Doty is actually one of the examples Mellon mentions in his article as something that AARO should have brought up in the report:
Air Force Intelligence “efforts to … obfuscate [and] manipulate public opinion” on UFOs since the 1950s are primarily what caused the harsh
stigma attached to the entire UFO subject in society. But this anti-UFO stigma is not investigated or historically documented by AARO – or even mentioned – contrary to its legal obligation.
This is despite the public admission by former USAF OSI officer Richard Doty that his official assignments included spying on US civilian UAP researchers and breaking into a private home, spreading disinformation about UAP, misinforming two US Senators, and spreading fake UFO documents including some so-called “MJ-12” documents that turned out to be a hoax (Doty radio interview Feb. 27, 2005; see Rojas, “
Open Letter,” posting May 6, 2014, OpenMinds).
And I agree with him there. I don't think it is
just a gish gallop to point out these errors and omissions. Getting dates and names wrong may not be very substantial mistakes in themselves, but it compounds and together with things like the non-working links to sources, not mentioning the Air Force's attempts to obfuscate and mislead (which I frankly think are not in dispute, with regards to how Project Blue Book was run and the activities of Doty) and apparently missing quite a few documented efforts from different government entities to study UAPs it paints a picture of an investigation that was not conducted in a serious enough manner. While I don't agree with Mellon in that people like himself and Vallée needed to be interviewed or consulted, I think AARO would have benefitted from hiring a serious historian with experience in looking through old government records and writing historical reports. I mean, the US government literally has an office equipped to handle such things:
The Office of the Historian!
I have to disagree here, on principle. I don't think it is much better to accept the excuse "they had access to better source materials" for these kinds of errors than when the ufologists accept claims of more clear-cut vidoes and photos being available but classified. It's an appeal to authority, and it goes contrary to the principle of looking at the available data. When every open source Mellon (or I, for that matter) can find on the Kenneth Arnold case says it happened on June 24 1947, why should we accept that AARO has somehow unearthed completely new files claiming another date? Because they are the government? The
National Archive says it happened on the 24th. The
Project Blue Book files says it happened on the 24th. Unless you want to claim that those files either have the wrong date or that copying them somehow turned a "3" into that "4" I think the more plausible explanation is that the observation took place on the 24th and AARO simply wrote the wrong date and no one in the office double-checked it. Is it immediately discrediting the rest of the report, or even the broad strokes? Of course not! It is, in itself, completely inconsequential. But the optics of making such errors
on numerous occassions does, as I said above, paint an unflattering picture of the overall quality of the work effort that went into writing the report.
I think Mellon raises some valid points in his article. The research seems sloppy and not mentioning any of the cases of government obfuscation is a glaring omission (EDIT: I misremembered what was in the report, probably too influenced by having read Mellon's article more recently than it, no excuse for that, but anyways, the report
does mention some claims that USAF was trying to cover things up, but I feel that it isn't engaging especially honestly with the question, saying its only finding was that they could find no evidence of an official or unofficial policy on the matter, which is a rather narrow/naive focus in my opinion) especially since the US Code establishing AARO was very explicit on that point:
The report submitted under subparagraph (A) shall—
(i)
focus on the period beginning on January 1, 1945, and ending on the date on which the
Director of the Office completes activities under this subsection; and
(ii) include a compilation and itemization of the key historical record of the involvement of the
intelligence community with
unidentified anomalous phenomena, including—
(I)
any program or activity that was protected by restricted access that has not been explicitly and clearly reported to Congress;
(II)
successful or unsuccessful efforts to identify and track
unidentified anomalous phenomena; and
(III)
any efforts to obfuscate, manipulate public opinion, hide, or otherwise provide incorrect unclassified or classified information about unidentified anomalous phenomena or related activities.
(my emphasis)
I find his argument that AARO didn't do that hard to argue against, however you interpret the legalese. Could it be part of the classified report? Maybe, but we don't know that, and it would be ironic to say the least if AARO classified the parts that explicitely dealt with government deception.
So over all I think Mellon raises some valid points with regard to the quality of the report and how genuine the US government (through AARO) really are in its efforts with regards to the UAP phenomenon, especially when it comes to the more shady parts of its own historical involvement. Where he loses me is when he try to make the claim that there are many excellent cases with data pointing to the extraterrestial hypothesis, because I think he is simply wrong about that and when he describes the case he focuses on the most (The Nimitz encounters) he himself makes glaring omissions and logical leaps in trying to establish it as beyond reproach, and that AARO's sloppy work on the report is just the latest in a long line of conspiratorial efforts to cover up the truth. At most I think it points to the tendency of the US government (which it has in common with most governments, companies, groups and individual humans) to gloss over or try to hide embarrassing historical attempts at lying in its past, and generally it just feels like an indifference towards the subject matter at hand, and that the people writing it didn't think it was very important work. I have the (completely unfounded) feeling that AARO might not be the most attractive workplace in the Pentagon.
It is of course telling that Mellon himself glosses over the, in my opinion, only "bombshell" in the AARO report: the embarassment that is KONA BLUE and the deceptive ways the Invisible College has used their knowledge of that project proposal to implicate a government coverup of a UAP recovery and reverse-engineering program. That whole charade has emphatically showed that they are not acting in good faith and casts serious doubts on any other claims about government sources and insights that they make. Unfortunately for Mellon, that overshadows the rest of his critique of the report and AARO, valid or not. Owning up to that fiasco would have been a much better look, but it is understandable that he didn't since he is either a true believer (and thus, the goals justify the means) or a grifter, in which case he has no incentive to apologize at all for his involvement with the whole thing. But I still think that just dismissing everything he writes in that article as gish gallop because of that isn't fair nor constructive since some of his arguments do have merit regardless, and those are worthy of discussion.
I feel that the tone of the comments regarding Mellon and this article is reminiscent of how redditors on r/UFOs write about Mick (and the skeptic community as a whole) and that is not a good look.
