Linda Moulton Howe

Linda Moulton Howe is a television documentary producer who, as Director of Special Projects at KMGH-TV, the CBS affiliate in Denver, began in September 1979 to research animal mutilations and produced A Strange Harvest, first broadcast on May 25, 1980.¹ In March 1983 she signed a development contract with Home Box Office (HBO) and on April 9, 1983 Richard Doty of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) showed her at Kirtland Air Force Base a document she described as a "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States."² The account is Howe's own, published in An Alien Harvest (first edition 1989); Doty denied it in 1988, and others have attributed to it a role in a counterintelligence operation.

A Strange Harvest and the HBO contract

Howe wrote that the research began on September 1, 1979 as an environmental story and became an accumulation of testimony that "implicated the presence of extraterrestrial mutilators," and that after the program she received hundreds of calls and letters.¹ During the fall of 1982, she wrote, an HBO executive who had screened the documentary asked for a proposal that "went beyond the mutilation investigation and focused primarily on evidence for extraterrestrial interactions." On March 20, 1983, in New York, she had dinner with the attorney Peter Gersten of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), who told her he had an Air Force contact, Richard Doty, who might discuss a 1977 landing at Ellsworth Air Force Base; Gersten had met Doty in Albuquerque on January 10, 1983. The next afternoon Jean Abounader, director of HBO's documentary unit and previously with CBS, with an assistant, accepted a proposal titled UFOS: The E.T. Factor and asked her to sign a development contract to deliver a shooting script.² Gersten then called Doty, who in a telephone call was "cordial" and agreed to meet on April 9.² On March 26, 1983 Howe and Larry Fawcett visited Robert Emenegger in Los Angeles about the 1964 Holloman landing; two weeks later, she wrote, Emenegger told her that his Department of Defense sources had told him not to take part.²

April 9, 1983

Howe wrote that Doty did not meet her at the Albuquerque airport; she telephoned Jerry Miller, chief of reality weapons testing at Kirtland, whom she had spoken to earlier about Paul Bennewitz, and Miller drove her to his house and called Doty, who arrived in a small white car. She asked Miller on the way whether he was the "Miller" of the "AQUARIUS Cable" that referred to MJ-12, and he did not answer. At the Kirtland gate Doty waved to the guard and drove through; he took her to what he called his boss's office in a small white and gray building, told her that A Strange Harvest "came too close to something we don't want the public to know about," and said he knew she had telephoned the Central Intelligence Agency while making it. Asked about Ellsworth, he said there had been a UFO intrusion at a missile site and that the inner-zone alert had sounded beneath the 150-ton concrete block over the silo.²

Doty took a brown manila envelope from a drawer and said "My superiors have asked me to show this to you. You can read these and you can ask me questions, but you can't take any notes." He moved her from a chair backed against the windows to a chair in the middle of the room, saying "Eyes can see through windows." Howe wrote that the title was "Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America" on "unidentified aerial craft (UACs)," that she remembered no president's name or date, and that it listed crashes in the Southwest including two at Roswell, in 1947 and 1949, Aztec, Magdalena, Kingman and one in northern Mexico, with recovered bodies and craft sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory and Wright-Patterson. It described "extraterrestrial biological entities" or "EBEs," a live one called Ebe held at Los Alamos "until June 18, 1952, when it died of unknown causes," and paragraphs on Projects Sigma, Snowbird and Aquarius and on extraterrestrial manipulation of human DNA at intervals of 25,000, 15,000, 5,000 and 2,500 years.²

Howe asked why she was shown it rather than the New York Times, the Washington Post or 60 Minutes. Doty answered that those institutions were "problem makers" to his superiors and that "any independent writer, producer or other individual media person is much easier to manipulate, control or discredit than a major organization with a staff of lawyers." He told her that she would be given several thousand feet of film of crashed discs, bodies, Ebe, and a Holloman landing on April 25, 1964, and that he would call using the code name "Falcon," followed by calls from others, including a "Tom." At a Mexican restaurant that night she asked whether it was dangerous for him to speak; he said "I have been told to tell you. We want you to do the film."² She wrote that MJ stood for "MAJORITY" according to Doty.²

