to the AIr Force, and it is unique in that it happened over their base. Supposedly whatever happened later was all intended to distract attention to whatever he'd seen. Distract by way of discrediting him by associating him with outlandish unbelievable claims of alien wars, underground bases and so on. That seems to match what happened.

reply to post by CardDown


It's true that Dr. Bennewitz was investigating Manzano UFOs, Christian P. Lambright is an amazing source and is filling in pieces of the puzzle. Dr. Bennewitz met Gabe Valdez in July of 1979 as mentioned in the interview, and that is where the connection to Dulce started. It was at the cattle mutilation conference chaired by Senator Harrison Schmitt. During an interview in 1984 Paul revealed how he found the Dulce base, and it wasn't from Myrna Hansen or his electronics equipment in his lab pointed at Manzano but it was his electronics expertise. A rancher in Dulce named Manuel S. Gomez was working with Senator Schmitt in finding a resolution to the mysterious problem going on, so when Dr. Bennewitz became acquainted with them he was shown there investigations and taken to the area. When they went up in the mountains by Dulce they saw a large object like a satellite which Paul said was a surveillance vehicle so he knew something was there. Paul setup a special monitoring station in the area and learned that UFOs were all over. Eventually Paul learned how to pick up signals and transfer them into transmissions on a video screen which communicated with the alien video screens. Gabe Valdez witnessed an alien on the screen and said it looked like a reptilian. Paul's descriptions of aliens do in fact reflect tall reptilian/insectiods along with short and tall greys as the Thomas Castello myth. The reason why then head of security at Manzano Lt. Colonel Earnest Edwards got upset when the White House lied to him about following up on the report is because he had some kind of close encounter experience with Paul and most likely saw the video screen. Very interesting that Christian Lambright said Paul was upset after meeting with John Lear, maybe those Dulce paper drawings are really from Myrna Hansen.

Greg Bishop and Bill Moore seem to have convinced Christopher O'Brien of the Richard Doty tales which are contradictory. Bill Moore is a self-proclaimed disinformation agent and Richard was a government counter intelligence agent. Sergeant Clifford Stone and Lieutenant Colonel Wendelle Stevens tell a different story that is confirmed by Paul's son Jeff.

Mark Pilkington covered the Bennewitz case in Mirage Men, according to his blog the film based on the book is coming together.
youtu.be...

reply to post by CardDown
I am currently reading a new book called Mirage Men by Mark Pilkington and it sounds very similiar to your book. If you get a chance .. read it I would like to know your thoughts. It is also about Bennewitz and Doty and the disimformation that is being fed to the Ufo community by our government. I got my copy at the library

reply to post by HODOSKE

I thoroughly enjoyed Mirage Men. The author is interested in exactly the same kind of data that I am, but we are drawing some different conclusions. Mark Pilkington seems to think that the US government has UFO disinformation techniques in their toolbox, which are used as needed. I tend to think it is instead mostly a passive effort, and if someone catches a glimpse of a secret project, they're happy to keep mum about it and let the public speculate about saucers and aliens.

Greyer wrote: "Paul [Bennewitz] setup a special monitoring station in the area and learned that UFOs were all over. Eventually Paul learned how to pick up signals and transfer them into transmissions on a video screen which communicated with the alien video screens. Gabe Valdez witnessed an alien on the screen and said it looked like a reptilian. Paul's descriptions of aliens do in fact reflect tall reptilian/insectiods along with short and tall greys as the Thomas Castello myth. The reason why then head of security at Manzano Lt. Colonel Earnest Edwards got upset when the White House lied to him about following up on the report is because he had some kind of close encounter experience with Paul and most likely saw the video screen. Very interesting that Christian Lambright said Paul was upset after meeting with John Lear, maybe those Dulce paper drawings are really from Myrna Hansen."

RH says: Sorry, greyer, this is all nonsense--part of the myth. I am one of the few persons who investigated the facts in the 1980s, interviewing Bennewitz, Valdez, Howe, and others in the process. The real story of Bennewitz and Dulce is found in Lambright's book, X Descending. He and I independently uncovered the truth years ago.

