SM: You say there are people who have witnessed cattle mutilations taking
place?
GB: No, they haven’t witnessed the actual mutilation but they’ve seen people
who don’t have access to helicopters and stealth technology and radios and
all this wandering around near a cattle mutilation. Not actually killing it.
They’ve seen people in robes and there’s candles there and stuff they find
afterwards. There have been witnesses out there that have seen humans around
cattle that have been killed and mutilated.
SM: So you’re talking about copycats.
GB: Yeah copycats or opportunistic people. Somebody who’s made some blood
sacrifice for something or other. It gets a lot weirder than that when I got
into it with Chris O’Brien on my radio show.
SM: Another interesting point, one explanation for identifying a UFO is the
performance of the craft. The fact that it can suddenly dart off and shoot
up at an incredible speed or angle and the automatic response of course is
that there is nothing terrestrial that we’ve got that can perform like that.
But you seem to intimate that that’s not necessarily true and that we
already have that technology.
GB: Well, I was hinting that we might. A lot of people have said we might
have that technology and whether it’s taken from aliens a la Philip Corso or
not, I don’t know. I read Corso’s book and there’s nothing in there to prove
anything except his opinion. I’m not saying he’s lying and it sounds good if
you’re a UFO researcher or a fan or whatever. Unfortunately, there’s no way
of proving it. Kind of like Bob Dean and his stuff about NATO headquarters
in the 60s. But as far as I could tell, if these documents are true,
scientists have been involved, specifically the United States government and
I think the British government too, have been involved in anti-gravity
research since at least the 50s. If they’ve got anywhere with that,
perfected it or whatever, there’s absolutely no way they’re going to tell
anybody that they are doing that. Bob and Ryan Wood are trying to determine
where the technology that Corso described as coming from the aliens actually
came from. They’re looking into the history of transistors, lasers, fibre
optics, etc.
SM: The next sequitor is, why aren’t we seeing these sorts of aircraft in
operation?
GB: People think they’re UFOs probably.
SM: Why haven’t we seen them in Iraq?
GB: I don’t know, I haven’t been to Iraq and I don’t know who’s there and
who is reporting it.
SM: Oh, I see. I see.
GB: Did you hear recently that the Iranian air force got an order to shoot
down any UFO?
SM: Well yeah, but they’re probably drones.
GB: If you look at purely physical science, you can’t have a person sitting
in one of those things with that kind of performance because they’d die.
They’d get smashed unless they found a way to cancel out inertia. I am
confused about how they can do these things and not produce a sonic boom
while going at 14,000 miles an hour.
SM: With the benefit of hindsight now, Bennewitz does appear to have been a
disaster waiting to happen. Above all, his location, his residence, right
across the road from the air base, his background, his interests, it just
seemed to be a disaster waiting to happen.
GB: I guess so but like we said, if they had just told him to cut it out, it
would probably never have happened.
SM: Has writing the book affected you or changed you in anyway?
GB: It didn’t change any of my beliefs about the subject. It made me feel
good that I could finish a book on time. It was the first one I’d ever
written. I’d edited the Exclusive Middle anthology and that was great as so
many people liked that. But to actually write a book about something, meet
all these people and talk to them.I tried to put it in some kind of context.
That’s the essence of telling a decent story. I’m not totally happy with the
book or the way the story was told but it’s a learning curve.
SM: What are you unhappy about with it?
GB: Well that Publishers Weekly review kind of stumped me because I realised
they were right. I didn’t develop the characters as well as I could have.
But part of that is it’s the first one I’ve written and the other part of it
is, especially with Bennewitz, how the hell am I going to get into his brain
if he’s dead and nobody wants to talk about him who knew him that well. I
can’t make stuff up. I tried to stick to the information I had at hand and
create a story with that.
SM: I think you’ve written a brilliant book and one that deserves the
attention of the UFO community.
GB: British people seem to be interested in it because there’s a healthy
scepticism. I don’t know if it’s the education system in the UK or what, but
it comes out in Nick [Redfern] too. They’ve got a healthy, (and to some
American minds pathological) scepticism about things and I respect that.
