Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, the CIA, UFO Disinfo, and Wonkette?

Political gossip blog Wonkette strays into Spooky territory this week with a story on President Jimmy Carter, George Bush I, and claims of a UFO snow job. I've already mentioned Carter's UFO report, but according to Carter administration White House lawyer Daniel Sheehan, fake UFO documents were used in an attempt to embarass Carter and prevent him from reforming the intelligence community, in particular the CIA.

The details of the story can be read at the link, but while the story seems a bit extreme, it is just a larger example of what was done to Paul Bennewitz (as detailed in Greg Bishop's Project Beta), and apparently to Linda Moulton Howe by Air Force Office of Special Intelligence counterintelligence agent Richard Doty.

I was skeptical of this story, told by Sheehan in recent years and pieced together in the 2000s. In particular, I was skeptical that stories of crashed saucers would have been used in 1977. Before Roswell is revived in the very late 1970s, crashed saucer stories were much more obscure than after the publication of The Roswell Incident in 1980. There were a few researchers interested in the topic in the 1970s, in particular Leo Stringfield. But I thought his work on this topic was too obscure, and it wouldn't make sense to have government disinformation utilizing the concept at that time.

Within a day of finding about this story, Nick Redfern posts that Stringfield was under surveillance by the FBI and Air Force. Not so obscure after all.