William L. Moore

William L. Moore is the co-author, with Charles Berlitz, of The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility (1979) and The Roswell Incident (1980), both published by Grosset & Dunlap.¹ With Jaime Shandera he released the Majestic-12 papers to the press in 1987. On July 1, 1989 he told the Mutual UFO Network symposium in Las Vegas that from September 1980 he had been in contact with a source he called Falcon and with Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Richard Doty, that through Doty he had supplied information about Paul Bennewitz, the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and other researchers until 1984, and that the Aquarius teletype and the Weitzel letter were products of AFOSI counterintelligence work.²³

Books and Arizona

Moore said in 1989 that he had been a high school teacher for fourteen years in Minnesota and, concurrently for ten years, a part-time labor relations expert with the Minnesota Education Association; that in 1979, after publishing The Philadelphia Experiment with Berlitz, he resigned his teaching position and moved with his family to Arizona to write full time; and that he came away from a divorce in 1983 with virtually nothing and went through bankruptcy soon afterward.² A text circulated on the UFO BBS in 1991, an encyclopedia-style account whose author is not identified in the copy consulted, places the teaching post in a small Minnesota town.⁴ From about August 1979 to mid-1987 Moore kept post office box 189 in Dewey, Arizona, as a correspondence address, and moved to California in early 1983.⁶ A promotional biography prepared for the 1988 television program UFO Cover-Up Live describes him as the author of two international bestsellers, with investigations that had taken him 200,000 miles to 38 states, Canada and Mexico, and living in Los Angeles.⁷ Moore said in 1989 that the APRO directors Coral Lorenzen and James Lorenzen of Tucson invited him to the APRO board after his move, and wrote in 1990 that in 1980 he was the board member in charge of Special Investigations.²⁵ He told the audience in 1989 that he lived in a rented house, drove a 1977 car and a 1979 motorcycle, had dropped his health insurance, and that "as for my being on the government's payroll, I can only say that I wish I was."²

Falcon, 1980

Moore told the July 1, 1989 symposium that in early September 1980 he was approached by "a well-placed individual within the intelligence community" who claimed to be directly connected to a high-level government project on UFOs, who said he spoke for a small group uncomfortable with the continuing cover-up, and who told him that a liaison man would arrange later meetings; the liaison was Doty, "a man who has since become quite controversial in his own right and who many people have mistakenly assumed is the Falcon himself." Moore said, "I knew I was being recruited, but at that point I had no idea for what."²

Moore also said that the name Falcon was invented by himself and Shandera in 1984 "strictly as a way of facilitating our talking to each other about this person, particularly on the telephone"; that Doty was referred to between them as "the Sparrow"; that neither man was aware of the labels, nor anyone else to Moore's knowledge, before about mid-1985; and that in mid-1987, after the MJ-12 papers were released, "at Falcon's suggestion and with the concurrence of Richard Doty" they began "dropping subtle hints that Falcon might in fact be Doty," which Moore called "an excellent diversion, particularly with respect to the effect it had following the UFO coverup live show." He described Doty as "much better at following orders and implementing the schemes of others than he is at coming up with ideas of his own," said "Rick is not the man you're after," and said that no one outside his project knew who the person in the control position was.² Mark Pilkington wrote that Moore named his contact Falcon after Robert Lindsey's book The Falcon and the Snowman.⁸ Doty said in March 1989 that he was not the Falcon mentioned on the television program and that government investigative agencies had exonerated him.⁹

A narrative that does not appear in the caption transcript of the speech is given by the UFO BBS text, which describes an account Moore gave in 1987, and by Pilkington, writing from a videotape of the 1989 speech and from Greg Bishop's Project Beta (2005). In early September 1980, after a radio appearance for The Roswell Incident, a caller said "We think you're the only one we've heard that seems to know what he's talking about." The BBS text adds that the first such call reached Moore at an Omaha radio station from a man who said he was a colonel at Offutt Air Force Base, and that the second, on September 8, 1980 after a radio show in Albuquerque, came from a man who said he was at Kirtland Air Force Base; the caller said he would wear a red tie at a local restaurant.⁸⁴ Pilkington wrote that Falcon offered Moore evidence of a government cover-up in exchange for information, handed him a document referring to "Project Silver Sky" that Moore found, after checking the witness names, to be fabricated, and at a second meeting on September 30, accompanied by Doty, told Moore that he worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency and spoke for a group within the intelligence community that wished to tell the public the truth about UFOs.⁸ Moore and Shandera wrote in 1990 that "Falcon" designated Doty as middle man in October 1980.⁵ Moore also said in the speech that the anonymous Weitzel letter sent to APRO in July 1980 was written by Doty, that "essentially, it was bait" meant to recruit someone inside APRO who could report on Bennewitz's activities and communications, that it was passed to him for action as an APRO board member, and that "it was not long thereafter that I came to know Richard Doty and began to provide him with information about Bennewitz and his case."²

