I first discovered Richard Dolan when he was interviewed for BoA: Audio back in 2006. Still studying for my BA at the time, I was impressed by his credentials and quickly got myself a revised edition of his excellent UFOs and the National Security State. That book was covered in tremendous depth during his BoA: Audio appearance, so here we're going to focus a little less on UFOs and get Dolan's thoughts and opinions on some other parapolitical topics instead. Most notably: the Kennedy assassinations, 9/11 and the Terror Wars, secret societies and the New World Order.
Richard Thomas: First things first, thank you so much for giving the Room 101 readers the time to answer these questions. I've read both editions of volume one of your book several times and am currently reading volume two, so it's really appreciated.
I was only 15 when 9/11 happened. Looking back on it now, I think that event and, more importantly, its aftermath (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) probably played the biggest part in me becoming interested in conspiracy research or parapolitics. When the War in Iraq first began, I was studying Hitler's rise to power for A-Level History and the parallels between what had happened in 1930s Germany and what was happening today, globally, just seemed obvious to me. In particular, how Hitler exploited the Reichstag fire (which he probably started) to make himself dictator and curtail civil liberties.
How do you think you first became interested in parapolitics (I'm guessing the Kennedy assassination probably played a big part) and do you share my concerns about the parallels between the transformation of the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich and what we see in the world today?
Richard Dolan: I think that there are very serious and scary parallels between what is going on today and what happened in Germany during the 1930s. The connection of 9/11 with the Reichstag fire is the obvious example, but there is much more. The existence and promulgation of The Big Lie, for instance. Hitler (and Goebbels) shamelessly exploited the fears of German people by repeating the most absurd lies over and over again, whether these were about the Jews, or about the Versailles Peace Treaty, or numerous other issues – and it worked. Or, I should say, it worked enough for them to have their way.
Today in the U.S. under Presidents George W. Bush and now Barack Obama, The Big Lie is promoted and peddled to an overstimulated, overworked, and undereducated American public. 9/11 is the linchpin of the entire edifice of deception that has grown around it.
My interest in parapolitics developed by degrees during the 1980s and 1990s, during my twenties and thirties. It didn't happen all at once. Even during my teen years, I was always a bit unconventional in my tastes: I was reading Plato and Shakespeare on my own when I was 14 or so and never stopped reading classical philosophy and literature. During my twenties I did a lot of standard political theory: from Hobbes through Locke and Marx and Weber and everything else. I studied the rise of Hitler to an excruciating degree. All of that was fairly 'conventional,' you might say. By the late 1980s, I was reading the essays of Gore Vidal, which was very influential on my thinking. Vidal wrote some outstanding analyses of the American political scene during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. One, in fact, later inspired the title of my own book: an article he wrote in the late 80s called "The National Security State." His piece was a critique of the Reagan administration, but I ended up taking that phrase as a concept to describe all of post-WWII America.
But the early 1990s, around the time I turned 30, I had discovered Noam Chomsky. Rather late in the day, when I look back on this all. Still, better late than never. Chomsky, like Vidal, was very influential on me. Still, his writing stops short of what we would call 'parapolitics.' As anyone who has read him knows, Chomsky doesn't really "do" conspiracies. I have always found this a little strange, as his general "big picture" political analyses is otherwise frequently so very good. He understands how powerful nations and economic entities systematically pillage the world for their own good – and call it "democracy." But perhaps it's because he is in the academic world that he has never taken the final, necessary, step. That is, to recognize not only that the elites "manufacture dissent" and control the very parameters of what most people even think, but that through black-ops and intelligence community manipulation of the academic world and media, are able to create entirely fictitious scenarios – the kind imagined by George Orwell – and pass it off as truth. In other words, the reality of our world is well beyond even the mendaciousness that even Chomsky sees. And that's pretty bad, indeed.
By 1994, when I began studying UFOs seriously, I was still very much in the "Chomsky mindset." During much of the period of writing my first book, UFOs and the National Security State: An Unclassified History, 1941-1973 (later republished with the subtitle Chronology of a Cover-Up), I was in that frame of mind. In other words, that – while there were lots of 'little' conspiracies, I was not a believer in grand conspiracies.
It wasn't until I became fascinated by the UFO topic that I became convinced that there was something bigger going on. I continued asking myself why wasn't this topic handled with more seriousness in the mainstream avenues of our society? Why did the universities ignore this topic? Why did the newspapers? After seeing the deep national security connections to the UFO topic, it became clear to me that a real, bona fide conspiracy is going on.
Coming to grips with the fact that there was a substantial conspiracy in that arena, it became easier to recognize the existence of other types of conspiratorial activity operating on a grand scale. But all of this took a number of years.
