Richard Dolan vs. Kerry Cassidy: place your bets

        In July last year, I wrote that Richard Dolan is the "egghead of UFOlogy," and indeed he is. His wikipedia article, complete with a list of his publications, confirms it. His own web site, richarddolanpress, lists more of his analytical essays on paranormal subjects. He completely lacks the borderline hysteria that is a feature of most individuals in the UFO "community", instead taking an academic approach to the subject.

        Kevin Moore is a British researcher and documentary video producer/director who is currently working on a documentary about the murderer Mark Richards, with particular emphasis on Kerry Cassidy's interest in him. Kevin's a good guy in my book. He frames his shots correctly and his audio is intelligible.

To recap the case briefly: 
        On 6th July 1982, Richards conspired with two accomplices to murder Richard Baldwin, a vintage auto dealer who he was on friendly terms with. Evidence included fingerprints on the murder weapons, some of Baldwin's property found in Richards' house and truck, and Baldwin's credit card in Richards' possession. A jury convicted him after four days' deliberation, and he was sentenced to life without parole.

        Since incarceration he has spun elaborate yarns about his own heroism as part of "the secret space program," battling and defeating the alien hordes in outer space, at the helm of exotic space battleships. He has made outrageous and impossible claims of military service, and says his first wife was an extraterrestrial.

        All this has impressed Kerry Cassidy so much that she has made the trip to Vacaville nine times to interview "Captain" Mark Richards, recording long recaps of the interviews on video each time. She apparently believes everything Richards tells her, and regards him as a vital whistleblower revealing information the US Government wishes to keep secret.

        She  has written (blog, 26 September—updated 27 October) that Richards was framed for the crime and is a prisoner of "The Illuminati-Draco planetary governement." What ingrates those guys are, eh? You'd think someone who has saved the planet  from alien invasion on multiple occasions would get some respect.

YouTube preview
        Last Friday Moore vouchsafed us all a preview of his work-in-progress, featuring an edited interview with Richard Dolan. Dolan left us in no doubt that, like Moore (and this blog), he thinks Kerry Cassidy has been utterly bamboozled.

03:03 Dolan: "I don't fault someone, again, for holding to a belief but... but if they're going to persist in excluding evidence because of an ideological blindness then... then yes they need to be taken to account. So I'm very glad that you're doing what you're doing because I believe based on the evidence that I have seen that you... you presented a more than strong case that Mark Richards is... is a deeply, deeply, dangerous, disturbed and sick man ....
04:11 "Now I realize that the other side will say "No, he was framed," but the evidence against him is overwhelming."

One day later, Cassidy reacted, in text on her blog.

KC: "Rich is not the man that I once knew.  What was once a fiery rebel working to expose the secrecy and revealing the role of national security as the proof of the coverup of UFOs in our skies, has now become an apologist for the state, hiding behind a false front masquerading as the voice of paternalistic “reason”.  He has settled for only the most conventional and superficial of explanations for a crime that implicates a top whistleblower who has for the past five years been at the cutting edge of our sector, revealing the very guts of the real truth behind the very craft Rich was so fascinated by as a young man.  And yet strangely, it appears that RD never asks himself the question, can evidence be faked?
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"What a coup for the dark side to have recruited this man who once challenged them on every level for their lies and hypocrisy to suddenly join their ranks in pretending that there are no other explanations for this terrible crime than to attack a top whistleblower and officer in the Secret Space Program as being “evil” and “dangerous”?  And why, rather than look deeper into why the state would be well motivated to stop the growing popularity of the Mark Richards disclosures, RD (and others) choose to unquestioningly accept the evidence presented by a man who has no background investigating crimes and little knowledge of the rule by secrecy? Do you not find it the least bit suspicious that in the process RD and Moore are working so hard to discredit me, a journalist who routinely reveals the real truth behind so many of life’s mysteries?"

        It's a mystery where Kerry gets the idea that Dolan is "hiding behind a false front"—in Moore's video he's seen looking relaxed but serious, sitting on a nice soft sofa, presumably in his own home. As to whether she's correct in stating that she "routinely reveals the real truth behind so many of life’s mysteries," that's a matter of opinion. Mine is that she's hopelessly gullible, handcuffed as a journalist by her own paranoia. But I don't think we've heard the last of this.