The Bennewitz period

The AFOSI interview of Bennewitz on October 26, 1980, the November 17, 1980 teletype and the delivery of its retyped version to Bennewitz in June 1981 are set out on the pages for Paul Bennewitz, Richard Doty and Project Aquarius. Moore said in 1989 that he first met Bennewitz in early 1981 and was in fairly regular contact with him through mid-1985; that his own role "was largely that of a freelancer providing information on Paul's then current thinking and activities"; that he "had nothing whatsoever to do with the counter intelligence and the disinformation, although I either knew or was aware of a number of people directly involved with that end of things," Doty among them; and that "I was providing regular reports on its effectiveness to some of the very people who were doing it to Paul."² He described watching Bennewitz grow more paranoid and physically worn, eating no lunch while smoking 28 cigarettes in 45 minutes on one visit, and said he had discussed Bennewitz's decoding program with J. Allen Hynek, who had independently examined it.² Pilkington wrote that internal Kirtland documents on August and September 1980 sightings reached Moore on February 1, 1982 from a man who gave a password, and that Moore, visiting Bennewitz, saw a yellow ball of light about twelve centimetres across in the laboratory; Pilkington wrote that Doty told Bishop that he and two National Security Agency men saw a similar orange light at the house.⁸ Moore said on the radio program UFOs Tonite! on June 11, 1994 that J. Allen Hynek "was part of this operation" and "under contract to the Air Force," and wrote to James W. Moseley on August 10, 2000 that Hynek's role had been to provide Bennewitz with "a carefully crafted means" of decoding the signals he received, a claim that Curt Collins reproduced.¹⁰ Pilkington wrote that when Moore last visited Bennewitz, in 1987, Bennewitz was barely sleeping or eating.⁸

Doty said in 2005 that Moore "had several sources within the U.S. Government," that he himself never met Moore with anyone but "official personnel," that on one occasion he met Moore with an NSA investigator, and that "during the Bennewitz affair, I met Moore with FBI agents."¹¹ Doty wrote in 2000 that Moore "was a coded source for OSI," "was paid for his information" and "was used to provide disinformation to Ufologists," and that he was "not involved in any conspiracy with Moore to create any documents"; in the same issue of Saucer Smear Moore wrote that he could "confirm Rick Doty's comments about Bennewitz and those strange 'energy balls'" and that he had seen one.¹² Pilkington wrote that Moore has always denied receiving payment and that he had seen no evidence to the contrary.⁸ Pilkington also reported Moore's account that cards mailed to him from the Soviet Union by what he took to be American assets contained encoded information, which Moore read by telephone to an untraceable government number and then forwarded to a post office box in Washington, D.C.; Moore said he never learned what he passed.⁸

Meetings with Gersten and the Pratt manuscript

On January 10 and 11, 1983 Moore attended the first of two meetings in New Mexico between Doty and the attorney Peter Gersten of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), with the San Francisco television producer Ron Lakis; the second meeting, at which Doty spoke of Project Aquarius, Ellsworth and extraterrestrial contact, was attended by Gersten alone.⁴¹³ Moore consulted for the San Francisco station KPIX-TV in 1982 and gave its program producer a copy of the November 1980 teletype, according to Philip J. Klass.¹⁴

Pilkington wrote that in late 1981 and early 1982 Moore and the National Enquirer writer Bob Pratt planned a book on the material Doty was supplying, with Doty credited as "Ronald L. Davis," and that Pratt's recorded telephone calls show Moore at first insisting it be non-fiction before agreeing to a novel, first titled Majik 12 and then The Aquarius Project. Pilkington cites Barry Greenwood and Brad Sparks, "The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12" (MUFON Symposium Proceedings, 2007), for this; that paper was not obtained for this page.⁸¹⁵ Collins wrote in 2005 that the book Exempt from Disclosure "has the same title as the book Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera intended to publish."¹⁶

The Graham badge, 1986 and 1987

Robert Hastings wrote on March 1, 1989 that in March 1986 Lee Graham, a holder of a "Q" clearance, gave him copies of the "Project Snowbird" paper and the "Project Aquarius" teletype, saying only that the source worked for the government. In a call in early June 1987, shortly before the Burbank, California press conference, Graham told Hastings the source had been Moore, who had shown him a government identification card bearing Moore's photograph and an alias, said to be identical to the badges of two agents of the Defense Investigative Service who had interviewed Graham about the documents, and had said he was "flagged" in intelligence computers; Graham said he had been introduced to Moore's "superior," known only as "Richard." Hastings wrote that he later heard Moore had "vehemently denied" being a government operative and claimed he had been playing a joke on Graham, the card being, according to Moore, a laminated MUFON card; Moore said in 1989 that the story "stems from nothing more than a practical joke." Hastings reproduced Graham's letters to the DIS of May 8 and October 19, 1986 asking why Moore had not been questioned.¹⁷