Pilkington, Bishop and Redfern are only the latest investigators to be duped by OSI agent Richard Doty's disinformation, which I first exposed in March 1989. As the old saying goes, "Those unfamiliar with the past are condemned to repeat it."

My summary of Lambright's book's most important revelations, including bona fide photos of UFOs hovering over the Manzano Weapons Storage Area in Albuquerque, may be read at:

www.theufochronicles.com...

--Robert Hastings
www.ufohastings.com

www.amazon.com...

Customer Review

Pilkington the hoaxer gets conned by the mirage men, February 26, 2011

By Dr. Trang

This review is from: Mirage Men (Paperback)

Some wit once observed: "The trouble with confirmation bias is that once you know about it, you begin to see it everywhere." This is the fundamental fallacy which Mark Pilkington falls for in this widely-publicised and well-written book. Whilst `Mirage Men' is not without merit and contains a few small nuggets of interest, its governing premise - that most reported UFO encounters have been the work of the US intelligence agencies in order to either delude the research community or hide secret hi-tech aerospace projects by making witnesses mistake them for alien spacecraft - is completely untenable. No-one acquainted with the evidence at close quarters could possibly be so gullible as to fall for such nonsense.

Unfortunately UK-born Pilkington has a major credibility problem right off the bat, as he admits to being a serial (no puns please) crop-circle hoaxer; a trespasser causing criminal damage, a charlatan and a deceiver. This admission tells us something about the author's character, and should put any attentive reader on his guard about taking anything in the book seriously.

The book is written in `this-is-our-story' format whereby Pilkington and colleague John Lundberg journey round the USA meeting and interviewing a handful of individuals working for or connected to the intelligence agencies - Richard Doty from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations in Albuquerque has pride of place - who variously claim to have been involved, one way or another, in perpetrating deception on the American public (who BTW pay their salaries) about the UFO/ET issue, for stated reasons which simply don't make sense. On the way they take in the annual Laughlin UFO conference (where they arrange to meet Doty who claims to be there as a `private citizen'), investigate the MJ-12 and Serpo hoaxes, hear about crash retrieval and aliens-in-US-government-custody myths, and detail a few of the better known INTEL operations carried out in the past 60 years.

Though reports of UFO/UAP encounters, abductions and cattle mutilations are global, little attention is given in `Mirage Men' to any case outside the USA; so the astute reader will immediately see that no meaningful conclusions can ever be drawn about the nature of these ubiquitous phenomena from such a parochial line of enquiry as simply looking at the supposed deception work of intelligence agencies in the USA. However, that's what Pilkington and Lundberg do, so conclusions are presented through this small prism.

The `cattle mutilation' phenomenon (though many thousands of different animals including urban domestic cats and dogs have also been so mutilated) is a good example of where Pilkington comes across as demonstrating his apparent naiveté. I personally inspected a mutilated heifer in SW Ireland in August 1970 with what later came to be recognised as having all the classic markers: part of the jaw, an ear, an eye, the entire rectal/genital area, and udders all seemingly excised with what we would now, 40 years later, see as something approximating precise laser-like surgery; no blood in or on the carcass, the animal discovered half way up a hillside one mile away from where she had been fenced in with the herd the previous evening, evidently dropped from above. (The local vet pronounced that the cow had "probably died of anthrax"(!)) This worrying phenomenon is global in scale, has been going on for more than 40 years and is repeatedly linked to sightings of UFOs reported by farmers everywhere from Australia to Kenya to Romania to Switzerland.

Now, fast-forward to how intelligence agencies try to manage an issue like this, which they can neither control nor predict. Jacques Vallee in `The Invisible College' (1975) investigated the case of a close encounter experienced by two fishermen on the French Atlantic coast which attracted newspaper and TV coverage. To defuse the story and debunk it, diving gear was planted on the beach nearby, together with a radio transmitter, widely publicised to suggest human agencies were involved; to plant seeds of confusion and doubt. Again, when a gigantic black, boomerang-shaped craft was seen by thousands of witnesses over Phoenix AZ in March 1997, to confuse witnesses a squadron of A10 aircraft was tasked to fly over the city later that evening and drop flares against the mountains, so the earlier sighting could be explained away as `military flares.' Want to convince the suckers that structured craft of non-human manufacture are not infiltrating our skies, but people are seeing your own secret and very human technology? Then design, test-fly, film and give widespread publicity to disk-shaped or triangular-shaped planes, many with no possible practical or military application (the ridiculous and completely useless `Avrocar' for example was almost certainly built for precisely this purpose) and suggest that's what people are seeing. These techniques are well tried and tested, and part of what Budd Hopkins has recently referred to as "the hydra-headed debunking machine and its many busy attendants."

