Richard Dolan: from UFO archives to a USO catalogue
Source interview: Watch on Disclosure Team’s YouTube channel.
Interview analysis
Richard Dolan recalls learning UFO history through scarce books, specialist journals and a used-book dealer before online archives transformed access. Vinnie Adams asks how that change reshaped the research community and its expectations of disclosure. Dolan then describes assembling a USO catalogue and using its coded reports to argue that the activity has deliberate patterns. His account connects the recovery of neglected sources with a more contested claim about what their collective behaviour means.
Key themes
From scarce journals to open networks
Interlibrary loans and a helpful bookseller supplied much of Dolan’s early reading, while researchers exchanged work through journals with small circulations. He recalls being criticised even for using the internet in his first book. Later online archives widened participation and made older material easier to inspect, while bulletin boards and video platforms also weakened the editorial barriers he associated with the earlier community. His recollection is therefore about a change in authority as well as a change in access: readers increasingly had to assess the source trail themselves.
What recent releases changed
Dolan places the 2017 reporting within a longer campaign for public recognition and rejects the idea of a single, coordinated disclosure plan. He welcomes access to military clips and the surrounding sequences of the Omaha recording, even while arguing that missing distance information prevents reliable speed estimates. His response to artistic reconstructions is different again: he takes the effort to produce them as a sign of institutional interest. The examples distinguish a recording’s potential for measurement from the political or cultural significance he assigns to its release.
Recovering reports and inferring intention
Dolan says he reduced thousands of potential USO cases to roughly 700 and coded recurring features in a spreadsheet. The Elden White story illustrates his source-recovery work: an alleged 1952 encounter survives through a letter written fourteen years later, retained by NICAP and subsequently brought to his attention through Carl Feindt’s website. Across the collection, Dolan reports a shift towards night-time encounters after 1967 and more frequent electromagnetic effects in military cases. He interprets those differences as deliberate concealment and interference, extending the catalogue from a record of reports into an argument about the actor behind them.
Assessment
Reading the reported patterns
Dolan directs listeners to a free PDF of his spreadsheet, providing a stated route to examine the comparisons he describes. The important question is how much of each pattern survives the selection and coding of the reports. A higher share of military equipment failures, for example, needs to be considered alongside the equipment present and the detail that military observers could record; a change in night-time reporting also needs a consistent basis of comparison across periods. These questions bear directly on his inference of deliberate interference. His closing forecasts about disclosure and political change are personal expectations from September 2026, separate from the historical accounts and reported frequencies.
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 norms surrounding his first book, when printed sources carried an authority that online material had yet to acquire.
for every case that I ... researched, I extracted about 15 or sometimes 16 different data points out of it. Did it happen in the daytime or nighttime? ... what was the shape of the craft? ... was it entering the water? Was it leaving the water? Was it just under the water?
Dolan describes the fields in his USO spreadsheet, which he uses to compare reports of encounters in or near water.
that indicates to me anyway that electromagnetic interference is not just some random byproduct of these objects which a lot of times people had wondered about. But I think ... it can be used intentionally for specific purposes as a form of ... sometimes what I call data denial by them.
Dolan interprets his reported difference between military and civilian cases as deliberate interference. He is proposing a cause for a pattern in the selected accounts.
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.