The HBO outcome

Howe wrote that at a meeting in New York on May 18, 1983 Abounader and her superior Bridgett Potter would not authorize production funds without the film and without confirmation by "the President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and Joint Chiefs of Staff," while urging her to continue; that Doty said his superiors "did not work for HBO and had their own timetable," that release was delayed for "political reasons," and that an interview with the retired colonel who had lived with Ebe had been approved but was repeatedly set and canceled; that Doty asked for photographs of her crew for security clearances; that in June Doty said he was officially out of the project; and that a man in Washington telephoned her office three times in March 1984 to say there would be further delays until after the November 1984 election. The HBO contract, she wrote, was active through September 1983 and expired without any film being released.²

Disputes over the meeting

On October 17, 1987 Howe wrote a letter at the request of Fawcett, publisher of Just Cause, to put the meeting on record, and her account was published in the December 1987 issue.²³ Doty wrote on March 5, 1988 to Larry W. Bryant, who had sought Doty's records under the Freedom of Information Act, that he met Howe in April 1983 at AFOSI District 17 after she telephoned him in early 1983 to ask about the 1980 Kirtland incident; that the meeting lasted about an hour and "was monitored by two of my supervisors"; that her questions "were centered around MJ-12, extraterrestrial beings, Project Aquarius," on which he said he had no knowledge; that "I can say, without a doubt, I never showed her any such document"; that she herself mentioned "a so-called 'Project Aquarius' briefing paper for President Carter"; that the government investigated him over the alleged briefing paper and "I was totally cleared"; that he had further telephone calls or short meetings with her over eighteen months, none after August 1984; that he made only a "Memo for Record" of the April 1983 meeting, destroyed after a year; and that "I know of no Government operation past or present that involved Ms. Howe or her research about UFOs."² The same letter states "I know of no secret Government investigation of UFOs. I have never heard of MJ-12 or any secret Government agency that investigates UFOs"; Philip J. Klass reported the sentence as part of Doty's letter of March 3, 1988 to Barry Greenwood, published in the June 1988 Just Cause.²³ Howe made a sworn statement and produced her correspondence with Doty and HBO; Doty did not swear a statement, according to Robert Hastings, who reported on March 1, 1989 that Howe told him Doty identified himself as Falcon and said Moore had given him that name.³⁴ In her book Howe wrote only that he said he would call using that code name.²

Moore said in his speech of July 1, 1989 that in early 1983 "I became aware that Rick was involved with a team of several others, including one fellow from Denver that I knew of and at least one who was working out of Washington, D.C.," in "an elaborate disinformation game against a prominent cattle mutilation researcher who at the time had close connections with a major television film company interested in doing a UFO documentary"; that "the government seemed hell bent on severing the ties that existed between the researcher and the film company"; that elements of the intelligence community feared the Bennewitz story about interception of electromagnetic emissions from the Kirtland-Sandia area "would end up as part of the script of a feature film"; that the researcher was shown purportedly sensitive documents at a meeting with Doty and others at the AFOSI office at Kirtland, including material on an alleged crash retrieval at Aztec, New Mexico; and that "the information which changed hands on that day was directly descended from the discussion" Doty and Moore had had a few months earlier, adding "there was no UFO crash at Aztec."⁷ The spoken text does not name Howe; the UFO BBS text of 1991, quoting a printed Moore text, gives the same passages with "[Howe]" and "[HBO]" in brackets and says Doty added the Aztec crash after learning of Moore's investigation of it.⁵ On Coast to Coast AM on February 27, 2005 Doty named operations against Bennewitz and Howe among four he described, and said of the one against Howe: "Linda was invited to Kirtland Air Force Base, and I was the primary agent, there were two other agents involved," "we showed her a document and tried to bring her in and hook her on a hook," and, asked whether it was on official orders, "Oh yes, for sure, absolutely"; he also said the television special "was never aired" and that the operation "somewhat backfired on us."⁶ Robert M. Collins was reported by Hastings to have sought Howe out in November 1987; Howe's book does not mention him.⁴²