SM: You do, in the book and probably inadvertently, paint an extremely
comical image of the intelligence agencies walking into Bennewitz’s house
the moment he walked out. This ridiculous situation of even Doty being in
there once and the orange orbs and Doty turns round and says, “Are those
ours?” It’s almost like they were tripping over each other.
GB: The thing about the orbs was; who knows what they were? Bill saw them
too. Doty either doesn’t know what they were or he isn’t telling. I talked
to him for about almost 3 hours one time, on the phone sporadically here and
there. but mostly in this interview in this restaurant. I think he’s an old
intelligence guy – he doesn’t like talking on the phone, so we sat in this
Denny’s out there in Grants, New Mexico and talked for a while. He was very
nice, very polite and very forthcoming about a lot of stuff but he also fed
me a lot of crap and I knew it too. Same thing he did with Bill and the
point was, the only way I would put something in the book was if somebody
else mentioned the same thing or if somehow, from another source, I got
confirmation of what Doty had said. Two or three people say something then I
included it as part of the story. If it were just Doty or just Bill, I would
say that in the book. A couple of times I say, “Well the only person that
told me this was so and so”.
One exception was the fact that Doty was on the base at Area 51. He told me
that and how am I going to check that out? There isn’t really any way.
SM: You’ve said there that all these intelligence agencies knew what they were doing but the impression in the book is that they didn’t. It sounds like a chaotic mess on Kirtland. The NSA were involved in projects on Kirtland and Doty didn’t know about them.
GB: Exactly. They wouldn’t tell what they were doing. There might have been somebody at the base who sort of knew what was going on but the intelligence agencies at least back then, I don’t know how they’re going to be doing things now, they were very secretive even with other intelligence people because you don’t know who these people are. Even if they’re checked out, they’re not cleared to know what Project “X” is so you’re not going to tell them about it unless you absolutely have to.
If Doty needed to know they were putting together some sort of system to encrypt messages or communications with weapons or something like that, they’d tell him. But if he wasn’t, they wouldn’t tell him and they’d keep him in the dark about it and as far as Doty or anybody else was concerned, they had no business to ask. And if they didn’t get a straight answer, they would drop it. The fact that they’re so secretive between each other causes these problems and makes it kind of comical, yes, but the reason for it is just the weird echelons of who needs to know what.
SM: What is your impression of Richard Doty? What do you think of him?
GB: Let’s see. I think he enjoyed that job. Keeping secrets, lying to people, keeping things from some people and not from others, having access to something that most people don’t; he enjoyed that. A lot of people would.
I don’t know if I’d enjoy lying to people and playing games with them, I’m not that kind of person, but his personality was such that I think he likes to do that. Personally, when I met him, he didn’t say anything cryptic, he didn’t give me the impression he was trying to mess with me but since I knew he was that kind of person, I could pick some of those things out. While I was sitting there I just kind of let it all flow. He didn’t let me record it and I had to remember everything he said and immediately run back to the hotel and take two hours typing up everything he said so I wouldn’t forget it.
SM: That was actually my next question; you said he bull shitted you to a degree and you explained your criterion for actually putting information he gave you for putting into the book. Could you give me an example of something he told you that wasn’t true or you didn’t believe was true and didn’t end up in the book?
GB: He told me that one time Paul had been given a contract to work on something for the air force and he had gone out to this testing area out in the mountains near Albuquerque to do this on government land. He said while he was there he saw a UFO and took pictures of it, really good pictures. He told Doty about it and Doty had to go later to his house when Paul wasn’t there and replace the pictures Bennewitz had taken with blank frames and keep that information for the government. I was thinking, “Well there’s no way I can find this out. It sounds interesting but I don’t know whether I can put it in the book.”
Then I get back and I was talking with Bill about it and he starts laughing so I ask him why? He said that’s just like Rick and he’s come out with that story before with people and he’s never seen it in the literature or anything and he know its complete junk.
But the thing was, I think he was telling me that to let me know that’s what he did with Paul generally anyway. He’d go into the house, they’d find things which were sensitive and take them and either not replace them or replace them with blank frames and just generally keep tabs on him and keep the most sensitive stuff, whatever that might be. I think he was giving me a little hint there as to his modus operandi and what was going on with the fake story.
There was a physicist from the air force who did the same thing with me. He didn’t really tell me fake stories but he would answer questions I asked him later in the conversation or the next day or the next week or the next month, in another way. It’s a very weird thing. It takes time to pick up on this and realise that’s what’s going on. I didn’t realise it until I got home. I thought, “Oh my god, he’s giving me a hint about what was going on at the base by not answering my question directly but telling me to look in a certain area.” This guy drove me on to Kirtland air force base and drove me around and showed me things. This physicist is now in his 70s and he was in charge of a lot of things on the base and I asked him what they were so interested in, a fairly straight forward question. And he said he wasn’t really sure and there were a lot of things going on at the base at the time.
He didn’t think it was the electro magnetic testing platform because that turned out that it didn’t do the job it was supposed to do after all that effort. Most of it is underground now and he drove me by it and I saw these antennas on top of it and there are bunkers underground and they do the testing under there now so you can’t see it.
But he also drove me near the Manzano weapons complex and at one end there’s the Star Fire optical range. And we could see it from the road there. You can’t see it from Albuquerque or from anywhere outside the base but we could see it there. It was off in the distance, maybe half a mile to a mile away.
And he said, “Oh, did you know about this guy, Bob Fugate? He used to work there. He figured out all kinds of stuff. He figured out this adaptive optics system, which was a big deal at the time.