What Did They Do To Paul Bennewitz? [Trenchant Edges]
Estimated reading time: 21 minutes, 23 seconds. Contains 4279 words
Welcome to the Trenchant Edges, a blog about strange ideas and the people who live them.
I’m your host Stephen and today we’re just getting into it. This is part 2 of UFO Summer Camp (In November). Read Part 1 here.
For the last couple years I’ve wanted to talk about this man and what the US military did to him in detail. They went to absolutely insane lengths to drive this man into a paranoid spiral.
As I dug into researching this piece, it became very clear to me that there’s too much information about this for my usual process. And a ton of it is extremely untrustworthy even by UFO standards.
No surprise, really. See, Bennewitz knew *everyone* in the UFO researcher community in the 80s. Because of that he was a perfect channel for disinformation, which he helped spread. A real superspreader event.
I don’t fault Paul, though. He was the target of a shocking amount of spy bullshit. It would eventually drive him into a mental asylum.
You and I wouldn’t fare much better, I suspect.
With that in mind, this is going to be a bit of a “just the facts” TE. We’re going to focus on the account on, from what I can currently tell not having read them all, is the most authoritative source: Greg Bishop’s Project Beta:
So, let’s set an expectation that this is very uh preliminary. May be subject to clarification or contradiction as needed.
Pitch: I need to make another $350 so I can afford to start driving uber on Tuesday. If you could pitch in, that would be wonderful. I’m even doing one of those sale things people tell me work. If you’ve got the cash and interest, I’d appreciate it. If not, no worries. This will always be available free to anyone to read as long as substack isn’t too much of a shit about it.
That said, what I really crave here is feedback and questions. I want to know how people are reacting to what I write.
As long as I don’t lose my apartment that’s the most important thing.
Government Issued Psychosis
I want to start this with my biggest question about this whole situation.
Why did any of this happen?
Paul Bennewitz and many of the other regular UFO people, thought they were discovering the truth behind a great mystery. Bill Moore thought he was going to get UFO secrets by snitching and lying to UFO researchers. Richard Doty sure seems to just love lying.
And I guess he also had orders.
But what the fuck was going on with military intelligence, the NSA, the FBI, and whoever else was watching Bennewitz? But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The short version of this whole story is Paul Bennewitz was a defense contractor who started a company, Thunder Scientific. He had a masters degree in physics. This was a smart, highly motivated, intelligent man who got interested in UFOs in the late 70s and found what he thought was evidence of UFO activity over Kirkland Air Force Base in 1980, which he reported to the authorities.
They reacted to this American patriot warning them about a security threat like he was trying to steal nuclear secrets. I’ve seen a few arguments around this: From Cold War Max’d paranoia to they worried Bennewitz’s meddling would provide information other intelligence agencies. My suspicion is someone was testing the UFO scene as vector for disinformation.
The truth is probably some massive mix of these as different agencies react to an ambiguous “threat” differently. And we’ll probably never have good information on those reactions.
The Air Force Office of Special Investigations officer assigned to him befriended Bennewitz and “helped” his investigation. This was Sargent Richard “Rick” Doty. He’s been a fixture of the UFO community ever since.
IMPORTANT: You should not trust anyone who promotes Rick Doty uncritically and everything he says should be assumed to be fucking with people. It needs said. The man knows he’s seen as untrustworthy and very good at playing on that to get people to ask, “But what if” anyway. He’s smart, charming, and knows a lot of interesting things. No one is going to learn any of them though.
Disinformation is most effective when it’s a mix of truths, half-truths, and carefully chosen lies.
All this escalated until August 1988, when Bennewitz family had him committed to a psychiatric institution for one month. He died in 2003 at age 75, with the family hostile to anyone from the UFO community trying to get in touch with him again.
It’s hard to argue with them about that.
Let’s get into the sheer alphabet soup of it all.
Abductions, Secret Bases, and Alien Invasions
Kirkland AFB was founded in 1941 and has hosted Nazis from operation paperclip and Sandia National Laboratories, Kirkland is no stranger to high paranoia. Which may account for, well, the rest of this story.
Everything that happens from here out needs to be taken within the context of some of the United States most closely guarded secrets of an escalating cold war and some of the most paranoid people alive. I saw one estimate that suggested that over 160 different companies, institutions, agencies, and groups were at Kirkland AFB in the 80s. Each with their own cornucopia of secrets both mundane and exotic to keep and overlapping jurisdictions.
Many of them heavily armed and allowed to kill to keep their secrets in the almighty name of national security.