So it doesn't seem to occur to Pilkington that surgical equipment, rubber gloves and other paraphernalia might have been planted near the carcases of cattle discovered to be mutilated by unknown entities, and that helicopters might be ostentatiously flown over the territory at low level, in order to give the impression that these activities are somehow performed by human agencies. The message seems to be: "We're in control, we're in charge; there is nothing exotic going on here." Some people are going to be suckered by this kind of activity: one such appears to be Pilkington who admits to falling for the ruse hook, line and sinker. He ended up believing the mirage men's deception that human agencies are performing the cattle mutilations, just as he believes "all" crop circles worldwide are man-made (which can hardly be stated as certainty unless you literally make every single one yourself).

Pilkington also admits to being seduced by a preposterous yarn spoon-fed to him by Rich Reynolds that the Villas Boas abduction in the remote region of Minas Gerais in Brazil in 1957 was somehow staged by the CIA using a helicopter disguised as a flying saucer, and a so-called `brain-washing machine' - all this trouble and extravagance with US taxpayers' money for purposes obscure, as Villas Boas might well have told no-one about his experience. The idea is completely absurd, almost rivalling Vallee's `Control System' hypothesis for sheer unsupported nuttiness. He even gets conned into believing that the 1952 daylight flyovers of Washington DC by dozens of disk-shaped craft, witnessed visually by thousands of spectators, might have been some kind of `radar hoax'. To his credit, Pilkington admits to the possibility that some UAP encounters may be unknowns; he just doesn't bother to investigate any of the compelling evidence, as doing so might threaten his underlying ideology. He displays little interest in the phenomena themselves, restricting his narrative to the few instances where staging by the intelligence agencies can be demonstrated and implying that this explains it all.

The book however is well written and edited, with a populist style and good chapter organization. It reads (intentionally, Mark?) almost like a film script. The hardcover from Skyhorse Publishing with a great dust jacket design makes for a quality artefact.

So at the end of the book, are we more enlightened about the `mirage men'? Not likely, unless you're an even bigger sucker than Pilkington and Lundberg appear to be. `Mirage Men' reveals little that is new, and taken as a whole there is more noise here than signal. However as entertainment, as intrigue and gossip about the UFO scene (the intended target audience) it's OK. Then again, the purpose of this project might be to knowingly disseminate yet more disinformation, as Doty admits to having spent years of his taxpayer-financed Air Force career doing. Pilkington has a long history as a persistent crop circle hoaxer and pretends to believe most of this rubbish from his mirage men - so who knows?

Originally posted by Dr. Trang

Unfortunately UK-born Pilkington has a major credibility problem right off the bat, as he admits to being a serial (no puns please) crop-circle hoaxer; a trespasser causing criminal damage, a charlatan and a deceiver. This admission tells us something about the author's character, and should put any attentive reader on his guard about taking anything in the book seriously.

This inability to understand something as simple as crop-circle art should put any attentive reader on their guard about taking Dr. Trang seriously.

Originally posted by Robert Hastings
Sorry, greyer, this is all nonsense--part of the myth. I am one of the few persons who investigated the facts in the 1980s, interviewing Bennewitz, Valdez, Howe, and others in the process. The real story of Bennewitz and Dulce is found in Lambright's book, X Descending. He and I independently uncovered the truth years ago.

My summary of Lambright's book's most important revelations, including bona fide photos of UFOs hovering over the Manzano Weapons Storage Area in Albuquerque, may be read at:

www.theufochronicles.com...

