Richard Dolan, one of the world's leading thinkers of the UFO subject, has again offered an original analysis, one that is sorely needed in our time. Despite a new partial openness to public discussions of UFOs since 2017, the most important question continues to be left unasked: who are these beings and what do they want?

This is perhaps the most vexing problem within an already difficult subject. Dolan has gathered together a mass of UFO contact and abduction cases and has tried to make sense of them.

Dolan argues that:

• The "true" UFOs are not ours.
• Aliens are here mainly because of our own development as a society and as a species.
• There is more than one group here, some arriving earlier than others.
• At least one of these groups operates on an entirely different level than we do, making it difficult to deal with them.
• At least one of these groups may be a genuine threat to us.

This is because it is humanity's particular development that has drawn in the galactic neighborhood to see what is going on, and perhaps to influence it.

To my wife Tracey.

My partner in everything.

This book would not have happened without the generous help and support from many people.

I am grateful to those individuals who have helped not only in the operation of our active website, but whose insights into the UFO subject and alien encounters has been very helpful to me. They are Kirsten Blackburn, Dr. Bob McGwier, Mark H., Jay King, and Sherri Miller. I also want to thank our good friends at PursuingX who have worked so hard for us. I hope all these people realize just how much Tracey and I have appreciated them.

I want to thank Sherri Miller a second time for the excellent artistic contributions she generously provided for this book. In addition, Thanks also to “Danny” (pseudonym) not only for discussing his experiences, but for his own arresting images of one of the entities he encountered. Dr. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens graciously allowed for the use of his collection of alien images. Researcher Michael Schratt and artist Tom Bogan also contributed striking illustrations for several cases described in these pages. While we are on the matter of artistic contributions, I must thank my wife, Tracey Garbutt Dolan, for contributing two outstanding sketches of her own encounters.

There are too many people who’s ideas have reached me directly to make an imprint in one way or another into this book. I can’t mention them all but want to acknowledge Drew Streitberg, David Wenbert, “Active Guardian,” and Scott Santa. I apologize to the many people I have overlooked.

Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife, Tracey. We have been partners in everything great and small, rain or shine. She has helped me in more ways than I can describe, and pulled me through more hard times than I have a right to expect. And she has always been there for me, just as I am for her. For all that and more, thank you my love.

Compared to everything else I’ve ever written, this book goes into some wild directions. For more than twenty years I have written about UFOs, a subject that has been on the fringes, often subject to ridicule. But I have always tried to do so with care to the facts and to restrain my speculative impulses.

This book, however, is an unapologetic speculative analysis on the most challenging question in the UFO subject: who are the aliens and what do they want?

I didn’t consider writing this book until early 2020, when I began to prepare two new lectures for an online conference. One was titled, Humanity’s Fourth Stage. It was a way to formulate the long history of our species into three stages, and an argument that we are now entering the fourth grand stage. Essentially, the path from hunting and gathering, to sedentary agriculture and the birth of cities, to science and industrialization, to where we now stand in the early 21st century: an age of artificial intelligence and transhumanism. In other words, I argue that we are embarking on a deep and irreversible transformation of the foundations not only of human civilization, but of the human being.

The other lecture I prepared that spring was titled Alien Agendas: An Executive Briefing. That lecture is the germ of this book. There I tried to gather what I considered to be the best evidence from the many stories of alien encounters and make sense out of them. I am well aware of how treacherous such a project can be. UFO sightings are hard enough to write about, but at least there are good cases attested to by multiple witnesses, electronic and physical evidence, and even declassified government records. You’ve got something tangible to work with. Yes, there are many gaps in that story, but at least there is a core of solid evidence that a researcher can work with.

It’s much harder with claims of alien contact. It’s not so much that the claims are not credible. In my own opinion, many of them are. But very few of them consist of multiple witnesses. Many of them occur under traumatic circumstances. Nearly all of them take place under circumstances in which the witness is wholly overmatched by the alien intellect, technology, and cognitive management capabilities. They can control our emotions to a large extent, and they have the ability to impair or even bury our memories of them. They work exceptionally well by stealth, much to the detriment of our ability to deal with them. Not least of which is our own psychological resistance to the entire idea of alien encounters, which in the context of our official narratives of what constitutes reality, often seems preposterous even to the person who experienced the event. All of which makes our information and judgements about them imperfect, to say the least.

Despite those and other obstacles to our understanding, researchers have access to a great amount of information about alien encounters. To a lesser but still significant extent, also about the aliens themselves. The information is not entirely uniform; there are inevitable discrepancies in how people describe the beings they encountered. But the broad consistency of many accounts, including many arcane details, is undeniable.

There are conventional ways of explaining those consistencies. Most common are psychological and social causes. For more than fifty years our culture has been very familiar with the idea of alien abduction. Like it or not, the stereotypical notion of small gray aliens with large wraparound eyes taking people in the dead of night for medical examinations has made its way into our collective psyche. It’s a truly rare person who has never encountered the idea. Therefore it’s all contamination, argue quite a few skeptics.

