An Interview With Greg Bishop
Dateline: Tuesday, July 12, 2005 By: STUART MILLER
By: Phenomena News Editor Phenomena News Editor, Stuart Miller, talks to Project Beta author Greg Bishop about how 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.
SM: In our prior email correspondence, you commented about a slightly negative review of the book that had appeared on Amazon.
GB: The guy gave it five stars but he said he didn’t know if any of it was true and that the premise of the book was that everything about UFOs was made up by the government. He either didn’t read the book or he read it with a preconception that he kept. SM: I’ll tell you something. When Nick (Redfern) launched the book publicly, Nicks emails everywhere were the first I think that most people knew about the book.
GB: Oh really God, I have even more to thank him for than I thought I did. I just saw a couple of the reviews he put up. They were really positive and I was very happy about it.
SM: Oh he did, he reached out and really pushed very hard and got others to get behind it too. Lets put it this way, I don’t think the UFO community could not have known the book was coming out. But the point I wanted to make was,to an extent, Nicks email gave that same impression. Maybe that guy read it and just absorbed it and went into the book with that attitude. Nick had certainly convinced me, before Id started to read the book, that all of ufology was a myth and it was a very pleasant surprise to open the book to realize that that’s not what you’re saying.
GB: I’m saying that a great deal of the wackier elements of ufology, especially the stuff that happened about underground bases, exchange of technology and that aliens seeded the planet with religious leaders, all that’s either been made up or capitalized on by the Intelligence agencies.
Its hard to get that across to someone who has no grounding whatsoever in the field, and that’s the kind of people who want to buy the book so it has to have some kind of point, and you cant have these grey areas where people get disinterested or confused.
SM: But the difficulty with this stuff is, well for example, a letter would have been sent to Bennewitz and within that letter, there would be a large element of disinformation and made up crap and so on, but there would also be elements of truth and the trick is to identify those elements that are true. I cant remember the name of the air force officer who wrote a particular letter to Bennewitz, its the one where he goes on about the four rolls of film, but then he goes on about Roswell. Now if you weren’t reading that within this book and knowing that a substantial part of it was a load of bunk, its very compelling. Its the sort of thing you not only want to read but also to believe.
GB: Yeah, exactly. I think they tapped into that want to believe vein very well and the main reason was to keep people away from sensitive air force projects and the secondary reason was to find out who was interested, why, and what they think. And the third reason, which not many people talk about but which I think makes a lot of sense is that they got off on it. They though tit was kind of funny.
SM: What, just basically yanking peoples chains
GB: Any job you do there are boring parts and standard parts, and these are government people. They were actually leading these people on a wild goose chase and that is the point of counter intelligence, to lead people away from what they didn’t want them to see. Well, they did that and they also capitalized on these stories. Rick Doty grilled Bill Moore on different aspects of the UFO phenomenon its history, different cases etc and then capitalized on those when talking to other people. Like for instance Linda Howe; I mentioned that little episode in the book too.
SM: Just for the record, could you specifically identify commonly held beliefs within ufology that, as a result of your research, are clearly bunkum. The first thing that comes to mind is Dulce, so presumably there is no underground base at Dulce
GB: I’m pretty certain there isn’t a base there. There was something placed there to make him think so though.
SM: Oh, the vehicles and shafts.
GB: He (Bennewitz) got the idea there was something there from the episode with Myrna Hansen. I don’t know if I made that clear because it wasn’t clear to me where he got the idea that there was a base at Dulce.
SM: Oh, you did make that clear, you did make the connection or the implied connection because I remember you saying that within her testimony that she said she was taken to an underground base.
GB: The funny thing was she was taken to an underground base, well she said she was, I have no idea, but the funny thing was, she described part of the Manzano nuclear weapons storage complex very accurately. There was no way she could have been there or known anything about it. She didn’t know anyone in the military as far as I know, and the air force was very disturbed about that. Dulce began with the idea that Bennewitz had that there was a base there and that the air force and the NSA to some extent were quite happy to let him believe that and encourage it because it took his attention away from Kirkland AFB. So that’s one of the myths I suppose that has grown up.
There are unexplained things about that. I cant remember the mans name but he came out in, I think the early 90s and said he’d been a guard at that base and he was going around lecturing about it. Then he surprise, surprise, died mysteriously of some fast acting disease or he killed himself, I cant remember which, sometime in the mid 90s. That’s the only reference I’ve seen where somebody has said that they were actually there but I don’t know what his motivations were, what he thought or whether he was a crazy person and if anybody ever checked up on him.
The other thing they brought up with Paul was specifically in this letter from this guy, I think he was with the NSA but he was working with Lockheed at the time. He’s actually around and I know his name but I don’t want to give it out because I didn’t have his permission, I didn’t talk to him. Some of the things he said in that letter, that there were two races, the Ebans and the Swedes, 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 were destroying ourselves is still an open question to me. They capitalized 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 rumors 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 Kirkland, 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 argent 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 wed 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 or8 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. Its 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.
SM: What drew you to write the book What attracted you to write up Paul Bennewitz’s life