Project Beta and Underground Bases 2

Some of the things he said in that letter, that there were two races, the
Ebans and the Sweads, that’s the kind of stuff that’s taken directly from
1950s contactee mythology or whatever you want to call it. Whether there are
Aryan white skinned space brothers coming and telling us that we’re
destroying ourselves is still an open question to me. They capitalised on
that and got him going on that and I believe some of these same people were
also talking to John Lear, Bill Cooper and people like that after Bennewitz
to keep that mythology going because it allowed them to keep track of how
their rumours had spread, and like I said before, who was interested in it.
And if people are interested and come flocking to these stories, it was
important to find out what their interest was because a lot of espionage is
done under the guise of being an innocent UFO researcher. I’m not talking
about American citizens at that time specifically. Soviet citizens actually.
SM: You did really surprise me with that revelation about those two sub
contracted private detectives taken on by Citizens Against UFO Secrecy who
did turn out to be Soviet agents. Because sat here 3,000 miles away, when
you look back at the mid 80s, you don’t still expect America to have this
“reds under the bed” syndrome.
GB: Yeah but it wasn’t. It was people hanging around military bases. There
was a Chinese guy that they were worried about for a while who said he was a
UFO researcher who mysteriously up and disappeared and went back to China in
the late 80s or early 90s. But the reason they’re interested in these UFO
researchers is because a lot of these sightings occur around military bases,
a good deal of them, and when people are out there at specifically places
like Area 51 and at the time Bennewitz at Kirtland, you’ve got a bunch of
people sitting round saying they’re looking at UFOs when maybe two or three
of them are not. And the air force and other people there are very
interested in these people that are saying, “I’m just out here looking for
UFOs and taking pictures”. And in the mean time they’re taking pictures of
the base, taking pictures of things that fly in, trying to get into other
areas saying they’re UFO researchers and what they are really interested in
is espionage and that’s what the air force is mainly concerned about. That’s
what got their interest.
If Bennewitz had just said they were UFOs, they would have just thrown him
in the kook file like anybody else and we would never have heard of him. But
he took it a step further and got very noisy about it.
Also, he was very smart and knew how to figure out some of these things.
Apart from his blind spot about the UFO subject, he was looking at drawing
attention to things that were in plain sight and other things that weren’t
in plain sight and they didn’t want other countries to know about. And yes,
they were concerned about the Soviets as they had the most interest and the
most wherewithal and agents stationed in this country to do this kind of
thing. We had agents in Russia too and that’s part of the story as well.
SM: Oh yes indeed and very adept ones according to the information in the
book. But that’s another aspect. I wouldn’t say that you show an element of
sympathy towards the Intelligence agencies but you do put them in a context
whereby they are seen simply to be doing their job as opposed to vilifying
them.
GB: I think they, specifically Richard Doty, went a little bit further than
doing his duty because I think he got off on it but yeah, for the most part
that’s their job. They think they’re doing the right thing and while I don’t
agree with the fact that somebody had to be driven crazy and I think they
could have done it a different way, they thought they were doing the right
thing and weren’t doing anything wrong and the fact that one person had to
go nuts and was getting more nuts as time went on didn’t concern them nearly
so much as someone in Russia finding out what they were doing there. And
even beyond that, as I mentioned, they had assets stationed in Russia and if
they found out that somebody over here was getting codes for these
satellites and sending them back to Russia, they would immediately have gone
in and done a house cleaning and found out who the moles were and how the
information was getting out. People have been deported, arrested, imprisoned
or worse. And to them one person going crazy because of his UFO beliefs was
far preferable to having an entire network of spies being brought down by
just leaving him alone. That was their trade off. I can see their reasoning
there but I’m not happy about what happened to Bennewitz and like I said, I
think they could have done it in a different way.
SM: Well OK, how do you think they could have done it differently?
GB: Well…(thinks)
SM: Couldn’t they just have sat him down and said, “Look, you aren’t
listening to signals from UFOs and aliens. You are listening to highly
sensitive black projects. Leave it alone.”
GB: Actually, you’ve answered the question for me because I haven’t really
thought about that before. Yeah, exactly. He considered himself loyal,
patriotic, etc. I think he was in the coastguard or something in World War
2, he actually enlisted, he wasn’t drafted and they could have appealed to
his patriotism and said, “Look, you’re onto things you shouldn’t be on to.
As a loyal citizen, could you please not worry about it? It doesn’t have
anything to do with UFOs and we’d rather you didn’t mess with it.” I thought
that was what they had done when I first started the book.
Project Beta Author Greg Bishop
© cfz.org.uk
The mistake, which you’ve pointed out here, was to decide that they could
get more out of him, get more out of the project by letting him continue
with his folly and finding out how he found out what he did so that they
could prevent it from happening again. And to do that, they had to let him
persist in these illusions to keep his interest and to keep him going in the
direction he was and take it as far as he could so they could find out how
far he could go and therefore how far any other reasonably intelligent
electrical physicist could go. The decision was made to get more out of him
by keeping him going then to just tell him to quit it and stop it because
the Intelligence community, when they move, they make sure there is a
multiple upside to what they’re doing. Instead of taking care of just one
problem, they can take care of 5 or 6 or 8 problems if they can do it. They
didn’t consider that he’d go crazy. When he did, I think some people were
concerned but they were more concerned with keeping the secrets and getting
the job done.
I don’t know that I agree with that methodology but a lot more lives have
been saved by having spies running around preventing wars, I think, then
everybody keeping secrets to themselves and having misunderstandings etc. It’s
a funny way to talk for most people, especially the very lefty people I hang
out with. I guess I consider myself the same but there are good reasons for
a lot of this stuff and a lot of it prevents a lot of unnecessary conflict
and bloodshed. That’s the point of it and that’s what they thought they were
doing.