Praise be the secrets! And may righteous fury immolate those miserable sinners who do. not. need. to. know!
Before 1980
By 1978 Bennewitz was living in Albuquerque’s exclusive Four Hills Village, less than a mile from Kirkland AFB.
Our man was right the hell up in there.
So here we have a intelligent, curious man with sophisticated technical skills right next to a military base doing some of the most secure research in the country.
We can’t overstate the secrecy stew here. On the job these are not, uh, people with a sense of humor.
Let’s focus in on Bennewitz’s business, Thunder Scientific, for a moment. When I say he was a defense contractor, what i mean is he regularly did business with the Air Force, Navy, NASA, and once we get into our story the NSA gave him a $75,000 R&D grant.
Some might push back on that characterization because most of his contracts were for harmless things like humidity sensors. But the war machine needs many things.
Bennewitz was also an investigator to APRO, a civilian UFO research group by the end of the 70s and in April 1979 he went to a cattle mutilation conference put on by Former Apollo Astronaut and then New Mexico Senator Harrison Schmitt, where he met Officer Gabe Valdez who was speaking at the conference.
Despite their continued collaboration, we’re going to leave Officer Valdez for another installment as his son wrote a detailed book about his father’s point of view.
APRO also deserves more than the few words we’re going to give it. It was a very prominent US UFO research group for decades and was itself the subject of lengthy surveillance and disinformation. Another Summer camp perhaps.
Let’s leave it at: When I say that you can study UFOs your entire life and not really understand the phenomena more than you started with, groups like APRO are why I said so.
Bennewitz spent much of his free time during this period collecting signals, photos, and other information that he slowly pieced into his theories about a secret base in Dulce New Mexico. He was far from the only person who saw strange lights in the sky around Kirkland AFB.
You may have noticed we haven’t discussed the substance of his ideas yet, but I think it makes the most sense to follow things chronologically. Let’s leave the 70s behind.
1980
1980 was when Paul met Abductee Myrna Hansen, the year he briefed the Air Force about his findings, and thus the year AFOSI Sargent Richard Doty came into his life. It was the year he planted a target on his back.
Bennewitz’s self-directed studies increasingly alarmed him, and why wouldn’t they? He was finding bits and pieces of an extensive alien agenda.
To speed up trying to find answers, he wrote hundreds of pages worth of letters to Jim Lorenzen of ARPO detailing his findings. If Lorenzen replied, those letters were lost. One of Bennewitz’s letters dated April 8th, 1980 promised 5% of the proceeds of a book he claimed to be writing to ARPO, citing their support so far.
Greg Bishop, author of Project Beta, specifies how few people in his life were willing to even listen to Bennewitz at this point. We have to imagine him as a kind of pressure cooker of creativity, paranoia, and frustration.
At this point we have to point to two side topics I don’t really want to cover here: The first being cattle mutilation which I’m just not interested in. And the second being Myrna Hansen’s actual experience.
I don’t really have any reason not to be interested in cattle mutilation, just doesn’t.
It’s relevant but doesn’t really make anything clearer.
The important thing here is the way Bennewitz and Hansen fed each other ideas and grew more paranoid together.
Summer 1980 was busy: We had The fraudulent Weitzel Letter, Guards seeing a bright light descend in Coyote Canyon, every radar facility in the Albuquerque area shutting down for 6 hours, another Coyote Canyon sighting, and Bennewitz and his new hypnotist perfecting their protocol for shielding from UFO mind control beams.
It’s a lot.
Fall would bring Bill Moore into the picture in several ways: First, his book about Roswell would come out, then he would agree to by a spy for the feds in exchange for secret information, and he’d befriend Paul Bennewitz.
Moore would be responsible for much of my personal hostility to UFOlogy by admitting he was an intelligence asset in 1989. We’ll get to it.
Paul would have a very busy few months running two briefings for Kirkland AFB staff that were met with let’s say mixed reception, volunteering to be spied on by goddamn everyone with an alphabet codename, and being fed disinformation. He gave over a ton of documentation he’d collected over the previous year.
He asked for money and was offered help setting up a grant he was told was from the air force but really came from the NSA. Maybe. It’s not clear if the grant happened.
Bennewitz would receive let’s say mixed signals from the Air Force. On one hand he was told AFOSI would not become involved. And yet Doty and others would continue feed him information.
What the fuck was he supposed to think?
