William L. Moore

William Moore is an American author who, with Charles Berlitz, wrote The Roswell Incident (1980), the book that first revived widespread public interest in the 1947 New Mexico case decades after it had faded from memory, and who later collaborated with Stanton Friedman on further Roswell and MJ-12 research. Moore was among the researchers who brought the disputed Majestic 12 documents to public attention in the mid-1980s, and his standing within the field collapsed after a 1989 MUFON symposium address in which he admitted to having knowingly participated, on behalf of Air Force Office of Special Investigations contacts, in a disinformation campaign targeting fellow researcher Paul Bennewitz — feeding Bennewitz false and increasingly elaborate claims about alien bases and government conspiracies that reportedly contributed to a severe psychological breakdown. Moore defended his actions at the time as intelligence-gathering cooperation he believed would ultimately serve the truth, but the admission was received by much of the UFO research community as a profound breach of trust, permanently damaging his credibility and raising uncomfortable, still-debated questions about the extent to which government disinformation operations may have shaped other prominent UFO narratives, including MJ-12 itself. Moore largely withdrew from public UFO research activity in the years that followed.