Richard C. Doty is a retired U.S. Air Force special agent who served with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico from 1979. He is one of the few former government insiders to say publicly that he helped deceive UFO researchers, and for decades he has also told stories of crash recoveries, captured beings and alien contact programs. That combination has made him one of the most contested figures in modern UFO history.

Born in 1950 and raised in Pennsylvania, Doty joined the Air Force and served in Texas, Vietnam, Washington state, West Germany and South Dakota before his AFOSI posting at Kirtland. There he was among the Air Force officials who dealt with Paul Bennewitz, a New Mexico businessman who believed he was filming alien craft and intercepting their signals near the base. Researcher William Moore told a 1989 MUFON conference that he had knowingly passed fake evidence of extraterrestrials to UFO researchers, and Doty later said he had given fabricated information to researchers while working at Kirtland in the 1980s. After leaving the Air Force he worked as a traffic officer in New Mexico.

Doty's name is closely tied to the Majestic-12 papers. In 1983 he contacted journalist Linda Moulton Howe, offered her Air Force records about contact with extraterrestrials, and at a meeting at Kirtland told her the MJ-12 story was true, then withdrew without supplying the promised material. In 1988 he appeared under a pseudonym on the syndicated television special UFO Cover-Up? Live. In Mark Pilkington's 2010 book Mirage Men and its 2013 film adaptation, in which he is the central figure, Doty admitted being part of an organized effort to deceive UFO researchers. Critics of the 2005 Project Serpo story, which described an exchange program with beings from the Zeta Reticuli system, have cited his involvement as a principal reason to doubt it.

Doty remained a frequent podcast guest in 2026. Clips circulated early in the year of him describing a surviving alien he said lived out its life at Los Alamos. In August he gave a four-hour interview to Chris Ramsay for the 100th episode of Area52, in which Ramsay pressed him on the Bennewitz operation and on what he had personally witnessed. Doty described what he said was a multi-agency surveillance operation on an Air Force sergeant who was repeatedly abducted and injured, and said he believed the so-called Alien Interview video, said to date from 1991, was genuine and had been copied by an audiovisual technician at Groom Lake. Critics, including the online commentator Red Panda Koala, have highlighted inconsistencies such as conflicting statements about whether he ever met retired Maj. Gen. Neil McCasland.

Doty's acknowledged part in the Bennewitz affair made him the best-known human example of the argument, set out in Mirage Men, that the U.S. military fabricated UFO folklore to draw attention away from classified projects. His later insider stories keep him in demand with interviewers who openly question how much of what he says reflects his own experience. He remains one of the clearest cases of a government agent who entered the UFO story as a source of deliberate misinformation and stayed in it as a storyteller.