An Interview with Richard Dolan

by Brent Raynes

Richard Dolan gave a lecture at Arkansas’s 2007 Ozark UFO Conference. It was entitled, “Revolution from Above: The Results of UFO Secrecy.” Just before his presentation on April 14th, I got to sit down with him and had a very pleasant and informative chat. Here’s what we talked about:

Editor: Well, I usually begin an interview asking how a person got started and became interested in UFOs.

Richard Dolan: I’ve been researching the UFO field now I’d say for about 12 to 13 years, since the early to mid-1990s. My background was strictly academic. I was a Ph.D student in history at the University of Rochester, studying Cold War history, national security stuff, Harry Truman, the Soviets, the CIA, and so forth.

Nothing at all to do with flying saucers, and then I got the bug. In 1993-94, I started wondering (like a lot of people passively wonder) is there anything to this or not? With me, studying the kinds of things that I was, I really wanted to know was there an element of missing history.

I will never forget walking into a bookstore in 1994 and seeing a copy of Tim Good’s Above Top Secret. It was one of those moments in my life that helped to push me in a certain direction. I flipped through his book, recognized lots of names from my own academic research, and the question that occurred to me was not is this true but rather is it historically valid that Generals and Admirals and CIA intelligence people were taking UFOs seriously in the 1940s and ‘50s. Because if they were taking it seriously that in itself is an interesting topic and why would that not have been in any academic history book that I had ever read, because it is absent. In the formal university setting this is just a non-topic, and yet who could deny that if you go back to 1950, to be a fly on the wall of some General who is seriously talking about UFOs, how could that not be interesting. That’s very interesting.

So with that very innocent, conservative, almost naive approach I started my research, which was simply to determine whether this was a valid historical issue. Well, obviously, very quickly I decided that it sure is and became acquainted with the literature and then just started doing my own research. I was essentially looking for the book that I ended up writing. I was looking for a nice 500 page overview that laid out a history. I didn’t really find one and so essentially ended up writing my version of one, which I called UFOs and the National Security State. And, in fact, I really stepped into it when I wrote this, so to speak, because I intentionally entitled the book Volume One, because it really went from the 1940s to the early 1970s, very explicitly telling everyone that yes, I am going to do a volume two. In fact, writing volume two has been such a huge project in my life, but I’m in the home stretch here. All of the research is done, and a lot of the writing is done, and I’m hoping to have this done before the year is out, and that will take the history right up to the present day.

So essentially my take on this is that it’s a no brainer that this phenomenon is not only real but that there are groups within the U.S. and beyond, transnationally, that are aware of what is going on and that indeed there is a cover-up. There are non-humans who are here among us. I think that’s pretty certain. This is a serious problem. Within the national security community if you get into the right circles these people are taking it very seriously also, and so that fact alone is enough for a days work because of course in our official culture this is all still silliness and nonsense. But then it goes much further than that. Really what you find is that when you lift open the cover of the UFO topic you find that it’s almost like reality within the matrix, where you discover that indeed there is a reality that is so different from our official version of truth that it’s almost at that level of what you get in the matrix and you begin to really wonder, “Are we living in an artificially generated reality?” That matrix exists, I believe, when we turn on our television sets and plug into mainstream corporate culture. So yes I very innocently stepped into this twelve years ago thinking that I was going to get my feet wet and now find myself swimming out into the ocean.

Editor: Have you had any problems with, since you took this position, from people like colleagues or maybe even government?

Richard Dolan: I’ve had a few instances that I would consider possible problems resulting from this. For two years, from 2003 to 2005, I was regularly getting stopped at airports when I flew. Now I was allowed to fly, but I was delayed constantly, and it was because of my name. Try getting an answer out of TSA regarding why you’re getting stopped. I mean, good luck. They won’t tell you. Someone said to me, “Well, there might be someone with the name “Richard Dolan” who did something really bad, and I thought maybe, but then I ended up searching my own name on the Internet and I’m 95 percent of all the hits on Richard Dolan anyway and I’m thinking, “Well, I’m guessing it’s me.” In particular, because I do have a very political take on the UFO issue. I’m not just someone who wants to study ufology as a science. I’m looking at the UFO phenomenon in a very political way. So I assume that it’s me, but I can’t get straight answers.

