SM: The feeling I’ve had so far in terms of Moore’s relationship with Doty and AFOSI is that so far, its almost been all one way traffic. So far, Bill doesn’t seem to have got much back. Does he (Editors note here; sometimes one asks stupid questions without thinking and this was probably the dumbest I’ve ever asked). Did they show him the golden egg so to speak
GB: I think they gave him the biggest hint they’d given anybody up to that point, through different documents. At first they gave him that fake one just to make sure he wasn’t the sort of person to go spouting anything. They wanted to make sure he was very careful about what he did and once he assured them of that, they said, OK. That Eisenhower briefing document, the famous MJ12 thing came out in 1986. Before that he had gotten bits and pieces, he’d received something called the Carter briefing document. He was led to a hotel in upstate New York after flying all over the country and given 30 minutes with these documents. They said he could do anything he wanted to do with them for half an hour and then they would take them away.
All these little documents had hints about what had happened in the past, what records specifically the Air Force had on UFOs, what they thought about them, and some people associated with studying them. Some of these documents might have been genuine, some might have been partially genuine, some might even have been completely fake but he knew at the beginning when he was given stuff, it would be his job to check it out. Nobody else was being given this access at the time and it went to about 88 or 89 when it finally trickled off. In that time, a lot, in fact maybe most of the documents we’ve come to know as the bedrock of FOIA government released information on UFOs were given to Bill Moore and Jamie Shandera. Jamie is in the background here but he played a very important role in all of this. He worked very closely with Bill. In fact the MJ12 documents were mailed to his house in 84 or 85 I think, which was not too long after Bill got involved.
So they did follow through on their promises but implied within that promise was that he had to find out what was true and what was not. Were not going to do it for you. Well give you hints. Now if they were giving him hints about something that was actually true, he was never able to determine that, which was basically why he stopped. He said, Look, I went as far as I could and I Couldn’t find out for sure. And I got as far as anybody at that point. He got his side of the deal except that they didn’t give out anymore than they wanted to or they had to.
SM: Does he regret his involvement with them now
GB: No, not at all. The only thing he said that he regretted was that speech in Las Vegas and I think I say somewhere in there that he doesn’t think he would have been so arrogant about it at the time. And he was. He was a little self-righteous but I think the reason was because so many people were cutting him down and saying he was full of it and they weren’t going to listen to him, and all that. He got really mad at them and decided to answer them in this way; OK, if you don’t think its real, Ill tell you what’s been happening and you can tell me what you think of that.
SM: Where in all this do the MJ 12 papers sit
GB: In the Bennewitz story
SM: In relation to Bill Moore.
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 rumors 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 Id 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 peoples 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 demeanor 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.
SM: You do, in the book and probably inadvertently, paint an extremely comical image of the intelligence agencies walking into Bennewitz’s house the moment he walked out. This ridiculous situation of even Doty being in there once and the orange orbs and Doty turns round and says, Are those ours Its almost like they were tripping over each other.