Richard Thomas: Lets take a step back in time before we go on. For me, the sheer number of high profile assassinations in the 1960s is reason enough to at least suspect conspiracy: JFK, RFK, MLK, Malcolm X, even Marilyn Monroe died under suspicious circumstances in that decade. Do you think that the same force could have been responsible for these deaths and what are your thoughts on the two Kennedy assassinations in particular? For instance, do you think Sirhan Sirhan could have been a "Manchurian Candidate"?
Richard Dolan: Every one of those assassinations is deeply suspicious, although I confess I've done comparatively little research on the assassination of Malcolm X. Regarding JFK, it is plainly obvious that he was killed in a conspiracy of some sort, most probably involving the CIA. Other researchers have done a vast amount of work on this, much more than I will ever read. Still, it is clear that after you tally up the many pieces of evidence, a conspiracy was involved. Some of these are:
• the protestations of Kennedy's secret service officer (captured on film) after he was ordered away from the vehicle moments before Kennedy was shot;
• the testimony of many eyewitnesses of four or more gunshots being fired at Daley Plaza; the testimony of the Parkland Hospital surgeons, all of whom described a massive exit wound in Kennedy's right parietal lobe – that is, the right side of the back of his head – indicating an entry point from the front of the head and exiting through the back;
• the destruction of JFK's autopsy records;
• the strange connections to the world of intelligence by such innocuous people as Abraham's Zapruder, who filmed the assassination. Zapruder, for instance, employed as his secretary the wife of a man named Georg von Mohenschildt. Mohenschildt was ex-Abwehr, currently working for the CIA – and the handler of Lee Harvey Oswald. Strange coincidences.
• Then there is the story of the Warren commission, headed by ex-CIA Dir. Allen Dulles, in which included such up-and-coming stars as Gerald R. Ford.
There is so much about the JFK assassination screams conspiracy. 80% of Americans know it was a conspiracy, and 100% of the rest of the world knows it. Yet, the "official" truth is quite otherwise, as we all know.
Regarding Robert Kennedy, yes, this is deeply suspicious. Sirhan Sirhan has never been able credibly to remember the details of the day of the assassination. He kept a diary in the period leading up to the assassination, and I seem to recall that the contents of the diary were very suspicious to investigators, and suggestive of mind control.
The technology of mind control is more substantial and goes back much farther than many people realize. There were substantial efforts by the CIA and other agencies from the 1940s onward to find ways of harnessing the human mind. We all know about how the CIA pioneered the use of LSD during the 1950s, but many people forget it was in order to find the ultimate mind control chemical. Advances in hypnosis were also far more profound than is generally believed.
When we are dealing with the national security and intelligence community – which steadfastly refuses to open its records for public viewing – we will always be at a disadvantage. Yet, to paraphrase an old comedy routine: it looks like it, smells like it, feels like it, and tastes like it.
Richard Thomas: Moving back to present times, there's no doubt at all that 9/11 was misused terribly by the Bush/Blair Axis, but I've heard you go a lot further in other interviews. Do you still believe (like me) that 9/11 was an "inside job" and what, for you, is the best smoking gun evidence? In hindsight, aside from the extremely suspicious way the buildings collapsed, the paper passport, supposedly found in the ruins of the WTC, was the first thing that really raised my suspicions.
Richard Dolan: Certainly, finding Mohammad Atta's passport on the street of New York City following the collapse of the towers – in perfect condition – it is eerily reminiscent of the so-called magic bullet being found on JFK's stretcher at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas. As everybody in the world knows, the wreckage following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers was almost beyond comprehension. My father, who worked at the World Trade Center for its final seven years – and who thankfully had the day off – told me that his colleagues described the remains afterward as absolutely disgusting. Remember, human body parts were liberally distributed throughout the wreckage. I don't mean to be excessively graphic here, but amidst the explosions, fire, dust, rubble, and dead bodies, how did this passport fall all that distance without suffering any damage? Here's another question: how did it get separated from the body of Mohammed Atta? When you travel, you carry your passport with you. Even for an alleged terrorist, he would, after all, need his passport with them in order to have boarded the plane.
But really, the thing that does it for most of us when looking at the evidence of 9/11 is the speed of collapse of the three primary buildings in New York City. All of them dropped at the speed of a brick falling through the air, unimpeded by any resistance. The airliners each struck the North and South towers roughly three quarters of the way up. That means roughly 80 floors of steel below the level of impact. These floors suffered no damage.
