Cpt. Lawrence H. Dyvad and Major Edward A. Doty
The document below shows that Cpt. Lawrence Dyvad, one of the mentioned participants in the July 9, 1947 Roswell crash/saucer-debunking balloon demonstration at Alamogordo AAF (later Holloman AFB), helped take a UFO report in 1951. Little else is known about Cpt. Dyvad other than he also worked for Project Mogul at the time, but the other report-taker, Major Edward A. Doty became head of UFO investigations at Holloman in the summer of 1951 and was the liaison officer with AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations, or AF counterintelligence). [AFOSI split off from the Army CIC (Counter-intelligence Corp) in Sept. 1947 when the Air Force became a separate service.] According to one witness, Doty was also head of security at Holloman.
Doty connections to AF counter-intelligence seem to run in the family. He is also the uncle of an infamous AFOSI UFO disinformationalist named Richard Doty who was stationed at Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, in the early 1980s. The younger Doty disseminated bogus government UFO documents and got Roswell investigator William Moore (coauthor of the 1980 "The Roswell Incident").involved in a bizarre psychological warfare scheme against an Albuquerque physicist and UFO investigator named Paul Bennewitz in an attempt to drive him insane and discredit him. Bennewitz had photographed UFO's over nearby Sandia base and Manzano weapons storage area.
On recent UFO Updates posts, Edward Doty's involvement with AFOSI and his relationship to Richard Doty was contested. However, in follow-up e-mails initiated by Bill Hamilton with Richard Doty and the still-living Edward Doty, both confirmed that Edward Doty was really an intelligence officer whose primary job responsibility was UFO investigations and who worked very closely with AFOSI. Both also indicated that Edward Doty was Richard Doty's uncle.
Both Doty's also stated that Charles Doty was Richard's father. Edward Doty added the following interesting comment in a response remail to Richard Doty: "Your dad and I were involved in Project Cup, which was more about UFOs than about Weather! Ask him sometime about that."
There is a suggestion here by Doty that some of the weather and ballooning projects were actually covers for UFO investigations.
The evidence is more than suggestive. The document below was an attachment to the final "Project Twinkle" report, November 1951, on the Green Fireball phenomenon. Project Twinkle was under the auspices of the Geophysical Research Division at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Cambridge Labs also oversaw Project Mogul and other balloon projects in New Mexico, and there was obviously a clear connection between the two. Although Doty did not work directly for the Cambridge Labs, the result of any UFO investigations at Holloman under his direction would end up there.
In his email, Edward Doty pretty much admitted that the Cambridge Labs was an intelligence clearinghouse for UFO information: "FYI - The Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory was a center for
intelligence collection. Anything to do with advanced or unknown technology (mostly Soviet and Eastern Block stuff), would be collected here and then fed on to W-Pat [Wright-Patterson AFB]."
Gathering intelligence on UFOs could easily be hidden under the umbrella of "advanced or unknown technology."
Doty in the past was not so open about the connection. In a 1959 letter reproduced in the 1995 Air Force Roswell report (Attach. 4), Doty stated he came to Holloman in Feb. 1948 as the Mogul balloon Project Officer. He went into great detail about his continued involvement in various capacities with the balloon projects there, but somehow failed to mention that his primary responsibilities were actually as a intelligence officer and UFO investigator. Again this is suggestive that intelligence people like Doty sometimes had "day jobs" that served as covers for their real intelligence duties.
The same may be true for Cpt. Dyvad. Given his association with the debunking balloon demonstration of 1947 and his later association with intelligence officer Doty on the UFO report, it seems plausible that Dyvad was also an intelligence or counter-intelligence agent. Prof. Charles Moore, engineer with the Mogul Project, when interviewed by the Air Force in 1994, recalled Larry Dyvad flying chase planes during the balloon launches, but in retrospect also thought it quite possible that Dyvad was secretly a counter-intelligence officer given his participation in the balloon demonstration.. Edward Doty's predecessor at Mogul, Col. Albert Trakowski, was also interviewed by the Air Force, and likewise thought it plausible that Dyvad was secretly counter-intelligence.
It is interesting to note that a Cpt. Dyvad filed his own personal UFO report on June 27, 1947 when a fireball passed beneath his airplane and disintegrated while he was flying near Tulerosa, N.M. (Click here for June/July 1947 New Mexico area UFO reports.) Dyvad attributed the sighting to a meteorite, as did the commander of White Sands Proving Ground, Col. Harold Turner. However, small meteorites do not remain fireballs at low altitudes, having slowed long before to non-incandescent speeds. Furthermore, Dyvad's report that day turned out to be one of many that day of glowing orbs spotted flying over New Mexico. Turner attributed two other fireball sightings to a meteorite, but the odds of multiple meteor fireballs being sighted in broad daylight in such a small region are miniscule. The previous day, Turner had been putting out another explanation, suggesting that people might be seeing the glow of the circular exhaust port of jet engines.
Dyvad was also one of many people associated with the Mogul balloon project known to have had UFO sightings (another was Charles Moore who had at least two). See recently added Mogul and UFOs section for details
Another interesting side detail in the following UFO report is that it came from an experimental radar station 18 miles southwest of Corona, N.M. This would have placed it only about 30 miles west of the Brazel debris field of 1947. Following the Roswell incident, the Army CIC and AFOSI were kept very busy investigating numerous UFO sightings over very sensitive New Mexico military and government installations, such as those at Los Alamos and White Sands.
