Richard Dolan didn’t have a sighting. He wasn’t abducted. He didn’t experience lost time or repressed memories.
But he does believe that UFOs exist, even though he hasn’t seen one.
Educated at the University of Rochester (N.Y.), Dolan was an Oxford scholar who also spent a summer studying in East Germany while the Iron Curtain still stood. He was in the middle of his doctoral dissertation on U.S. diplomacy in the time of President Harry Truman when he wandered into a book store, and there, lying on top of a stack of books, was something titled “Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up” by Timothy Good.
“Even I knew there were claims of a UFO cover-up in the 1940s,” he says, “and I had vaguely heard of this place called Roswell, N.M. So it occurred to me that if I was studying that period of time, and if there were even a little bit of truth in these claims, why hadn’t I read about it in any academic history book? And I thought, ‘Let’s just get this settled. I’m going to take two months out of my life, research this and figure out if there’s anything to it or not. Two months, and I’m out.’”
It’s now 25 years later, and Dolan says he’s never lost interest in the rabbit holes down which his research has taken him. He’s the author of several books, including the recent “UFOs for the 21st Century Mind,” and a respected speaker at events like the Ozark Mountain UFO Conference, the oldest one of its kind in the U.S., looking not at what he or anybody else believes but what the paper trail proves.
“One thing I’ve always been good at is basic research, so I started with a standard bibliographic search. What are the primary books the believers support and the ones the skeptics use to debunk those beliefs?,” he recounts. “And what I discovered early on, at least to my satisfaction, was that those who believed in UFOs had a shockingly good case.”
Dolan goes on to explain that declassified government and military documents, opened to the public in the late 1970s and early 1980s through the Freedom of Information Act, “supported the reality of UFOs.”
“I didn’t care what anybody’s opinion was, but I did care that leading generals were having serious conversations in the classified world while they were at same time telling the public nothing had happened,” he says. “Those documents proved — not hinted, not suggested, proved — that the military were interested in and concerned about these disc-shaped objects that showed incredible maneuverability and were able to evade our interceptors in repeated flights through sensitive air space. Were they Russian? Were they some secret U.S. project? Our analysts asked these same questions and came up empty. And a whole avalanche of questions just started falling around me!
“It has been the most fascinating journey I could ever have imagined.”
Dolan first came to the Eureka Springs conference at the invitation of its now deceased founder, Lou Farish, whom he calls “a very knowledgeable and insightful man.” The conference, he adds, always brings together “a lot of fascinating, brilliant people who think outside the box and want to tell people like me their stories.”
Many of those personal tales “seem very credible” to Dolan and bring him back to the bigger questions about UFOs.
“The frustrating thing is not that I can’t prove they’re real. I can,” he says. “But the most difficult part of the mystery is what do they really represent? Who are these entities? Why do they do what they do? I still haven’t grasped the enormity of all that — and it’s possible I never will. As one friend of mine said, it’s like dogs getting together for conferences to talk about what humans do when they pull out of the driveway in the morning. It may simply be beyond anything we can really grasp.”
__
FAQ
Ozark Mountain
UFO Conference
WHEN — April 13-15
WHERE — Inn of the Ozarks in Eureka Springs
COST — $20-$150; live streaming is $43
INFO — ozarkufoconference.com
BONUS — Other speakers include author Donna Lynn; researcher Nick Redfern; Chase Kloetzke, an expert on the Starchild Skull; Tricia McCannon on “Ancient and Modern Visitation of the Star Nations”; Nancy Tremaine on “Re-Introduction to the Reptilians”; and Grant Cameron on “Disclosure 2018.”