We can’t ignore the possibility that any single account might be the result of social influences. But when we get into the details, many of these stories don’t easily allow for a psycho-social explanation. Aside from the fact that many recollections of an abduction or encounter are vivid and highly specific, they are bewildering to the people having them. It’s fair to say that many, maybe most, would prefer to believe their experience was imaginary.

Then there is the sheer quantity. Whereas we can measure at least a small portion of UFO sightings, since there are a few databases that house such reports, we don’t have anything comparable that records alleged alien encounters. But there is no question that a massive data trove has developed over the years, contained in countless books, articles, interviews, and collected studies. The number of reported cases runs into the thousands; how many thousands I have no idea, but the number is high enough.

One of the biggest hurdles to accepting the idea of alien encounters is basic skepticism about UFOs themselves. But a detailed review of proven UFO reports, especially military reports in which it’s clear that authorities were utterly mystified by an extraordinary object, certainly hints strongly that someone else is here. Someone our society has not acknowledged. Explaining all such cases as exotic black budget technology, or as Russian or Chinese technology, fails miserably. The door is open to other probabilities, other intelligences.

I long ago concluded that the most reasonable explanation for the best UFO reports is that “others” are here, somehow, from somewhere. Once we make that single admission, it becomes easier and frankly logical to recognize that the recollections of so many people actually do have a reason to be accurate. We acknowledge that aliens are probably here. People are remembering specific details about apparent aliens often, though not always, in connection with UFO sightings. There actually is a solid foundation for us to believe that some of these people did in fact encounter aliens.

I decided to work with these accounts on the basis that they are fundamentally true and try my best to make sense of them. Making the call on which cases are more noteworthy than others will always be filled with some subjectivity. It’s probably impossible for anyone to know the full history of all such encounters, or to understand them all at the deepest levels. It’s easy to make a mistake in judgement and I am sure several have crept into my own study. But I also believe that it is possible to review cases that appear to be strong and information-rich, and to develop a reasonable picture of what we are dealing with. This is what I have tried to do here.

That is why I think of this study as a speculative analysis. By speculative, I don’t mean imaginative. I mean an attempt to fill in a picture based on the available information, a picture that can offer a scenario that makes sense based upon what we (think we) know. That makes analysis important. We take what we have and try our best to puzzle out what makes the most sense. It’s an imperfect method for knowledge, and perhaps knowledge isn’t the best word to use here. “Developing a hypothesis” would be more accurate. But few people would deny the value of developing hypotheses for what is surely one of the most vexing and potentially important phenomena of our time.

Some things only become obvious in retrospect. After I completed my research into what I have called the fourth stage of humanity, it became clear to me that we can’t understand the presence of other beings here on planet Earth without understanding the long trajectory of humanity. This is especially so regarding the current place we have found ourselves along that long path. Where we are right now matters very much in connection to an alien presence. Before we understand what these other beings are doing here, we need to understand where we have come from and where we are going. For that reason, the basic concept of that research has made its way into this study.

I have been in the UFO field for more than a quarter of a century. My initial position during the 1990s was quite conservative compared with where it is now. In those early years, I told myself that I only had one simple question in relation to UFOs. I didn’t even care to know, so I claimed, whether or not aliens were real. Nor did I concern myself with abductions, or crop circles, or anything else that I considered “weird.” My question was: Do UFOs constitute a genuine, legitimate part of our history?

That was a long time ago. It’s been a long journey to reach my current perspective on UFOs. I learned that the subject served as a gateway into countless other fascinating questions. It turned out to be one of the biggest surprises of my life. Finally, after all these years, I want to go deeper into the weeds. It’s time not simply to acknowledge that, yes, aliens are probably here, but to ask who are they and what do they want?

So, imperfect as I am sure it is, I am offering a scenario of the alien presence and goals. While I am basing everything that follows on evidence that I believe to be valid and true, there remains much that I don’t know and can’t pretend to know. I have no doubt that this is an incomplete picture. In all likelihood, none of us will ever know the full scope of the reality of the UFO/ET phenomenon. But I hope that, as an exploration, you the reader find this to be engaging enough to go the distance with me. There are many fascinating questions in here and important directions for future research.

Since 2017, our public conversation about UFOs has changed dramatically. Many are still unaware of this change, because after all they have their own lives and concerns. Not everyone cares. But anyone with a passing interest in the subject has witnessed a sea change in attitude.

The New York Times, CNN, Fox, Washington Post, Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and many other fully mainstream organizations have been taking the matter seriously. To those of us that have followed UFOs for so many years, the change has been astonishing and refreshing.

None of this has happened before, and it can only be good for us as a society to be able to have a conversation on UFOs. This was impossible even a few years ago. We are now at a point in which voices from the mainstream media are asking, are these UFOs real? Some of them even openly suggest that the answer is yes. At the least, they recognize that there is something out there that seems real enough, and for which we don’t have a conventional explanation.

So far, that’s the limit. Beyond this limit is a wasteland, a place that the establishment media continues rigorously to avoid. It is the no-mans land in which we might openly entertain the notion that someone else, someone beyond our civilization, is behind the UFO phenomenon. It’s the question that everyone sees but no one asks, the omnipresent shoe waiting to drop.

