GB: It fits in, in that it was part of the deal he had made. He kept tabs on
people, reported on what they were thinking and their opinions and what they
knew at the time, what kind of reports they were investigating and what
rumours were making the rounds in the UFO field. In return he got documents
and the block buster was the Eisenhower briefing document saying there was a
group of 12 people convened by Harry Truman in 1947 to deal with the UFO
subject. Bill now thinks that document is probably false or mostly false. At
the time he had no idea. People said he championed the idea of it being true
throughout the late 80s and through the 90s but he published a book called
the MJ12 Documents where he discussed all the documents he was handed by the
government and how authentic he thinks they are. Two or three of them out of
the six or eight he thought were completely false, some he said were
probably mostly disinformation and others he said probably were true as far
as he could tell.
The people came out and said, “He brought out all this stuff and he said it
was true and he was spreading disinformation”, well that isn’t true. If you
look at the written record of what he said, he judged them each on their own
merits and tried to figure out if something was real or not. As far as I can
tell, he was really careful about it.
Another thing he did was to put out altered documents and people got mad at
him about this too. He’d leave out certain things or change things and I
asked him why he did that. I said, “Did the government tell you to do that?”
and he said, “No. They just gave it to me and said do what you want with it.
I did that because if somebody came back to me with a bit of information
that I thought I could use, if they hadn’t picked up the false parts that I
changed or guessed at the bits I’d taken out, I would use that in judging
how accurate and how reliable their information was.” I think that’s
legitimate, it doesn’t bother me. They said he was spreading disinformation.
This is something he learned at this ad hoc spy school that the air force
put him through. They actually trained him to be a low level spy. He did
other things besides UFO things which I also point out in the book.
He says he never got paid for it. His only pay were these documents that he
could do what he wanted with. For one thing, they were a very valuable
information source for anybody looking into this kind of thing and for
another it makes you feel like you’re kind of important. He’s not a prideful
person, I’ve noticed that, but if you get his dander up, if you get him
irritated with stupid questions or you don’t listen to him or argue or
discuss something in an illogical manner, he doesn’t have very much
patience. That’s just his personality. I respect him – I wish I could be
that way. I’m too patient.
SM: What was, in the end, his opinion of Bennewitz? How did he feel about
him?
GB: I don’t think they were ever any kind of close friends but according to
people I talked to, and that Publishers Weekly Review took me to task for
not getting more into people’s personalities and motivations, but the main
character, Bennewitz, nobody except for his family and I guess other people
I couldn’t talk to or knew about, knew what his personality was and what
made him tick. What his basic demeanour was. Really, all they knew him from
was from the UFO subject and since Bennewitz, at least at that time was
quite obsessed with it to the exclusion of his own business and his family,
that’s all they knew him by. I asked Bill about him too and he said he didn’t
know much about him either except for visiting him on a few occasions to
talk about this subject and to tell him a few things he could tell him to
try and put the brakes on a little bit.
One thing he did say about Paul was that his filters weren’t very good.
Anything that agreed with what his preconception was, he would accept
without any hesitation and he would incorporate it into growing theory about
what was going on. At the end, after the Air Force lost interest, Bill lost
interest and didn’t hang out with him that much either.
Richard Doty actually hung out with him, he said, after all this and tried
to be friends with him but his family, and particularly his son Matthew,
didn’t want Doty to have anything to do with him. He blamed Doty for sending
his father to a mental institution and making his health deteriorate. I don’t
disagree with him. He was a family man. But the thing is, the family I think
have a lot of contracts with the government and they don’t want to mess
those up by suing them.
To the question of what Bill thinks of Paul, I think he only thought of him
to the extent of how he dealt with the UFO subject and what his beliefs
were, and what he was doing with that information. They hung out a little
bit, they had lunch occasionally, he went to his house a few times, but it
wasn’t like this ongoing, everyday thing. Bill lived in Arizona at the time
which is about 300 or 400 miles away from Albuquerque so he didn’t see him
that much.
Bill feels it could have been done better. He feels sorry for Bennewitz but
he also knows what the stakes were. He had made an agreement and he had to
stick to it which meant not telling Bennewitz why he was interested in him.
He thought he was just the guy that had written the Roswell book and the
Philadelphia Experiment and was a board member of APRO and to him this meant
somebody who knew what they were talking about and was interested in what he
was doing.