Editor: What do you think about some of the other countries, like France who recently put all their information, they said, out on the Internet. I think that the Peruvians are pretty open about theirs.

Richard Dolan: There are various government initiatives from around the world that are far more liberal on this matter than that of the United States. The French release incidentally I believe only involves civilian reports. It did not involve military reports. Nevertheless, they released a lot and it was of value. I go back and forth on my thoughts about what these government statements mean. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a form of blackmail against the U.S. so that, in other words, if there’s a government that is on less than ideal terms with the U.S. would they ever threaten to release UFO-related information? Is there some behind-the-scenes activity going on? I can only speculate on this, but I do wonder about that.

It’s also truth that the U.S. in the modern world is the center of control and as such is really the center of repression over a lot of global media. Americans have a hard time understanding this because we all grew up thinking certain things about our country, but this isn’t the past. This is 2007. We’re in a different world. Other countries in fact can be expected to be pushing the envelope far more than the U.S. government. I think that what’s happening with the U.S. government is that it is firmly under the control of certain transnational corporations and very wealthy interests. They’ve gotten their hooks into matters here and they’re not going to let go easily. So if there is going to be change then it could very well come from elsewhere, from other countries. I definitely do not see any voluntary disclosure on the part of the U.S. government.

Editor: I know that there’s been a lot of information too it seems from Brazil, where they’re trying to get information released, and they’ve even stated in a report that there was a crash incident back in the ‘90s where they described how they got a call from NORAD or somebody within the American government, alerting them to this crash.

Richard Dolan: South America in particular, as well as Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, each of those nations, at various times, have been very open with their media. UFO sightings, UFO crashes, interactions with military personnel, it is a very different culture down there in a lot of ways compared with up north.

Now the thing is that those South American revelations have not resonated up here in the United States at all. I mean, mainstream media absolutely does not touch upon this at all. So in a sense they’re living in a very different mental reality down in South America than we are up here and since the power in the world resides in Washington I suspect that revelations from South American governments may not mean a heck of a lot. Unless they are really truly able to deliver the goods, i.e., by bringing out an absolutely ironclad document or photograph, or an explicit statement, but what we’ve had is Brazil, France, and the others not making an explicit statement to the effect saying that there is in fact a worldwide UFO cover-up, it’s dominated by the boys in Washington. There hasn’t been that type of statement and I think that’s what it will take really to crack the wall.

Editor: So in your presentation today are you going to lead to what’s going to be in your second book?

Richard Dolan: A lot of what I’m talking about today will be in my second book. My theme today is on some of the political results of UFO secrecy. Think of it this way. If you are hiding a secret that’s one thing, but if you’re hiding technology that you’ve acquired that’s a whole other thing, and what’s happened is that crash retrievals have required the farming out of this technology to private corporations for study, for research and development, and over a number of years what that has done is to privatize a large portion of the UFO secret. So that in a sense, what I think has happened, it has gone beyond formal government control, that these private entities continue to use the U.S. military and government for their purposes and to help maintain secrecy, but that they in fact now have the control. This is something that I’ve come to over a number of years of looking the matter. I wasn’t really looking at it this way five or ten years ago. I’m looking at it now.

The other part of that is that we’ve gone through an unacknowledged global revolution in the last 15 years, and that’s the transnational revolution. What we’ve really witnessed, if we think about it, is the death of nation states. Where is sovereignty these days? Is it within the United States, or the World Bank or IMF, or other transnational institutions? It’s really hard to say. We’ve moved into a different kind of world. But it’s different enough to make us question where is ultimate authority, and this matters when you’re talking about UFO secrecy. Who has got the secret? Is it the President of the United States, who I think most of us at this point would say, “Probably not him.” But if not him then who and where. So figuring out this structure of power has been one of my main preoccupations for the last year in helping me to formulate my final perspective on how the secrecy works in preparation for my next book.