--Robert Hastings
www.ufohastings.com

Hello Robert thank you I appreciate the research, very interesting that you have interviewed Bennewitz. I don't know why Valdez would be lying and I believe him, it is also reported that Bennewitz did not want the details of his research disclosed especially in the early days. It is said in your summary -

After Bennewitz approached USAF commanders at Kirtland with his films, and subsequently began giving interviews about his sightings at Manzano to ufologists and the press, OSI agent Richard Doty was secretly ordered to neutralize his testimony and evidence through the use of dirty tricks, including providing Bennewitz with forged documents and other bogus information about U.S. government-sanctioned alien operations near Kirtland, and other bizarre subjects—which he was encouraged to publicize—in an effort to undercut his credibility with the media and the public. Bennewitz was also told that aliens were monitoring his own activities and, as a result, he began wearing a sidearm at home.

In Greg Bishop's Project Beta it is reported that on June 3rd, 1980 Bennewitz was wearing a sidearm at home because he believed aliens were monitoring his activities. Paul Bennewitz contacted Kirtland about the Manzano UFOs on October 24th 1980 and Richard Doty first went to his house two days after, which is when the 'disinformation agents' became involved, before Bennewitz approached USAF commanders at Kirtland. I often seen that the dates get overlooked on many aspects of this case, making it easier for people to believe the product of counter intelligence in my opinion - a disinformation campaign on us not Bennewitz.

greyer wrote: "Paul [Bennewitz] setup a special monitoring station in the area and learned that UFOs were all over. Eventually Paul learned how to pick up signals and transfer them into transmissions on a video screen which communicated with the alien video screens. Gabe Valdez witnessed an alien on the screen and said it looked like a reptilian..."

RH: What is the original source of this information? Where did it first appear?

Since greyer has not yet responded to my last post, I will go ahead and post a response to his comments on this thread by Chris Lambright, author of the new, well-researched book, X Descending:

Greyer wrote:

"Paul [Bennewitz] setup a special monitoring station in the area and learned that UFOs were all over. Eventually Paul learned how to pick up signals and transfer them into transmissions on a video screen which communicated with the alien video screens. Gabe Valdez witnessed an alien on the screen and said it looked like a reptilian. Paul's descriptions of aliens do in fact reflect tall reptilian/insectiods along with short and tall greys as the Thomas Castello myth. The reason why then head of security at Manzano Lt. Colonel Earnest Edwards got upset when the White House lied to him about following up on the report is because he had some kind of close encounter experience with Paul and most likely saw the video screen. Very interesting that Christian Lambright said Paul was upset after meeting with John Lear, maybe those Dulce paper drawings are really from Myrna Hansen."


RH wrote in response:

Sorry, greyer, this is all nonsense--part of the myth. I am one of the few persons who investigated the facts in the 1980s, interviewing Bennewitz, Valdez, Howe, and others in the process. The real story of Bennewitz and Dulce is found in Lambright's book, X Descending. He and I independently uncovered the truth years ago.

Pilkington, Bishop and Redfern are only the latest investigators to be duped by OSI agent Richard Doty's disinformation, which I first exposed in March 1989. As the old saying goes, "Those unfamiliar with the past are condemned to repeat it."

Greyer then responded:

Hello Robert, thank you I appreciate the research, very interesting that you have interviewed Bennewitz. I don't know why Valdez would be lying and I believe him, it is also reported that Bennewitz did not want the details of his research disclosed especially in the early days. It is said in your summary -

“After Bennewitz approached USAF commanders at Kirtland with his films, and subsequently began giving interviews about his sightings at Manzano to ufologists and the press, OSI agent Richard Doty was secretly ordered to neutralize his testimony and evidence through the use of dirty tricks, including providing Bennewitz with forged documents and other bogus information about U.S. government-sanctioned alien operations near Kirtland, and other bizarre subjects—which he was encouraged to publicize—in an effort to undercut his credibility with the media and the public. Bennewitz was also told that aliens were monitoring his own activities and, as a result, he began wearing a sidearm at home.”

