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That IP address, controlled by a company in New York, was actually assigned to the domain myprivacytools.com. They are a company that sells a software program called "Hide My IP", which routes connections through anonymous proxy servers to hide where a computer is actually connecting from. I thought it was very strange that Roger Huffman would go to the extreme of hiding his location when sending me a message. It was on checking the second email received from him that my suspicions grew even more. The location from which the second email had originated, traced directly to Qwest Communications, an Albuquerque, NM area Internet Service Provider. In fact, the IP address traced outside of Albuquerque to a location in the small town of Milan, New Mexico. A check with Qwest Communications verified that the IP address in question was one of their IP addresses, though they would not say more than that. This same Qwest Communications IP address range soon echoed in another strange way.

In 2005 and 2006 a peculiar scenario began to evolve concerning a mysterious
Project Serpo
. The details of the project are unimportant here, but what is significant is that Richard Doty was apparently caught using deceptive email accounts to add support for the existence of this previously unknown project. As enthusiasts interested in this subject began to exchange emails and look for evidence that the project was genuine, other email messages began to appear from mysterious individuals who seemed to add support for the project and to bolster each others’ stories. Fortunately, a few clever souls at www.realityuncovered.com became suspicious of these email messages and the way they seemed to fit together a bit too nicely. As I had just recently done, they also decided to check the email headers to see what they could find.

What they discovered was that while the suspect messages appeared to have come from three or four different email accounts, each with different usernames, they had, in fact, all come from the same block of IP addresses as Richard Doty’s emails. In on instance, email from three different accounts, one of which was Doty’s, was shown to have originated from one specific IP address. With that, these researchers had to conclude that Doty himself had been writing all these messages using email accounts registered under fictitious names. A clamor arose as supporters of Doty and the Serpo story tried to downplay this evidence. Doty denied his involvement, and various attempts by others to explain away the IP address issue strained credulity. In the end, the sheer number of emails coming from IP addresses that traced back to Richard Doty left most informed readers wary of the entire Serpo debacle. From my point of view, it showed a prior history of Doty creating email accounts with fictitious names to serve his purpose. It certainly set a precedent for my suspicions about the Huffman emails I was receiving.

When it became apparent that Huffman was not going to answer my question about where he was living, I wrote another more general email to which he did respond. In my reply I asked if I could call him on the telephone to talk about a few things that I preferred not to put into an email. He wrote back, but asked for my telephone number, saying he would call me when he got the chance. Strangely though, before I even had a chance to answer, another email came in, this one saying simply, “Send me your number.” A quick check revealed that the first message originated from the Milan, NM area, but the second appeared to have come once again from New York. I wrote him and sent my telephone number, but I asked politely if he would tell me his area code so that I would know to pick up the call when it came through on Caller-ID. Not surprisingly, I have never received an email reply or a call.

It made no sense that the real Roger Huffman would act so strangely when I was simply trying to verify what someone else had said about him. But not wanting to give even a hint of his location was too suspicious to ignore. When enough time had passed to accept that whoever was using that email address was not going to write back, I decided enough was enough. I followed-up with a lengthy and very direct email in which I laid out my concerns and asked if he would care to offer any kind of explanation. I detailed the evidence of his emails apparently originating from both New York and Milan, New Mexico, pointing that the New Mexico location was exactly where Doty was writing from. I included the fact that when I had asked merely to know where he lived—or even just his area code—he refused to provide any information whatsoever. I told him I had expected that, assuming he did know Doty, he might inform Doty of my questions. However, the fact that he only related the same basic details Doty had previously given, and his emails had come from virtually the same zipcode area as Doty’s, made me wonder with whom I was actually corresponding. I plainly stated I was now suspicious that I was not corresponding with Huffman at all and that I felt there were good reasons to suspect I was actually corresponding with Richard Doty.

By this time, it was my opinion that the email address I had located and used was certainly a fraud aimed at anyone who might see it and use it to write to Huffman. More importantly, I had reason to wonder whether the real Roger Huffman was involved at all! I ended my email expressing my opinion that, even if Roger Huffman was involved, at best there was collusion going on to ensure I got only the information they wanted me to have. I wrote that I hoped my suspicions were unfounded, but that all these issues made me question the truth of anything I had been told.

Needless to say, I never received a reply. Did the evidence implicate Richard Doty in an attempt to impersonate a fellow veteran? Was Roger Huffman, assuming he was writing the emails I received, willing to vouch for Doty’s claims even if it was all a lie? Would someone who had served honorably at the LS-85 and who knew others who had given their lives there allow anyone to usurp a bit of glory by perpetuating a lie? Or was there more to the story? With no evidence that the real Roger Huffman even saw my emails, based on what I had found, I have to believe it was all Richard Doty.

In a final bit of adding insult-to-injury, I forwarded to Col. Clayton a copy of Huffman’s email in which he had verified that Doty had been to LS-85 in early 1968. Col. Clayton then wrote to Huffman, using the same email address, and referred directly to the message that Huffman had sent to me. Col. Clayton then sent me a copy of Huffman’s reply. Huffman, or whoever it was, totally denied he had said any such thing and countered that, after all, Doty had not even joined the Air Force until later that year! To top it all off, he told Col. Clayton that he had never even heard of me. It was an interesting response for someone who should have had nothing to hide.