Here is a simple question. You can make it multiple-choice, if you like. Would 80 floors of steel offer (A) a lot of resistance, (B) some resistance, or (C) no resistance to the speed of collapse of those buildings? Even if they were to offer as little as, say, one second per floor – which really isn't a lot when you think about it – that would still add roughly 80 seconds to the speed of collapse. And yet the North and South Towers collapsed in about 10 seconds. In other words without any measurable resistance whatsoever. This is simply not credible.
This point is even more significant for the destruction of Building 7 of the World Trade Center complex. This was a 47-story tall steel frame structure which was hit by no aircraft, although it did suffer damage from the North Tower when that tower collapsed. Yet Building 7 came down seven hours later, also at virtual freefall speed, and also in a pile of dust like the other buildings.
It's important to mention these facts because such cases of building collapse are only consistent with those of controlled demolitions. Indeed, fires had never before (nor since) caused steel frame structures to collapse. Never. And there have been fires far worse even than those which ravaged the World Trade Center buildings. The World Trade Center buildings were not made with design flaws, as some people have tried to argue. They were made competently to say the least, and indeed were designed to withstand multiple impacts of commercial airliners.
That's only a beginning, of course. There are so many more questions one can raise, not simply with the New York City aspect of 9/11, but with the Pentagon, Pennsylvania, the fact that NORAD was asleep at the wheel, the connections that existed between members of Al Qaeda, the CIA, and the Pakistani ISI. All of these and more lead us to become very deeply suspicious of what happened on September 11, 2001.
Richard Thomas: What exactly do you mean by the term "inside job?" Do you think 9/11 was a Bush/Cheney led plot or do you believe the Neocons were just small pieces in much larger globalist game of chess? I've heard you talk about the Bilderberg Group a little on certain podcasts, do you think they or other secret or quasi secret groups might have been responsible in some way?
Richard Dolan: I'm glad you asked this because I have maintained for years that to call 9/11 an inside job does not necessarily mean that it was planned out of the Bush/Cheney White House. Any reasonable study of the office of the U.S. presidency shows us that the office has been beholden to international financial interests for many, many years. In my new book, UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991, I point out that Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush all were beholden to financial interests that were vastly more powerful than the office of the President. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to describe David Rockefeller as America's kingmaker for the past half-century.
Therefore, calling 9/11 an inside job is more likely to mean that there are strong international components to it. Also, we must remember the nature of the intelligence world. Not only United States intelligence community, but all intelligence communities tend to operate with little to no public oversight, and have developed relationships among themselves in ways that most people can't even fathom. There are also innumerable rogue elements within the intelligence world. There is a lot of money – a great deal of money – floating around in that world and very little effective oversight. How hard is it to imagine that a powerful rogue group might decide that an event like 9/11 was necessary for them to further certain ends? The U.S. president would be utterly irrelevant in the planning process, and indeed would be a hindrance. The President's job would be simply to go along with the program once everything went down. That, and presumably not to ask too many uncomfortable questions.
Richard Thomas: If Osama Bin Laden wasn't behind 9/11, why do you think we're still in Afghanistan? One of the more alarming things I've heard you talk about in your lectures is that illegal drugs are actually big business, on a par with oil and arms. Do you think this might be the real reason for the continued NATO occupation of Afghanistan?
Richard Dolan: Drug trafficking is unquestionably one of the world's largest businesses. Nobody knows if it's the largest, the second-largest, the third-largest, or even the fourth-largest. You've got weapons, cars, oil, and drugs. Simply because narcotics are illegal doesn't mean that nobody wants all that money. Everybody wants that money, from streetcorner pushers, to police officers on the take, to local public officials, to federal officials, to intelligence agencies, to major banks and financial entities that receive fees for laundering the proceeds. Everybody wants that money. It so happens that the Taliban, for all of their horrible deeds, nevertheless suppressed opium production in Afghanistan during the late 1990s. And it is also true that opium production dramatically rose after the invasion in 2001.
There are other things to note about Afghanistan, however. One is the natural gas pipeline, which had been a dream of leaders of industry and finance for a long time. An enormous amount of natural gas lies to the north of Afghanistan. Getting it to industrial countries like the U.S., is not so easy, however. The idea was to create a pipeline to the sea, compress it into liquid form, and ship it. That's expensive, but in an era of uncertain natural gas availabilities, still an attractive option. If you look at a map of the region, you'll see that a faster, more direct route actually lies to the nation of Iran. But during the late 1990s, Afghanistan seemed to be a more likely route for the pipeline: Afghanistan to Pakistan and then to the sea. Now, that pipeline has had all kinds of problems of construction during these years. Most likely, we can attribute this to the nonstop fighting that has occurred in that country since 2001. Nevertheless, this is a major geopolitical reason for the U.S. presence in that country.
