Project Beta and Underground Bases 3

SM: What drew you to write the book? What attracted you to write up Paul
Bennewitz’s life?
GB: It was one of 4 or 5 proposals I sent out and that was the one that
Simon and Shuster wanted. The other main reason was that I had a personal
connection because I have known Bill Moore since 1988 which is kind of late
in the game, but it was the year before he made his announcement in Las
Vegas that freaked everybody out and that really affected me because I was
there at that conference. I was sitting at Bill’s table helping him sell
books and things and he wouldn’t tell me what he was going to talk about. He
said that it was really going to blow the lid open and make a lot of people
mad but maybe a lot of people will have their eyes opened and we can do
things differently.
So when the lecture was about to start, I walked in and took a seat about
two thirds of the way up the front. Phil Klass was in the front row with a
tape recorder and Bill started his lecture and a few minutes into it, people
started yelling at him and interrupting him. I’ve never heard such a violent
reaction to anything – politically or otherwise. I wondered why that was and
why people were so mad that it began my interest. I knew Bill and as time
went on, I asked him more and more questions about it. I thought this would
be a story to cover as no one else was going to talk about it. Bill was in
the middle of it, we were on friendly terms and I thought he’d tell me more
than he might tell somebody else and that indeed was what happened.
SM: Tell us about that announcement.
GB: It wasn’t specifically about Bennewitz. He was part of it but the speech
ran for about two and a half hours, it was a long talk.
SM: Good grief.
GB: Well, it would have run shorter but he kept getting interrupted. The
State director kept having to get up and say, “Look, let Bill say what he
has to say. He’s here to give a..” which was answered followed by shouts of
things like, “Why should we? He’s full of crap.” The announcement was that
many of the stories that had been circulating about underground bases,
abductions in exchange for technology, alien intervention in human events
throughout history, specifically those three things were mainly the product
of a disinformation campaign and that Ufologists who were listening to
government people who were thinking that they had an inside source and this
was the real stuff, his warning was, you had better watch out because a lot
of that stuff is not true and I know because I’ve been through it. At first
they were confused because they thought he was one of them, and he was up to
that time, and I think he still was.
Now suddenly a lot of the things they’d been told and a lot of the things
they’d built their reputations on were in question. He said, “I had the
wherewithal to find out these things and you didn’t.” That’s a very bad
thing to say to a Ufologist. Somebody that’s been working on something for a
really long time, to say to them, “Hey, you that have been working on this
for 10 years. Most of what you’re talking about and putting in your
newsletters and saying at your lectures is based on false information.” That’s
a really hard one to handle for anybody. They got very upset with him. I
could see why they’d get upset but I couldn’t understand why they’d stay
upset for so long. Now it’s been over 15 years since he gave that talk and
his interest in ufology dropped off. Actually I’ve had him on my internet
radio show about 3 times and I always get old line Ufologists listening in
and commenting on it. Nobody says anything bad. It’s all kind of sunk in. It’s
taken about 10 years to get this information to sink in and for people to
realise there were a lot of things that were false. In fact a couple of them
said, “Well, I knew that all along anyway” and these are the people that
were yelling at him in the beginning.
SM: Another thing that the book has done for me is clarify Bill Moore for me
because I’ve always been very confused about him up to now in terms of how
he was seen. Sometimes when he was referred to, it would be in a negative
sense. At other times it would be in a positive sense. Obviously, I was well
aware of his long time connection with Stan Friedman. Stan has never said a
bad word about him that I can find. But always there was this thing about,
“Well he was involved in psyops (psychological operations,) he was involved
with Bennewitz” and it’s been very confusing trying to justify him in terms
of his place in ufology. But in terms of how far I’m into the book, the
impression I get is that he was as much a victim as anybody else.
GB: But you know what? He was a willing victim. He agreed to be a victim.
SM: Well yes, but he had an enormous carrot dangled in front of him.