Maybe not scepticism but an enquiring attitude; “Well, what are the pros and
cons? Does this make sense, does this not make sense.” Leave your belief at
the door and see if it can be changed by some sort of checkable facts.
That’s another reason why I wrote the book too actually, to answer that
question and I’m glad you brought it up. If you can’t get past somebody’s
decent research, checkable facts, actual living people who have been asked
questions, documents etc. and make a conclusion that this isn’t what it
seems to have been in the past, if you can’t get past what you find with
that, and if it makes you have to change your opinion, well, then you’re
probably doing ufology a disservice.
SM: I would agree with you but I think you’re doing your fellow Americans a
disservice as well. I understand what you mean when you say we have a more
sceptical attitude but my response to that would be, “Where’s it got us?” If
anything we’re worse off here then you are in the States. You seem to have
achieved much more than what researchers here have.
GB: (At this point, Greg made reference to another book coming out later
this year by a well known author which I had not heard about it and would
have expected to. I later asked someone else about it who confirmed that it
was a well kept secret until publication. Sounds like it’s going to be a
bomb shell. I know the subject matter but not what it’s about).
I just had a little part. My part was just along the edge, mostly of
interest to UFO researchers because I’m basically saying the same thing Bill
said in 1989. There are more receptive ears now as people have had 16 years
for it to sink in. I think I’m not getting nearly the flack that Bill got.
I think he helped me as much as he could to do the book because it’s a book
he wanted to write maybe at some point but he just couldn’t do it and didn’t
want to. I went ahead and did it for him. He said there were things in the
book he disagreed with but they were philosophical disagreements and “I can’t
make you change what you wrote.” For the most part he said it was accurate
and agreed with most things I had said. I asked him some very nasty
questions about some things about why he did certain things and didn’t he
feel guilty and this and that. He was really straight forward. Sometimes he
got irritated but at all the time he answered my questions as best as he
could. They were the same things he’d been saying for years just in more
detail. I don’t have any reason to believe that anything that came from Bill
was either a lie or disinformation. But he wouldn’t tell me who Falcon was,
even though he’s dead.
SM: Darn, I was going to ask about that. Greg, it’s been fascinating, thank
you.
Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the
Creation of a Modern UFO Myth by Greg Bishop is published by Paraview-Pocket
Books.
The Excluded Middle editor, radio host, author and lecturer Greg Bishop has
provided the field of UFO research with what is without doubt one if its
major, published contributions. The subject matter of Project Beta is an
unusual one; and were it not for the fact that the story is meticulously
detailed, referenced and researched, the reader might be forgiven for
thinking that they had stumbled upon a high-tech, X-Files-meets-Robert
Ludlum-style thriller. But Project Beta tells a very real story – and one
that is as harrowing as it is informative.
In essence, the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction book relates the story of
physicist Paul Bennewitz, who after stumbling upon Air Force and National
Security Agency secrets that he believes are connected to the activities of
sinister extraterrestrials and UFOs, is bombarded by the murky world of
officialdom with a mass of disinformation, faked stories and outright lies
in order to both divert him from his research and lead to his mental and
psychological disintegration.
While anyone and everyone with an interest in UFOs should read Greg’s book,
it is unlikely to please some – particularly the I-want-to-believe crowd
that foam at the mouth whenever the words “underground base,” “cattle
mutilations,” and “alien abductions” surface. As Greg shows, many of the
cornerstones upon which today’s ufological lore are built, had their origins
in the fertile minds of military intelligence and the behind-the-scenes
spook-brigade.
The UFO truth might not be “out there” after all – it may all be one big con
behind which a veritable plethora of classified, military projects have been
hidden.
Hopefully, Project Beta will open the floodgates that lead to questions
being asked at a higher, official level about the Bennewitz affair, and
those who manipulated the man to the point of collapse will be made to
answer for their actions.
Greg Bishop can be contacted at www.excludedmiddle.com.