Greg Bishop
London/New York: Paraview, 2005, $14 (US), p/b
In Lobster 40 I presented a summary of this story. This book-length version adds much detail but nothing substantially different from that summary.
Bennewitz was an electronics manufacturer in New Mexico, who lived a few yards from the boundary fence of the Kirtland Airforce Base, a vast complex in the desert near Albuquerque which included a nuclear storage facility. (The Air Force was one of his customers.) Bennewitz became obsessed with lights, that he would see from his windows, moving around above some hills on the base. He began filming the lights, trying to record their visual and electromagnetic output and became convinced they were extraterrestrial in origin. Somewhere along the way he was introduced to a woman claiming to have been abducted by aliens and a major league folie-à-deux took place. Being a good US citizen (and an Air Force supplier) he took his discoveries to the base authorities. The US Air Force responded by pretending to believe him and feeding him disinformation about UFOs and the US government’s alleged dealing with aliens – disinformation which was then circulated among the UFO buffs in the US with the deadly imprimatur, ‘from the US Air Force’.
The author’s subtitle description of ‘a modern UFO myth’ doesn’t convey the scale of this. A great deal of ‘modern UFOlogy’ – maybe most of it – in the last 20 years has been this rubbish that was first run through Paul Bennewitz. (1) And it went mainstream: many of the themes of The X Files TV programme originated with the US Air Force, via Bennewitz. Bishop tells that the US Air Force’s Sergeant Doty, who was the main contact with Bennewitz, eventually wrote the script for an episode of The X Files!
The author thinks that this disinformation began as a means of misdirecting Bennewitz away from secret US Air Force operations; but I wonder. The thing to do with an inquisitive businessman who makes his living selling electronic kit to the US government would be to say: ‘You’re a loyal American. All we can tell you is: we can’t tell you.’ Wave the national security flag – and hint, if necessary, that his contracts might dry up. They didn’t do this. They began misdirecting him, confirming his UFO theories. We know that a UFO disinformation programme was running in the 1970 (2) and it seems likely that the US Air Force plugged Bennewitz into an existing operation. The purpose of the operation remains unknown. As for poor Bennewitz, he ended up in a mental hospital.
Notes
[1] Also run through Linda Moulton How, Bill Moore and Timothy Good.
[2] In 2001 Daniel Sheehan reported encountering a bit of it. See Lobster 42. It is curious that Sheehan should wait till he did to announce this. The year before he addressed the 9th Annual International UFO Convention in Florida on the subject of UFOs and didn’t mention it. Was he perhaps waiting until he though there was sufficient cover for him to speak without attracting ridicule? In the event his (to me) startling story attracted almost no interest at all.