Richard Thomas: I suspect getting control of Iraq's oil was the major reason for the Anglo-American 2003 invasion of Iraq, but what do you think of the idea that capturing ancient astronaut technology left behind in the country could have been another reason?
Richard Dolan: That idea has been put forth by several researchers, most notably Jim Marrs, who has done some outstanding investigation during his lifetime. It's still hard for me to make my own determination on this thesis, so I'm going to pass on that one for now, except to comment on one thing. This was the systematic plundering of the Baghdad Museum. Most people probably remember this. This was a massive and yet surgical-like looting of perhaps the most important ancient museum in the world. All of this was done under the watchful eye of U.S. troops, and the entire world followed the progress, which lasted several days. If there were ancient secrets to be stolen and exploited, we may presume that they existed within that museum, perhaps within the many secret underground layers that have been rumored to exist.
There is no question, however, that international financial groups have wanted to privatize Iraq's oil for many years. Indeed, David Rockefeller himself met with Saddam Hussein during the late 1980s to try to make that happen. Also, representatives of Kissinger Associates. Back in the bad old days of Saddam, all that oil was owned and controlled by the Iraqi government. That meant that, yes, Saddam and his family could skim and live like kings, but it also meant that the oil paid for the Iraqi infrastructure: hospitals, schools, roads, and so on.
The problem, however, from the point of view of international finance, was very simple. They did not own that oil, and hence could derive no profit from it. After the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam's government retained control over the Iraqi oil fields. However, after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, all changed. It's one of the great, unremarked stories of our time how the Iraqi oil has now gone over to multinational – that is private – control.
Well, not unremarked upon in Iraq, of course. Those people know full well what has been going on.
Richard Thomas: 9/11 was eight years ago and Bush as well as Blair are long gone. Do you share my concerns that the general public seem to think President Obama, in and of himself, is some kind of resolution to the last eight years, even though Obama has actually only expanded the War in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan? Also, have you seen Alex Jones' latest film the Obama Deception and, if so, what are your thoughts on it?
Richard Dolan: I think The Obama Deception is a fine piece of journalism. Barak Obama campaigned on a platform of "change you can believe in." But as you suggest, there has been no change. One journalist recently made the apt remark: "want to know what Bush's third term would have looked like? You're living it." And it's true that Obama's major policies are all extensions of what we were seeing under George W. Bush. From the expansion of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the trillion dollar "stimulus package" for which there is no money to pay, to the ever-increasing power of federal agencies to spy on citizens, and especially to the increasing speed of the creation of a kind of global hegemony by financial elites. One fact pointed out in the Obama Deception was how this current administration is dominated by Wall Street finance to a greater degree than any previous U.S. presidency. All of Barack Obama's top advisors come from Wall Street.
Barack Obama attended, along with Hillary Clinton by the way, the 2008 Bilderberg Group meeting. This is now an open secret. It should be clear to anyone who has done some investigation on this that Barack Obama became President in order to clean up America's dirty face. To give America a better public image. To give the appearance of change, while moving full speed ahead with the actual agenda, which includes globalization, stripping away of personal privacy, and the continued privatization to select hands of the resources that matter: oil, water, and so on.
Richard Thomas: Speaking of Alex Jones, in his film Endgame, he documents the dark history of Eugenics and argues that the whole point of the New World Order super-state being constructed is to carry out Eugenics on an unprecedented global scale. The elimination of at least 80% of the world population and the transformation of the global elite into super beings via the merger with advanced technology.
I know you have at least some interest in Transhumanism and what is called the Technological Singularity (as do I) so what do you think of Jones' Endgame scenario and assertion that Transhumanists are crypto Eugenicists?
Also, do you think we need some kind of international law or agreement to insure the technology involved in creating a Trans or Post-human is not abused?
Richard Dolan: I think all of these points are valid and there needs to be a greater public discussion about it. Our technology is evolving so rapidly, and I'm afraid our ability to grasp the implications of what we are doing is continually lagging far behind. We have now deciphered the human genome. We are very close to having advanced nanotechnology. The combination of those two sciences can mean all kinds of things. It could mean a virtual utopia for all human beings, provided that such technology were used for the benefit of humanity at large.
And yet, we must assume that those individuals who have hitherto been "Masters of the Universe" would have no desire to for this outcome. It isn't hard for them – or for most of us, for that matter – to see that we are in the midst of a dangerous population explosion. We are sucking down global resources at a rate that is probably not sustainable. A mere century ago there were about 2 billion people in this world. We are now approaching 7 billion people, with each person using vastly more natural resources than did our ancestors. It's almost certainly not sustainable in the long term.