In Greg Bishop's Project Beta it is reported that on June 3rd, 1980 Bennewitz was wearing a sidearm at home because he believed aliens were monitoring his activities. Paul Bennewitz contacted Kirtland about the Manzano UFOs on October 24th 1980 and Richard Doty first went to his house two days after, which is when the 'disinformation agents' became involved, before Bennewitz approached USAF commanders at Kirtland. I [have] often seen that the dates get overlooked on many aspects of this case, making it easier for people to believe the product of counter intelligence in my opinion - a disinformation campaign on us not Bennewitz.


After being contacted by RH last night, Chris Lambright responded to Greyer’s comments above:

Greyer, understandably but unfortunately, is laying down conclusions drawn from what he's read over the years, but without double-checking the fine points on which those conclusions hinge.

As an example, he cites Bishop's book as his way to cite what is in the 1980 AFOSI documents, rather than reading the documents for what is actually there. If he had read the documents carefully, he would see that there is nothing in them stating that the first time anyone spoke to Paul was in the October of 1980. The AFOSI document(s) mention Paul, but never actually say when Paul first called the base.

The documents introduce a lot of things supposedly happening in the Aug-Nov period, and everyone has simply assumed that Doty and Miller went to visit Paul as a result of Paul's first contact. But that's not what that document is about. I suppose it wasn't AFOSI's job to correct an assumption that worked to their advantage.

Since Edwards clearly told Stone and Ortega (see Edward's 'Briefing transcript log entry') that his first contact with Paul was January of 1980, that answers all claims of when Paul must have contacted the Air Force--and it supports the idea that Paul likely got his films in the mid-December '79 time-frame. Edwards has said that he referred Paul to Doty (or vice-versa) and so I think it's a safe bet that almost immediately after Paul called and spoke with Edwards, Doty was on it.

There are also statements attributed to Doty (I think it's mentioned by Bishop as well) that he visited Paul the first time at his lab, though I don't have a date on that. What I could never figure out, but that I now think is significant, is why there isn't a single document attesting to any meetings or discussion with Paul between January and October/November. There isn't a single document stating exactly when Paul called and spoke with Edwards the first time (except for the 'log entry'). If Edwards was so thorough about documenting his meeting with Stone and Ortega, why is there no log showing his conversation(s) with Paul, or any document reporting when Doty first talked to Paul. Significant by their absence I think, and definitely worked to let people think it happened later in the year.

As for reptilian aliens on computer screens, I'm fairly sure, based on what I've been told, that Paul was getting some bizarre things on his computer. My friend Tom Blann apparently saw some pictures that Paul had given to Gabe Valdez of images he got off the computer screen. I personally never saw, and certainly was never sent, any pictures like that by Paul or anyone else, and I don't recall ever discussing them with Paul. Then again, wasn't that the computer supposedly 'given' to Paul by the Air Force (thru Hynek) with software to 'facilitate communication with aliens'? I suspect it facilitated it a lot!

Greyer says "...it is also reported that Bennewitz did not want the details of his research disclosed especially in the early days." I wish Greyer had said where it was 'reported', because I never heard that. Paul seemed willing to talk to anyone in my experience. However, there are indications, in Bishop's book and elsewhere, that Paul himself became suspicious of some of what was going on, to the point of distrusting AFOSI and perhaps Doty et al. Maybe Paul preferred not to have this 'research' disclosed because he began to suspect the computer generated images were not so 'alien' after all...but that's just [speculation on my part].

It seems to me that we do have evidence that AFOSI counterintelligence was coming up with material they hoped they could feed to Paul and have him spread it around (e.g. the NSA telex), so maybe they were also hoping he would spread around images he was getting off his computer screen, further diminishing his credibility. All I can say is that he never sent me any such bizarre images, and they never factored into our conversations, at least not in any way to be memorable.

At least Greyer is civil in his comments and seems willing to entertain new information. It's things like 'Mirage Men' that aggravate me the most--an alleged 'documentary' by two guys who I would have thought would know better. One of them replied to me they don't necessarily accept everything Doty says, and yet they're sure putting him out front as if he lends support to their premise. I wonder if they ever heard the saying, "When you dance with the devil, the devil doesn't change...the devil changes you."

freelance_zenarchist wrote:

Originally posted by Dr. Trang

"Unfortunately UK-born Pilkington has a major credibility problem right off the bat, as he admits to being a serial (no puns please) crop-circle hoaxer; a trespasser causing criminal damage, a charlatan and a deceiver. This admission tells us something about the author's character, and should put any attentive reader on his guard about taking anything in the book seriously."

