Richard Dolan on changing UFO research cultures and his USO case collection
Source interview: Watch on Disclosure Team’s YouTube channel.
Interview analysis
Richard Dolan describes the transition from a small research community dependent on printed journals and scarce books to an online field with wider access and fewer editorial barriers. Adams asks how those changes affected the questions researchers asked, the disclosure movement and the quality of material now released to the public. Dolan then explains how he assembled and coded a collection of reported unidentified submerged object encounters, drawing conclusions about patterns and intent from the selected cases. His closing political forecasts express his expectations in September 2026, rather than findings from that historical or case research.
Key themes
The archive changed who could participate
Dolan’s recollection of interlibrary loans, used-book contacts and difficult-to-find journals shows how access shaped his early research. He contrasts that scarcity with online archives that allow more people to investigate the same material. His account is especially useful as a participant’s history of changing practice, while the chronology and character of earlier organisations remain subjects for their surviving publications.
Wider access weakened the old editorial barriers
Small-circulation journals and personal networks gave way to bulletin boards, websites and video platforms. Dolan sees gains in participation alongside an increased ability to circulate unsupported or sensational claims. The important change is not simply the quantity of information: readers have to reconstruct the editorial checks and source trails that a publication may once have supplied.
Public release and analytical usefulness are separate
Dolan welcomes access to military recordings while criticising the absence of distance, speed and other contextual information. He also distinguishes artistic reconstructions from original observations. A release can document what an institution held or considered worth reconstructing without settling the movement or identity of the object depicted.
A selected case collection and an inference of intent
Dolan describes reducing thousands of potential USO reports to roughly 700 cases and recording common variables. He interprets changes in night-time reporting and differences in equipment effects as signs of deliberate behaviour. Those patterns need to be assessed against case selection, witness opportunities, reporting practices and the availability of equipment before they can identify an actor’s intentions.
Assessment
Make the selection and coding available for comparison
The USO collection offers a way to recover neglected accounts and ask explicit questions across them. Its statistical interpretation depends on how cases entered the sample, how missing information was handled and whether a later report repeated an earlier source. Publishing the case references and coding decisions would let other researchers test the day–night and equipment-effect comparisons. Dolan’s broader explanations involving hidden bases or strategic concealment remain hypotheses beyond what a reported pattern alone can establish.
Navigate the source interview
- 1:05 — Dolan’s entry into UFO research in the 1990s
- 4:25 — Printed sources, limited circulation and research access
- 7:55 — Bulletin boards, the web and changing editorial barriers
- 10:35 — Early organisations and their relationship with government
- 16:04 — How historical circumstances shaped researchers’ questions
- 19:43 — Abductions, crop circles and the expanding subject
- 25:02 — The 2001 disclosure event and later advocacy
- 28:19 — Dolan’s assessment of the 2017 media turning point
- 34:34 — Public releases and missing video metadata
- 40:41 — How the USO book project began
- 43:39 — An individual historical witness account and its survival
- 46:23 — Coding case characteristics in a spreadsheet
- 47:38 — Day–night patterns and reported equipment effects
- 50:15 — Underwater bases as Dolan’s interpretation
- 54:34 — Cold War naval reporting and Soviet accounts
- 58:34 — Historical cases and researchers he would revisit
- 66:14 — Political forecasts and rumours of an official announcement
Questions
1:29 How did the UFO research landscape of the 1990s differ from the present?
16:04 Were earlier researchers asking different questions because of their historical circumstances?
19:43 Did the expansion into abductions and other subjects strengthen or complicate research?
36:25 Has the evidence improved, or has public discussion mainly become more acceptable?
40:41 How did Dolan find and select the reported USO cases?
50:15 What leads him from the case collection to a hypothesis about underwater operations?
66:14 What would an official announcement need to provide beyond a political statement?
Selected quotations
Three full stops (...) mark words omitted from the transcript, including verbal filler or false starts. Every retained word follows the source transcript. Use the linked timestamp or full transcript for surrounding context.
everything was analog. Even the fact when I wrote my first book, the fact that I had used internet at all in my research was seen as a mark against me.
Dolan recalls the research culture surrounding his first book, contrasting the scarcity of printed sources with later digital access.
you don't really know how fast these things were. You don't know how distant they were to the camera.
Dolan explains why the released videos he is discussing may be interesting without supplying the information needed for a reliable motion analysis.
I extracted about 15 or sometimes 16 different data points out of it.
Dolan describes coding each selected USO case by features such as lighting, reported shape, relation to the water and effects on equipment.
Sources
- Source interview on YouTube — Adams’s full discussion with Dolan, including his account of assembling and coding the USO collection.
Read the full source transcript (plain text). The supplied wording and time markers are retained.