July 1, 1989

Moore declined to submit the paper, titled "UFOs and the U.S. Government, Part I," for the symposium proceedings, said he would take no questions from the audience, and instead built seventeen questions and answers into the text.⁴² Pilkington wrote that about a thousand people attended at the Aladdin hotel while a rival conference met nearby and that the address ran about two hours.⁸ Moore opened by saying he had "wanted to come here tonight and kick ass," and said later: "I have known precisely what I was doing all along. It's just that very few other people knew what I was doing"; Pilkington, reading the videotape, gives the sentence as "I have known exactly what I was doing all along, it was just that nobody else knew what I was doing."²⁸

In the question section Moore said that he had had no involvement in providing information to any government agency about UFOs or the people involved since 1984; that the only conscious involvement he had had with a disinformation operation was the one connected with Bennewitz; and that he had never been on the payroll of any agency of the government. He said Lee Graham was among the "several other individuals" on whom he supplied information, beginning in 1983, that counterintelligence interest in Graham concerned his inquiries into the then classified stealth aircraft program, and that the identification card story "stems from nothing more than a practical joke which has simply gotten out of hand," adding "I do not hold a government ID card." He said that the videotaped interviews with the source code-named Falcon, some made in the presence of news media members, had not been confiscated and remained in his possession; that the Ellsworth Air Force Base humanoid case of 1977 "was a special counterintelligence training exercise in the creation and dissemination of this information," in which Doty, stationed at Ellsworth Air Force Base at the time, was involved but not as the creator of documents; and that the AFOSI documents on a 1980 landing near a nuclear storage facility at Kirtland were, to the best of his knowledge, authentic.²

Moore said that after the broadcast of UFO Cover-Up Live "the FBI showed up and began asking questions about it," arranged a private showing in the office of the producer Michael Seligman, and interviewed ufologists on both coasts including Shandera, while avoiding him; and that a Freedom of Information Act response of July 1988 admitted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation held nearly sixty pages of material on him, all classified for reasons of national security. Of the program he said: "I'm convinced that at least some of that information falls under the category of disinformation. I'm equally convinced that some of it is true," and that the sources knew they would be identified on the show as confidential government informants.²

Moore's closing positions, as spoken, were that a highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization is visiting Earth and "actively manipulating our awareness of their presence"; that elements of at least two government intelligence agencies know this and run classified projects; that counterintelligence personnel have conducted "an on-again off-again campaign of deception and disinformation about the UFO phenomenon for more than 40 years," including phony documents and informants, for five possible reasons, among them use of the phenomenon by "trilateralists" seeking world unity against an unknown threat from space; that a group designated MJ-12 operates at the White House National Security Council level; that there was a Project Aquarius, "possibly two of them," one in 1971 to 1973 and one in 1976 to 1985, with contract and report numbers obtained; that the Cutler-Twining memorandum was, in his view, "reasonable certainty" authentic and had been planted among the papers of Record Group 341 for them to find; that there was "no compelling reason to believe" the Eisenhower briefing document was other than authentic, though its authenticity was not proved; and that "our group is euphemistically called the aviary and each individual uses a code name of a bird." He closed that there is "an extraterrestrial presence here on planet Earth" and that a small number of government people know it. Pilkington called the closing section Moore's "Estimate of the Situation."²⁸ The UFO BBS text, citing a printed Moore text of 1989 that was not obtained, adds that Moore named as subjects of intelligence interest between 1980 and 1984 Len Stringfield, Pete Mazzola, Gersten, Larry Fawcett, James and Coral Lorenzen, and Larry W. Bryant, and said four other prominent ufologists had been doing "the same thing," two of them still active.⁴

Citizens Against UFO Secrecy devoted most of its September 1989 Just Cause to the speech. Barry Greenwood wrote that Moore "reported the effects of the false information regularly to some of the very same people who were 'doing it' to Paul," and, of the television program, that "here we have a fair portion of the last hour wasted in presenting what Moore admits to be false data."⁴

After 1989

Moore told a syndicated reporter in August 1990 that AFOSI had approached him and given him what he called "disinformation," and that "certain agencies stir the UFO pot, for some reason."¹⁸ Collins wrote that Moore left ufology around 1994, according to Brian Parks, and that Moore gave Bishop in 2005 a name for the "real Falcon" that Collins, citing Bishop and Parks, gave as Harry Rositzke, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who died in Warrenton, Virginia, on November 4, 2002; the name is Collins's report of what Moore said to others, and Moore did not publish it.¹⁹ Pilkington wrote that Bishop remembered Moore "lying prone on his back in a state of near panic as he told Greg that the aliens were here on Earth." Moore declined to be interviewed by Pilkington for Mirage Men (2010).⁸