This inability to understand something as simple as crop-circle art should put any attentive reader on their guard about taking Dr. Trang seriously.

END OF POST

With his permission, Dr. Trang responds:

The point about Pilkington admitting he and Lundberg are crop circle hoaxers has nothing to do with ‘understanding crop circle art’. The point is this: in the first chapter of his book Pilkington admits to being a hoaxer, a fraudster and a liar – not to mention a trespasser and a law breaker – right there, in print! - before he even starts his declared mission to persuade the reader that Doty is a trustworthy source of insider knowledge, who is going to reveal the truth about UFOs not really existing as anomalous phenomena at all, but being all cooked up by the US Government to deceive everybody.

Originally posted by Robert Hastings
I am one of the few persons who investigated the facts in the 1980s, interviewing Bennewitz, Valdez, Howe, and others in the process. The real story of Bennewitz and Dulce is found in Lambright's book, X Descending. He and I independently uncovered the truth years ago.

Robert, I read your articles from the time. It seems that Bill Moore's performance at the 1989 MUFON symposium was a response to charges by you (And CAUS). So, what's your feeling now, was Moore ever a "UFO double agent"? My feeling is he wanted to be a UFO superstar, wanted results and was not so particular in the methods used to produce them.

So to get straight to the point, is there a Dulce base or not, also are there aliens and people working together with them or not? Also are these two pictures the only real remaining ones from the so called 'Dulce papers?

img809.imageshack.us...
www.crowdedskies.com...
www.crowdedskies.com...

Ofc I would need more people who actually have interviewed any of the people who spoke about it /Bennewitz, Schneider, CASTELLO??), before I can make conclusions which clearly will not happen any time soon (getting more information that is).

reply to post by Robert Hastings


Good day Robert,

unfortunately I haven't read Mirage Men so I can't verify that Mark Pilkington admits to being a "hoaxer, a fraudster and a liar – not to mention a trespasser and a law breaker". I'm assuming (and please correct me if I'm wrong here) Mark admits to creating crop circles, and that's where Dr. Trang's own assumptions take over with all those nasty labels. My belief is that creating crop circles does not automatically make one a hoaxer, liar or criminal. There are legal ways to go about creating crop circles, and from my experience it's not the circle makers that proclaim their designs are created by aliens, bizarre microwave technology from satellites, or whatever fantastical explanation is popular at the time. That is mostly done by the self proclaimed researchers and experts that try to make a living off the work of the crop artists.

And as for persuading the reader that Doty is a trustworthy source of anything, I find that surprising since everything I read about Mirage Men while it was in the works seemed to be taking more of a neutral stance on Doty, or letting his lies speak for themselves.

For example here's a snippet from a review of Mirage Men by 3am magazine that seems to contradict Dr. Trang's interpretations.

One of the key figures in Mirage Men is Richard C. Doty (’Rick’), a former special agent of the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Doty, it is alleged, played a key role in spreading disinformation among UFO groups about the US government covering up ET visitations. Pilkington tells us he liked Doty, despite being lied to and given the run around by this legend in over-the-top bull#ting. Pilkington is restrained and unbelievably even-handed in his portrayal of Doty, but an image of this ‘intelligence agent’ as a pathetic fantasist still seeps out from the text. After recounting how Doty claimed he’d personally met an extraterrestrial called EBE 2, who’d allegedly stayed on earth as a guest of the US government, Pilkington writes:

“As Rick and I looked at the picture of EBE2, John appeared. I pointed out EBE 2 and repeated what Rick had told me.

“That’s a bust,” said John flatly, “a model. A ufologist I know has it on his mantelpiece.”

A hint of frustration crept into Rick’s voice: “If that’s a bust then it’s taken from a photograph, because I know that’s real.”

“It’s a bust,” insisted John, before wandering off again.

Doty may or may not have been an ‘intelligence’ agent, but judged on Pilkington’s account he’s also a complete basket-case - albeit a highly entertaining one.