1981
According to the least trustworthy men in the world, what was going on was weird enough that even the intelligence agencies involved were confused. From Project Beta:
Possibly the strangest thing to happen in the Bennewitz home was experienced not just by the family, but Moore and Doty as well. On yet another visit, Moore’s attention was drawn to something bright near the ceiling of the “home lab.” He was startled to see a pale orange or yellow “ball” about the size of a softball hovering in the corner. The glowing orb, which had a pale blue halo around it, “wobbled” ever so slightly, but otherwise stayed in place.
“Jesus, Paul, what’s that?” Moore asked, pointing.
Surprisingly nonchalant, Bennewitz said, “Oh, you see them too. I haven’t been able to figure out what they are, but they keep showing up.”
The orb, which looked three-dimensional and self-illuminating, quickly “winked out like someone turning off an incandescent light. It was more like it faded out very quickly,” says Moore. “It was transparent. You could see the corner where the wall met the ceiling behind it.”
Others had noticed the orbs too. On one of his many trips out to the Bennewitz home to check up on things when the family was out (i.e., break-ins) Doty and two NSA operatives had disconnected the alarm system and were just about to start snooping around when they noticed one of the balls floating underneath a central stairway in the large entry room. “It was orange, and had ‘sparkles’ in it,” said Doty. “I asked the other guys: ‘Is it one of yours?’” But the NSA men were mystified as well, and the trio tried to see if the phenomenon was projected from outside of the house somewhere. No dice. “We never did figure out what that was,” said Doty. Perhaps the NSA was in fact responsible, but if so, they never admitted this to anyone outside their circle.
While we have to assume this story is bullshit, we should consider the possibility it’s not for a moment: Orbs are nothing unique to this story. They’re scattered throughout the literature.
I know at least one person with a strange experience with one.
But I’m inclined to think they’re bullshit-ish because the last account I read was from Lue Elizondo in his book Immanent. A book I initially thought was poor Luis putting together his resume to be the new Rick Doty, but now I wonder if wasn’t him accidentally admitting he’s the new Paul Bennewitz. We’ll see how his mental health goes, I guess.
By mid 1981, Bennewitz was sleeping with a .45 pistol and seeing UFOs everywhere. By this point he’d been so thoroughly fucked with it’s hard to blame him.
The tone reminds me of the most paranoid shit in John Keel’s writing: This is a man deep in self reference.
One thing I’d like better information on is like, how did this affect his family and relationships? Seems like he’s probably putting them through hell, right? We’ll see glimpses of this as we go.
If 1980 was the year all the groundwork came together, 1981 was the year it started going public. Bill Moore gave Bennewitz a forged document about Project Aquarius, which is most notable as the first reference to Majestic 12 the public would get.
MJ12 is a famous hoax about the conspiracy secretly running the government after cutting a bad deal with aliens. We’ll be going back to it again and again. We mentioned it a bit with Bill Cooper who was a massive advocate of it and then a very loud detractor, calling it disinformation.
We’ll have much to say about it in later summer camp installments.
According to noted disinformation agent Bill Moore, former project bluebook scientist J Allen Hynek supposedly gave Bennewitz a computer with a program on it designed to feed him misinformation. This story is suspect both because of its source and because nobody else has confirmed it. The computer appears to exist along with the misinformation software, but this could easily be a ploy to get Bill Moore to spread distrust within the community.
A task he undoubtedly excelled at.
All this time Paul Bennewitz was attempting to get people interested in his ideas. He wrote to his senators, various members of the UFO community, and eventually the Air Force and President Ronald Reagan himself.
A Left Turn at Albuquerque
In editing to this point I’ve cut about a thousand words and slowly realized this doesn’t make full chronological sense. Instead of burning the draft and starting over, we’re going to sum up what Paul Bennewitz’s conclusions were as of late 1981 and then quickly focus in on what bullshit alphabet soup he was fed.
If the previous sections were confusing, let’s call that verisimilitude. It was for Paul.
Paul summed up his investigation in late 1981 in a document called Project Beta: SUMMARY OF REPORT AND STATUS (WITH SUGGESTED GUIDELINES)
It’s about 5000 words and lays out the alien threat, starting by describing some of the research methods to obtain the information in it. He estimates the alien force to be roughly 50,000 strong and to be operating within conventional physics more or less.
Here’s an outline:
Research methods
Computer communications and their bases
Implants
Alien Weapons and Weaknesses
Aircraft Vulnerability
Our Weapon
Ground Attack Plan Against their bases
Summary
These aren’t official headings and the topic shifts around a bit. But this is a pretty good fingerprint of it.