The global elites who are creating this new world system presumably see this and more. They also see the opportunity of creating their own form of Utopia. Most of us, unfortunately, are standing in their way.
Richard Thomas: While on the topics of Eugenics and population reduction, like me, will you be refusing any compulsory Swine Flu vaccination or are you unconcerned? Also, do you give any credence to the idea that Swine Flu could be some kind of manmade bioweapon?
Richard Dolan: There is no way that I will allow anyone to poke me or members of my family with a swine flu vaccination. There are too many risks associated with the vaccination that have already come to light. We don't do many medications in my house, anyway. I'll stick to my carrot juice, thank you very much.
As to whether or not the current swine flu is a bio weapon, I'll wait until I encounter tangible evidence before I make a strong statement about. But this is the kind of thing has been done before. We know for sure that U.S. military and intelligence groups have played games with diseases in the past. This goes back to the 1940s and 50s at the least. Indeed, the anthrax scare of 2001 has now been traced to Fort Detrick Maryland. I assume most people can readily understand what that means.
Richard Thomas: Somewhat disturbingly, of course, the idea of using advanced technology to create a new superspecies isn't too far removed from David Jacobs' hybrid theories as outlined in The Threat. Also, we can't really talk about human-alien hybridisation and the New World Order without at least mentioning David Icke's extremely controversial reptilian ideas.
I suppose my question is do you think the alien agenda and the New World Order endgame could in fact be one and the same, or, to put it another way, could the aliens be the secret rulers of the world? If so, how old do you think this conspiracy could be: for instance, do you think it's possible mankind could be their creation?
Richard Dolan: With questions like these, we naturally enter a realm of speculation. Jacobs' theory does have a certain compatibility with what you're talking about. The real question is, if there has been a long-standing alien presence on our world in some form or another, have they been manipulating us? Although definitive proof eludes us, there are suggestive reasons for thinking this is the case.
One of my friends, Colleen Clements, who has a PhD and formerly taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has written a number of books that suggest this scenario. If so, if we have been "developed" in some way, it's not much of a stretch to assume that these other beings would consider us something of an investment. Would they want to control, at least in broad terms, our social and political and intellectual development? Might they be doing so now? These are the themes that people like David Icke discuss, and as crazy as they sound to the uninitiated, responsible investigators are obligated to inquire. We may not have answers easily forthcoming. But when you are doing an investigation, you have to do it honestly and courageously. You can't rule things out because they seem absurd to you at first glance. You have to look at the facts and decide what scenarios fit within those facts.
Richard Thomas: We've discussed some deeply dark and scary topics in this interview do you have any solutions to the problems the world faces that our readers can put into practice?
Richard Dolan: We all need to keep in mind that human history is filled with crisis and suffering. There has been no period, ever, in our history in which people did not face serious difficulties and even questions concerning their very survival. It's nothing new.
For all people, at all times, facing difficulties requires a kind of calm courage. You have to stay calm in order to learn the facts that you need to know. And you have to be brave. I've come to see our life as something akin to flying a glider plane through a hurricane. It's a hell of a wild ride, and at the end of it we all crash and burn. There is no way out of that. So what we have to do is first accept the hurricane, and secondly experience all that we can from it – learn from it, and enjoy whatever we can along the way. Because that's our life.
We have been handed this precious gift. We could just as easily not exist at all. And yet here we are. What do we choose to do with this existence of ours? Sadly, most people basically throw it away. But for every person there is the opportunity to begin the long journey of expanding their awareness and consciousness. It is only through heightened awareness of ourselves and our world that we can find meaning in what we do, and organize with each other to the extent that we can actually effect positive change.
To put it another way, most of us sleepwalk our way through life. Now it is time to wake up.
Richard Thomas: Thanks again Rich, please tell our readers how they can get signed copies of both volumes I and II of UFOs and the National Security State and when they may expect to see Volume III?
Richard Dolan: My books are available at my website: keyholepublishing.com. I sign all copies of books that are sold directly from my website. Of course the books are also available at Amazon.com.
I do not expect the third volume of my history to take nearly as long as it took for the second one to appear. Nearly all of the research for volume 3 is already completed. I think two to three years is reasonable to expect. At that point I will have completed a three-volume, 1,600-page history of UFOs. Even now, it surprises me when I think about it. I've enjoyed this journey of mine, of delving into this topic and having the opportunity to learn the things I've learned, and to communicate what I've learned to other people. There is still a long way to go, and there is still a great deal for me to learn. I want to live long enough to make some real progress on this issue.