I can only speculate as to why email messages that appeared to have been sent by Roger Huffman would alternate between originating in the New York City area and a location in what seemed to be Milan, New Mexico. The majority of the email messages I received from Doty and Huffman came by way of a Qwest Communications IP address range suspiciously similar to one Richard Doty’s emails have originated from in the past, with most appearing to have originated at a home or office computer in the vicinity of Milan, New Mexico. To make the issue even more specific, several recent emails sent by Richard Doty to both Col. Clayton and another person I have worked with came from
the exact IP address that Huffman’s email originated from
. Why the real Roger Huffman would be writing from a small town in western New Mexico (or using an anonymous proxy) and feel the need to be evasive about where he lived was odd to say the least. On the other hand, it is fairly common knowledge that Richard Doty now works for the New Mexico State Police and, according to the state police web site, he is a Sergeant in the District 6 substation covering Grants and Milan, NM.
⁷²

In 2007, when I first wrote to Col. Clayton and told him what I was looking into, I was very surprised to learn that he already knew Richard Doty. I admit to being very suspicious when he said that he had known Doty for years, because I could not imagine how they could have known each other if it were not tied somehow to LS-85. It was obvious that Col. Clayton knew Doty—the right Richard Doty—but it was how the two of them had come to know each other in the first place that made Doty’s interest in Lima Site 85 even more compelling to me. The explanation began with Col. Clayton asking me if I had ever heard the name Richard Metzger.

Not knowing who Richard Metzger was when Col. Clayton first asked me about him, I immediately did an online search to see if anything jumped out. That led to an interesting tangent to this story that is worth mentioning. I found a curious match on that exact name, and it was someone I thought at first might be the man in question. A Richard Metzger had started a company in 1996 called
The Disinformation Company
. It was interesting to find the name ‘Metzger’ and ‘disinformation’ together. Disinformation might certainly be a keyword when it comes to Richard Doty. Although I quickly learned this was not the right Metzger, the coincidence still strikes me as strange to say the least.

The Richard Metzger that Col. Clayton had been referring to was supposedly a screenwriter or producer who had expressed an interest in the story of LS-85, with the possibility of working it into a screenplay. In the late 1980s, he began contacting the survivors and the families of those who had been there and arranged to conduct interviews and gather material. Col. Clayton, who was also interviewed, claimed he had caught Metzger exaggerating parts of the script and passing it off as truth, at which point Metzger seemed to disappear. Col. Clayton eventually found him living in Gallup, New Mexico, but the entire issue came to a halt soon afterward when Clayton heard through his sources that Metzger had unexpectedly passed away. Little more happened until a few years later when Richard Doty came onto the scene.

In the early 1990s, an official recovery mission was organized to go back to LS-85 and search for the remains of men missing since the attack in 1968. Col. Clayton was part of that mission and, in the planning stages, he began to contact others who might have information or be able to help. Always wary of hoaxers and wannabes, Col. Clayton and his men devised a set of questions to help them weed out imposters. As the planning progressed and the news spread about the recovery effort, a number of people responded. It was during this period, sometime around 1994, that Richard Doty first contacted Col. Clayton.

Doty introduced himself, telling stories about his own time in Laos and expressing sympathy about what had happened at LS-85. According to Col. Clayton, four people checked out Doty and, on the surface, everything seemed to be in order. One person did voice suspicions about him but nothing seems to have come of it, and eventually someone known and considered reliable vouched for Doty. Exactly how that came about or specifically who vouched for him remains unclear. Regardless, in the early 1990’s Richard Doty contacted Col. Clayton directly and expressed his interest in LS-85—
but he never said a word to suggest he had been there himself.

By what seemed a fortunate coincidence, Doty happened to live in the same Albuquerque-Gallup area where Richard Metzger had been. When Col. Clayton learned this, he told Doty about Metzger and the episode of the suspicious screenplay from a few years before. Doty offered to try to locate Metzger’s widow, a woman named Darlene, and help obtain any documents and other material Metzger had collected during his research and interviews. This material could have been useful in resolving remaining questions about the aftermath of the attack on LS-85, and so Col. Clayton was happy for Doty to try. Col. Clayton was amazed when, virtually overnight, Doty claimed he had located Darlene in Albuquerque, and almost as quickly, claimed to have obtained much of Metzger’s material. Fairly soon however, Col. Clayton began to question a number of similarities he was noticing between Richard Doty and Richard Metzger. Many of the things Doty said began to sound eerily like things that Metzger had said. Col. Clayton began to suspect, if Doty and Metzger were not the same person, they might have been good friends or at least had some other close connection. But Doty maintained that he had never heard of Metzger.

Nevertheless, Doty’s interest in LS-85, the odd similarities to Metzger, and then Doty’s claim to so quickly have obtained Metzger’s material, made Col. Clayton suspicious. The fact that communication with Doty was restricted purely to email only led to more suspicion. As Col. Clayton described it:

“He claims to know many people in the “spook” business that I do, and puts me in touch with them but only thru email. No phone numbers in any of the replies. He even found one of the CAS people who were on the hill that night, and put me in touch with him. When my questions began to get down to what happened that night the words just did not compute, and suddenly I get a message telling me he is moving, and I have been unable to find him again.”

Whether Richard Doty and Richard Metzger had been collaborating on a plan involving the LS-85 story—a plan that had come unwound—was something about which Col. Clayton had wondered for a long time. During my communication with him, Col. Clayton told me he had once met Richard Metzger in Albuquerque, where Metzger had interviewed him. Out of curiosity, I located several pictures of Richard Doty, taken over the last thirty years, and forwarded them to Col. Clayton. He did not think the photos I sent resembled the person he knew as Metzger, though he could not be certain. Col. Clayton has never met Richard Doty face to face; any time he tried to arrange a meeting, there was always some reason Doty was unable to make it. As Col. Clayton and I continued to share notes, even more peculiarities became apparent.