I didn’t want to quote from it too much but the last few paragraphs are just too much not to.
AS AMERICANS IN THIS PARTICULAR INSTANCE, WE MUST REALIZE THAT WE CANNOT REPLY UPON OUR INHERENT MORAL PRINCIPLES TO PROVIDE THE ANSWER. NEGOTIATION IS OUT. THIS PARTICULAR GROUP CAN ONLY BE DEALT WITH —NO DIFFERENTLY THAN ONE MUST DEAL WITH A MAD DOG. THAT METHOD THEY UNDERSTAND. THEY HAVE INVADED OUR COUNTRY AND OUR AIR AND THEY ARE FREELY VIOLATING THE PERSONAL AND MENTAL INTEGRITY OF OUR PEOPLE. THERFORE, IN ELIMINATING THIS THREAT MOST CERTAINLY WE CANNOT BE CALLED THE “AGRESSOR”, BECAUSE WE HAVE LITERALLY BEEN INVADED.
IN FINAL CONCLUSION A) THEY CANNOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES BE TRUSTED. B) THEY ARE TOTALLY DECEPTIVE AND DEATH-ORIENTED AND HAVE NO RESPECT FOR HUMAN OR HUMAN LIFE. C) NO NEGOTIATION, AGREEMENT NOR PEACEFUL COMPROMISE CAN BE SETTLED UPON IN ANY WAY. D) NO AGREEMENT SIGNED BY BOTH PARTIES WILL EVER BE ADHERED TO NOR RECOGNIZED AND RESPECTED BY THE ALIEN, THOUGH THEY MIGHT MAKE US ATTEMPT TO BELIEVE OTHERWISE. E) ABSOLUTELY NO QUARTER CAN BE ALLOWED UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. ONCE THE OFFENSE IS INSTIGATED, IT CANNOT BE ABANDONED. IF IT IS, RECIPROCAL REPRISAL WILL IMMEDIATELY RESULT. THEY MUST BE MADE TO COME DOWN—DESTRUCT THEMSELVES WHICH IS A STANDING ORDER IF THE SHIP IS FAILING OR TO LEAVE EARTH IMMEDIATELY—NO LEEWAY OF ANY KIND CAN BE ALLOWED NOR TOLERATED.
WE IN OUR INNOCENT HUMAN WAY, NEGOTIATED THE FIRST TIME BY COMPROMISE—TOOK TOO LITTLE WITH NO MAJOR SAFEGUARDS AND ALLOWED TOO MUCH. WE MUST NOT ALLOW THAT TO HAPPEN AGAIN.
Yes, the all caps are in the original as published in Project Beta.
The thing that really strikes me here is Paul’s certainty they can’t be trusted. Earlier in the document he reveals how regularly he catches them in lies:
IN TRUTH THEY TEND TO LIE, HOWEVER THEIR MEMORY FOR LYING IS NOT LONG AND DIRECT COMPARATIVE COMPUTER PRINTOUT ANALYSIS REVEALS THIS FACT. THEREFORE MUCH “DROPS THRU THE CRACK” SO TO SPEAK; AND FROM THIS COMES THE APPARENT TRUTH.
This paragraph is extremely funny once you find out who he was talking to through his computer.
Or would be if it hadn’t frothed the man up into what is arguably genocidal rage. Not to mention the cost to his own mental health.
In short, the aliens use implants to communicate and control humans and humanoids, but are themselves hamstrung by a decision making hierarchy that requires checking up the chain which can take up to 15-17 hours.
Their technology, while impressive, also is limited by energy storage and thus needs regular resupply. Most of their weapons can be defended against and Paul has a several prototype weapons he wants mass produced for an assault to retake the bases.
Much of the document is about that plan and isn’t very important.
Many of these details, including a deal made with the aliens they betrayed, would be remixed right down to today.
Psychological Operations
We’re not going to go into a deep exploration of psyops here, but we will review some of the ways the military/intelligence/law enforcement establishment fucked with him.
We’ve already covered a lot of the early spying, the decision to encourage him to divert him away from very real secrets he’d tagged, the previously mentioned research grant, introducing him to Bill More, and egging him on through contact with Rick Doty even after telling Bennewitz that there would be no official investigation.
In a way, Bennewitz’s probing for UFOs with his sophisticated electronic equipment was a kind of volunteer penetration testing: Telling the military what signals they’re putting out that just anyone with the equipment and expertise can read.