News media coverage of UFOs has suddenly become serious.

There are other no-go zones since the door opened a crack. For example, beyond the question of aliens, there is the question of political and military coverup of UFOs. That is another shoe waiting to drop. Or the question of UFO crash retrievals. This is something that is tantalizingly close to being discussed. It has been raised ever so tentatively, and then it goes away with no attempt to go further. One of the most astonishing moments regarding UFO crash retrievals occurred on May 31, 2019, on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Carlson’s guest was Luis Elizondo, formerly of the Pentagon’s AATIP program connected to UFOs, now a member of To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences (TTSA). The interview ended with this exchange:

Carlson: Do you believe, based on your decade of serving in the U.S. government on this question, that the U.S. government has in its possession any material from one of these aircrafts?

Elizondo: I do, yes.

Carlson: You think the U.S. government has debris from a UFO in its possession right now?

Elizondo: Unfortunately, Tucker, I really have to be careful of my NDA. I really can’t go into a lot more detail than that, but simply put, yes.

Now, you would think that exchange might have been enough to stir up a larger public conversation, but other than within the UFO research community itself, very little changed. Yes, it’s remarkable to hear even a small admission like that coming from establishment media, but we are still taking baby steps.

Not only that, but it’s entirely possible that further progress on the road to Disclosure slows to a grinding halt. There is no inherent reason why the ball will move any farther down the field. The reason, in my own view, is that the revelations have essentially “maxed out.” We are at the point in which there is a semi-official disclosure that something is out there and we don’t know what that something is. That position remains a place of safety from the establishment point of view. It’s a place that continues to allow for the coverup to continue, slightly refreshed and updated for our era.

Who knows how long it will take our society to arrive at a more advanced place in all this. It could take many years. Meanwhile, we can address the deeper questions ourselves.

Based on everything I have researched in relation to UFOs, I long ago concluded that there are aliens, that some of them are here on Planet Earth. From the evidence I will present, there appear to be multiple groups and, most likely, multiple agendas.

There are obviously people who think such a line of inquiry is premature. They might not question my assumption that there are aliens “out there,” but they would definitely push back on the suggestion that any such aliens are here. But I think we can make that assumption. Not with the same level of certainty that a FOIA document can demonstrate that the CIA was having high-level conversations about UFOs, or that the U.S. military has had numerous encounters with inexplicable aerial and oceanic objects. But we can, with reasonable application of intelligence and logic, infer a few important things.

One is that the UFO phenomenon continues to be anomalous and definitely unexplained. Whether it’s the Tic-Tac UFO of 2004 or any other UFO case that you can think of going back through the 1940s and even before that, there is more than enough evidence showing that too many of these objects have been carefully observed doing things that we have believed to be impossible. Our best evidence indicates that at least part of the phenomenon, the core part of the UFO phenomenon, very likely includes what we would call aliens.

We could say they are extraterrestrial, or we might ponder if they are interdimensional in some way, or even whether they might be time travelers of some sort. Or perhaps there are other explanations and scenarios. I am not inclined to believe in most of them, but we can make a reasonable case that at the very least they are not us. They derive from a civilization that is not our own, and is not from here.

That constitutes our starting point.

Dolan at the International UFO Congress in March 2017

Richard Dolan has been researching and writing about UFOs and related matters since the 1990s. He earned degrees in History at Alfred University and the University of Rochester, as well as a Certificate in Political Theory at Exeter College, Oxford University. He was also a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship.

Richard’s background in Cold War history, international diplomacy, and world history enables him to bring a unique perspective to his research into UFOs. He has appeared on many television and radio programs and has lectured around the world.

Richard lives in Rochester, New York with his wife, Tracey Garbutt Dolan.

Find him at richarddolanmembers.com, richarddolanpress.com, and his Youtube Channel to find out about his current projects.

The Alien Agendas: A Speculative Analysis of Those Visiting Earth

Richard Dolan
Richard Dolan Press
Rochester, New York 14619 USA

Copyright © 2020 by Richard M. Dolan
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Richard Dolan Press and logo are registered trademarks of Richard Dolan Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dolan, Richard Michael
     Alien Agendas: A Speculative Analysis of Those Visiting Earth / by Richard M. Dolan
     245 p. cm.
     Includes bibliography and index.
     ISBN 9798557741590
     1. Unidentified Flying Objects
     2. History.
     I. Dolan, Richard M. II. Title

First published in the United States by Richard Dolan Press
First Printing: December 2020
Cover Design by Enrico C. Gabuyog, Jr.

All photographs and illustrations in this book were reproduced with the kind permission of their owners, or else are in the public domain.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Also by Richard Dolan:
UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up
UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed
A.D. After Disclosure: When the Government Finally Reveals the Truth About Alien Contact
UFOs for the 21 Century Mind: A Fresh Guide to an Ancient Mystery
The Secret Space Program and Breakaway Civilization
UFOs and Disclosure in the Trump Era