While I have no idea how you’d confirm this even if true, but it’s possible that some of the shit done to Bennewitz was actually the KGB trying to counter-misdirect him for making it harder for them to spy on Kirkland AFB.
That seems unlikely but you never really know.
In early 1981 someone, presumably the NSA, connected him up with a computer that let NSA agents parked in an empty house across the street communicate him pretending to be the aliens. This came along with them realizing he’d started to decode a new method of encryption that led multiple signals travel on a single carrier wave.
They had a program that generated a fake alien language for Bennewitz to decode. Basically, they provided a slew of sources of disinformation that pieced together and elaborated by a particularly paranoid mind got you Project Beta.
On top of that, a slew of fake documents with bits and pieces of truth such as project Aquarius, Project Excalibur, and others.
Furthermore, the Air Force and maybe others set up fake signs of an underground base like air vents on Archuleta Mesa near Dulce. The site of the famous Dulce base.
Later in the 80s, Bennewitz claimed to have seen a wreck of a black triangle that sounds suspiciously like a wrecked F-117 Nighthawk.
Supposedly Dr. Robert Fugate of the Starfire Optical Range was also tasked to create some way to create fake UFO sightings.
This just kept fucking going.
By 1987, Bill Moore described meeting Bennewitz again with him looking like a “concentration camp survivor” having lost a ton of weight, having barricaded himself in his home, and having clear injection marks on his arms. He would chainsmoke dozens of cigarettes over lunch and be unable to get sleep.
The stress of this really added up leaving him especially vulnerable to whatever dirty tricks the alphabet soup still involved in his life were thinking up next.
What matters most here is this wasn’t just like, one or two organizations. But a slew of mysterious visitors who may or may not have been working together.
Eventually it was all to much for Paul Bennewitz and in August 1988 his family checked him into a mental ward for a month and then prevented anyone associated with UFOs from talking with him again.
While many people, myself included, have made Richard Doty the primary villain here… the account in Project Beta is extremely clear he could only have been one front waged on Paul Bennewitz’s mind.
Greg Bishop brings up the specter of MK Ultra as perhaps something led to techniques that drove Bennewitz into psychosis, but here’s where we have to discuss some limitations of his text.
First, the book is really two books and they shade into each other in an awkward way. The first book is about Paul Bennewitz and the second is about Bill Moore, with the climax of the book being his 1989 revelation of working for the feds.
I think Greg did a lot more jumping forward and backward in time to cover how his research had revealed much more about the early days of Bennewitz’s project than much of anything after 1982.
There are a ton of other threads explored in that second book, but this is mainly about Bennewitz so we’re not going to worry about them here.
The second limitation of Project Beta is the obvious sympathy Bishop has for Bill Moore and you don’t find out until near the end that actually they’ve known each other since 1988. Meaning at the time of publication they’d been friends for 17 years.
Greg Bishop was literally in the audience when Bill Moore gave his MUFON speech in Las Vegas in 1989. Selling Bill’s merch.
These may be innocent and honest choices of a writer working under awkward constraints, including his personal relationships, but I do find it highly suspect that we only find out that relationship with arguably one of the antagonists of the book, whom the book itself goes to great lengths to justify.
This probably isn’t intentional disinformation. But it does seem pretty dishonest to hide your past with one of your book’s main subjects especially when the thing he’s most well known for is lying on behalf of the government.
So, relying on this book as a sole source is my fuck up. I should not have done that but I’ve had to cut so much just to get down to 4000 words, lol. Since I’m asking for some grace about that I’m inclined to give it to Greg Bishop as well.
At least until we talk.
Anyway, here’s the full two hour speech Bill Moore gave in 1989. The audio’s kinda bad, but such are old recordings.
We’ll be coming back to that.
Wrapping Up
It needs to be said that Paul Bennewitz was probably already deep into a paranoid spiral when he briefed the Air Force in late 1981. He’d already come to many of the conclusions they’d exacerbate over the next 7 years.
We’re not done with Paul Bennewitz yet. But we have an expected detour next.
Tomorrow, 11/30, we’ve got an update on the UFO news from the last year. Maybe disclosure happened and we just missed it? Come back tomorrow for what I hope will be a lighter and more fun ride.
I’m gonna go get Thanksgiving Dinner 2: The leftovering.
If you have any questions, thoughts, or concerns please comment them!
And if you can support this nonsense, please do. I think I fucked up the discount I tried running yesterday and it’s still open for another day or two.
Alright. See y’all tomorrow.
-S